How do you know...

[phiar]

how to gauge if your campaign is not working? What is a reasonable amount of time to test the campaign that you have posted to see if it is going to fly or not? This will be my first posting on adword and I don't really know how to gauge how much to spend each day or even if I will be spending too little or too much when I'm first starting out. Also, am I paying by keyword/phrase or by ad? Suppose I have two items that I want to sell should I start with just one to see if it is cost effective or not? I'm reading good things about adword (and considering my submission will take 4-6 weeks, if at all!) this might be a great way to get much needed exposure.

Thx
--Phia

[amica_webmaster]

First, you need to decide what you mean by "working." What's your goal for the campaign? Is it to generate clicks - anytime someone clicks on the ad, that's a success? Or to lead to immediate sales? Or may maybe you have something else in mind.

Once you identify what you want from the ad, you can define success criteria. For example, generate 50 visitors per day, or provide 25% return on investment, etc. Some success criteria are easy to measure, other much more challenging. Clicks are easy, Google will provide that information as billing information. Or you can use a tracking url for the ad and you can use tracking software to determine the number of referrals that you get for that url. If your success criteria requires say, tracing a visitor from an ad referral to a sale, then you are going to need to do more work. For that, you'll need to use cookies, and software capable of tracking a visitor through those cookies.

Ifyou take the time to think carefully about your goals, it may not then take very long to know if your're meeting them. You might realistically test ads on a scale of a few days.

[phiar]

I am trying to follow my adword campaign and I had hoped that I would see my ad on Google, I have been checking all day and have not seen my ad at all. Could it be because the ad is being spread out over so many other se's, and it's only being shown so many times per day?