Why Can Google Ads Campaigns Be Slow To Start?

If you’re a Google Ads customer of ours you may have heard us tell you that Google Ads campaigns can sometimes be slow to start. But what exactly does this mean and why does it happen?

What does it mean?

Over the first 7 to 10 days of any NEW Google Ads campaign (or ad group with new keywords) a lot is going on but this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll obtain many clicks. Let’s say you have a budget of £10 per day and your average cost per click is £1 - you effectively have enough budget to obtain 10 Google Ads clicks per day. However, when you first start your campaign you’ll likely only achieve 1 or 2 clicks over the first couple of days, this will then increase to 3 or 4 until after around 1 week to 10 days, you are spending all of your budget and achieving your maximum number of clicks.

Why does this happen?

There are a couple of reasons as to why this happens but the main reason is because of your keyword quality score. Quality Score is a diagnostic tool meant to give you a sense of how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers. 

This score is measured on a scale from 1–10 and available at the keyword level. A higher Quality Score means that your ad and landing page are more relevant and useful to someone searching for your keyword, compared to other advertisers.

Quality Score is calculated based on the combined performance of three components:

1. Expected click-through rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.

2. Ad relevance: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user's search.

3. Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.

When you first start running your new ads and keywords, you don’t have a quality score. Google doesn’t know how good your ads and landing page are. This means the ads aren’t shown as often as they will be once the ads have “got going” a little.

Don’t worry if over the first week your ads don’t spend much budget. They are finding their feet during this time and it’s perfectly normal to not see any significant impact within the first and second week. After this time, your ads will pick up, start showing more, obtaining more clicks and spending more of their allocated budget.