Quick Tip: For the first couple of weeks after launching a new AdWords campaign, watch your keywords every day to make sure they are still online.

It’s easy to feel like you’ve accomplished something after setting up an AdWords campaign and beginning the process of driving paid traffic to your site. But you can’t take your eyes off of the situation. Even if Google begins sending a stream of traffic to your site, it is highly likely that very soon it will begin shutting off your keywords. What seems to happen is that AFTER your account is up and running, the Google system begins an audit of your campaigns to see how closely your keywords match your ad content (and possibly even your landing pages), the kind of click rates your keywords and ads have, etc. While it’s going through this process, it will probably be shutting off many of your keywords and insisting that you bid more (MUCH more in some cases) to turn them back on.

So if you’re not paying attention, the traffic you started receiving at the beginning of your Google campaign will dry up to a trickle until you adjust your bids. So being aware of what’s going on with your campaigns early on is critical to keeping your ads running.

You can avoid this situation by bidding very high early in your campaign. The problem is you could end up paying more than you should in order to have a profitable account. It is probably best to start low and adjust your bids up as needed, rather than starting high and adjusting down.

Call us if you need some help monitoring your pay per click campaign.