When Should You Update Your Ads?

Every business owner’s dream is to post your ads and then have an immediate influx of new customers. Sadly, that rarely happens. Ad campaigns take a lot of fine tuning and updating for them to really take off. There is a sweet spot you want to try to hit when you update ads; too soon and you’ll miss out, too late and you’ll lose potential customers. So you should strive to find the porridge — we mean a timeline for your ads — that’s just right. This guide will help you understand this, week by week. It, of course, excludes:

• Seasonal changes
• Product/service changes
• Upcoming events/promotions

One Week: Way Too Soon

Unless your ads are selling the wrong content to the wrong people, you shouldn’t think about touching your campaigns. When we say the wrong content to the wrong people, we mean that your ads are selling shoes to adults when you’re a children’s clothing store. Why is one week too soon? After all, you are seeing some results in your data, getting some calls, and nothing is working out as expected. This is because some of our ad platforms haven’t fully optimized themselves yet. Facebook, for example, has a learning phase for all new campaigns posted there. What’s the learning phase? It’s a period when Facebook still has a lot to learn about your ad set. During this phase, Facebook is exploring the best way to deliver your ad set. This means its performance is not optimized and your cost-per-action is normally pretty bad. It will improve if you give it time! For paid search, one week is just not enough time. You need a significant amount of data to know what is and what isn’t working. One week of data is just not enough to decide that.

Two Weeks: Still Too Soon

Two weeks is still a little too soon. It’s unlikely that the learning phase on Facebook has ended yet — and if it has, the data will still be very skewed by it. So avoid making any major changes because you may trigger the learning phase again, which begins any time an ad is posted or edited! If the learning phase is done, you may have “learning limited” ads. That means your ads aren’t optimized to achieve the predicted outcome. It’s not a bad thing, but it will limit your reach. If you do see “learning limited,” you can update your ads and start the process over again if you’d like.  Take one of our campaigns, for example. We run ads for a company that sells a newly designed dog ACL brace. Because it has a medical term in it, the learning phase is going to be a little longer and may end up restricting our reach. Depending on what you're trying to sell, especially if it's more medically-centered, then you may have a harder time getting your ads out of the learning phase on Facebook. For paid search, two weeks of data is definitely better than one. You’ll have a better understanding of who is clicking on your ads, where people are seeing them, and what ad group is working. You may even start to see data trends and think of ways to fix them. However, keep those fixes away from the ads themselves. It’s still too early to make any major edits. What you can do is this: update your website for a better user experience, make it easier to find the shop page for your product, and check out the call to actions and the audience you're targeting. Take some notes on how to hone in your messaging, and wait another week.

Three Weeks: Okay-ish

The third week is a toss up. It can be too early, but it can also be just right. It depends on what you’re trying to sell and what platforms you’re using. We know that’s not the answer you’re looking for, but every campaign is different! It would be like asking for a chocolate cake recipe and getting one for apple pie — both are good, but it’s not quite right. For example, if Facebook left the learning phase during week two, then this is too early to change anything. You have one week of good data, which simply isn’t enough. Take a look at each platform and take in all of the data. You’ll want to look at:

• Cost-per-action
• Cost-per-click
• Traffic
• How Much
• Where the Traffic is Coming From
• Bounce rate
• ROI
• How your competition is doing compared to you

Four Weeks: Just Right

One month is juuuuuust right. You should have all the real data you need to make an informed decision about your ad campaigns by now. For social ads, you need to compare your engagement, your interactions, and everything under the sun to see what campaigns are performing the best and what ones are falling flat. You can either tweak those campaigns or turn them off — it depends on how you want to split your budget. For paid search, you’re going to do the exact same thing. Find out which campaigns are spending your money without much return and either turn them off or try again. If you’re new to managing social and paid search ads, or just don’t have the time, you can trust the experts to manage, update, and boost your campaigns for you. We know the ins and outs of all major digital ads platforms and are happy to help you manage your campaign. Give us a call and we’ll make sure your campaigns are not too hot and not too cold — with us, they’ll be just right.