How fast do Google Ads results come for a Birmingham business?

The first week

Ads are reviewed by Google, usually within a day, and start showing. Clicks arrive immediately, and so do the first wrong ones: the search terms report fills with jobs, courses, manuals and towns you do not serve, however good the negative lists were at the start. The first enquiries come if the page is right and the tracking is proved; if the first week produces clicks and nothing else, the page or the tracking is the problem, not the ads.

Weeks two to four

The first fortnight's search terms are read and the waste is cut, the schedule is moved to the hours somebody answers, and the location option is confirmed as people physically in the patch. Bidding stays on Maximise Clicks or manual while the conversion data builds. Enquiries arrive at whatever rate the searches and the page support, and the cost per enquiry in the first month is a real number but a misleading one, because it includes all the waste that has since been removed.

Month two

With clean conversions arriving, bidding moves to Maximise Conversions and, where the numbers allow, a target cost per enquiry. Smart Bidding then needs a few weeks and a few dozen conversions to settle. The landing page is changed where the first month's data points: a heading, the form length, the position of the number. The first written report arrives at the end of the month with the first meaningful cost per enquiry.

Month three: the first one to judge

By the end of the third month the account has a settled cost per enquiry, a schedule and a radius corrected from data, and enough enquiries for you to have said which became customers. That report recommends one of three things in plain words: spend more, because impression share is being lost to budget at a cost per enquiry below what an enquiry is worth; spend less or stop, because the sum does not work; or hold. It is the reason the minimum term is three months and no longer.

What makes it slower

• Tracking that was not proved with a real test call and a real test form, so the first month's data is wrong and has to be discarded.
• A homepage as the landing page, which converts badly and gives Smart Bidding too little to learn from.
• Bids and budgets changed every few days, which resets the learning period each time.
• A budget too small for the click price, so the account collects a handful of conversions a month and never settles.
• A phone that is not answered when the ads run, which no amount of time fixes.

What makes it faster

Inheriting an account with history rather than starting from nothing, because the search terms and the conversion data are already there. A page that already converts. And a business that answers the monthly question about which enquiries became customers, so the bidding learns from the right signal from the start.

Read on

The page that does this for you is How we work: the first 90 days; the long version is the guide Why your Google Ads are not converting.