The Learning Phase
Photo Cred Lukas
Often times when setting up new campaigns the excitement starts. Now that the hard work is done your ready to start generating leads. You may have heard of the learning phase before. In this post I’ll explain what it is, what to be mindful of & what to watch out for.
Google’s learning phase is a period of days where your campaign is doing just that. Learning. Well its a bit more than that. When you first turn on your campaign the machine will tell you that the campaign is in the learning phase. During this time google is determining who to show ads to.
Lets break it down further by using an example.
Imagine that youve spent the weekend setting up your ads.
Youve researched your keywords.
Youve spent time writing the copy.
Your campaign structure is laid out as by theme as it relates to your business.
You turn on the campaigns after this & its scheduled to run only on the weekdays from nine to five. A few days go by. Your constantly checking the ads. You might see your campaigns say that its not eligible.
Whats worse is that in the first couple of days youve noticed that youve spent a bit more than you were expecting because your daily budget was too high. Pausing immediately is required. Yet, before you decide to do so you might be thinking about how this would affect your campaigns.
Your not wrong.
Pausing your campaigns can cause the machine to slow down progress. Theres three scenarios you might be thinking about.
Changing your ad schedule to specific days in the week.
Reducing your daily budget so you spend less.
Reducing the max cpc to pennies on the dollar for a short period.
The only problems about these options is that you dont know whether or not the learning phase is going to be triggered. Time is of the essence when your money is on the line. Triggering the learning phase isnt a good look when you need get sales fast. Heres what I think about this.
If your concerned about your campaigns getting triggered by the learning phase then consider not doing google ads.
When Im running campaigns of course I know that the learning phase is going to be triggered during launch. However, sometimes clients require to increase, decrease or pause campaigns all together. What Ive found is that the businesses that succeed are the ones who can afford a week of the learning phase.
When you think about it a week of ads live is a drop in the bucket.
Like everything else in business google ads is a long game. You can’t expect to run ads for two weeks & get crazy results. its just unrealistic. Also, the learning phase doesnt bother me anymore because time & time again Ive seen campaigns convert while in the learning phase. So worrying about it is one of the least of your problems.
While im not a fan of pausing campaigns theres a good chance that if your account structure is tight then pausing them for a bit wont hurt you. If you really want to validate this concept then you can always test it out yourself as well.