I have a question about starting a new online shop with a Google Search campaign, and I’d love to get your thoughts. I’m selling high-quality Damascus kitchen knives (www.kyotsu.ch) in the Swiss market. All tracking (GA4 and conversion tracking) is already set up.
Here’s the current setup:
Six standard ad groups (related products), each with one responsive search ad (ad strength “Excellent”).
Around 12 exact match keywords per ad group.
Planned daily budget: about $42 for the entire campaign.
Google is recommending that the campaign first goes through a learning phase of about three weeks with a small daily budget of only $6, so the system can “learn.” They also suggest using only broad match keywords instead of exact match, and adding a maximum of 5 keywords per ad group.
My questions:
Do you think $6 per day is really enough for the learning phase, or would you recommend a different starting approach in general?
Would you go with broad match keywords as Google suggests, or would you stick to exact match in the beginning to avoid wasted spend?
I’d really appreciate your insights on what’s a smart way to start in order to keep things efficient.
from my experience, $6/day may not be enough for the learning phase to end successfully. that’s because google generally needs 50 conversions or several conversion cycles to learn and make adjustments to bidding strategies accordingly. at such a low spend, the system will take long to gather data. i would recommend increasing the budget to somewhere around $20-$30 per day if possible.
broad match can help shorten the learning phase. this is because it will capture more diverse queries and provide google more signals to work with. however, remember that broad match will only make sense if side-by-side you are also using smart bidding and a strong negative keyword list. otherwise, starting with exact or phrase match is suggested as that will give more control and once you start to see stable results, you can test broad match as well.
Thank you for your detailed feedback – it’s very helpful.
I wanted to clarify: does your suggested budget of $20–30/day refer to my 12 exact match keywords per ad group, or to the five keywords per ad group suggested by Google? What’s your take on that?