We advise ALL of our clients at the proposal stage to give us 3-6 months to start generating improved results. There are many factors that contribute to how quickly results will show and these include (but are not limited to):
In truth, no one can tell you with any certainty and the reality is, that it varies from advertiser to advertiser. For instance, an established company with an existing Google Ads campaign is likely to see improvements much more quickly than a brand new company with a new campaign.
While it is reasonable to assume 3-6 months will give you an idea of the potential of the campaign(s) it is important to remember that Google Ads doesn't often provide 'instant wins' and instead, it takes time to build and refine a campaign. This means that campaigns often improve as more data is collected and optimisation decisions give more results. To put this into perspective, you should view your campaign with the following milestones in mind as a rough guide:
3-Month Milestone: Is the campaign showing promise? It might not be providing the level of leads/sales you want at this point, but is the potential there? Metrics to look at it include the quantity of conversions, cost per conversions, traffic levels, quality score, CPCs and usability metrics such as 'time on site'. If one or more metrics is improving then your campaigns are likely showing potential.
6-Month Milestone: Conversions should be clearly improving and if they aren't then an understanding of why they aren't is important to ensure that progress can be made. If it is clear the ad campaigns are working well (because ad campaign-related metrics demonstrate so) then consider other improvements such as website conversion rate optimisation or if any internal business factors could be impacting performance.
9-Month Milestone: The ad campaign should be converting regularly and profitability should be increasing. Any issues negatively affecting the campaign such as website conversion rate or internal business factors should be addressed and remedied by now to ensure that further performance increases are possible.
12-Month Milestone: Year-on-year comparisons will soon be possible and should form the basis of any further performance appraisals. Comparing performance in this manner ensures that seasonality isn't affecting metrics and as such, a fair comparison is being made. At this point, campaigns should be more than ready to scale further with budget increases.
Seasonality
One of the reasons it takes time to understand your campaign performance is the impact of seasonality. The only way to accurately gauge the success of your campaigns is to compare year to year.
For example, if a retailer is selling T-Shirts, comparing sales from September to August is likely to show that performance is decreasing and of course, this should be expected given the Summer is almost over.
Now, if sales in September are fewer than sales a year ago in September (and investment/budget is the same), then is more likely indicates something is amiss.
Every business regardless of the sector is prone to seasonality at some points. The longer you run your advertising campaigns, the more you will understand how seasonality affects your business and how best to mitigate quieter times.
IMPORTANT NOTE: To understand campaign performance, you must ensure every phone call, email and sale is tracked and reporting in Google AdWords. Without this tracking, it is almost impossible to drive increased performance or even understand how campaigns are performing at all.