Summary: Your Google Ads can take up to 12 weeks to reach peak performance, and often have little results in their first week. SEO requires long-term patience, showing results between 4-12 months after starting. Your social media posts will appear instantly, but requires time to build an organic following.

If your business wants to increase its digital presence by utilizing Google ad management, search engine optimization, and social media marketing, congratulations! Making decisions to invest in your growth is always exciting. However, many nuances and requirements are involved with digital marketing that requires plenty of time and strategy before it comes to fruition. From an experienced digital marketing agency, here is an approximate timeline of what to expect with each service.

It’s important to keep in mind that with nearly all forms of digital marketing, it is difficult to go from “0 to 60”, and see high-end results right away. Instead, what you will see is a snowball effect, first starting with just a small fraction of future results, slowly picking up steam as your business expands its digital footprint, eventually leading to incredible results.

Google Ad Management

It’s important to not make any major changes within the first week of your Google Ad being live, even though you might not see results. Your ads all need to start and weather through the “Learning Phase.” This is where Google attempts to figure out if your ad is following its guidelines, potentially sending out flags if its algorithm cannot quantify what the images within your ad contain. 

Once your ad passes the “Learning Phase”, results will not be immediate. The next process is to monitor any clicks you receive and adjust negative keywords to ensure that your ad only reaches people searching for phrases that could turn into leads. This process of fine-tuning a campaign can take up to 12 weeks, at which point your performance will only continue to improve with time.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization should always be looked at as a long-term investment. Google’s algorithm has an enormous amount of factors that it needs to be able to identify within your website, which requires anywhere between 4-12 months to see the full effect that SEO can provide.

Some of the factors that cause this long wait period are page relevance, quality, and usability. Google waits until it has long-term data that shows your page will drive clicks for relevant search phrases, slowly increasing your rank based on results. It also takes time to evaluate whether links within your website are credible and do not redirect people to unexpected pages. A final metric that also is taken into account is how often people will visit your website and immediately leave for another website, known as “bounce rate”. Scoring highly in the eyes of Google in each of these metrics is vital to moving up the search rankings, but requires patience. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media is the only true “instant impact” within digital marketing. Once you share a post on social media, it instantly is visible to followers and can be shared to help promote your business. 

However, it is still a long journey from when you first create your social media account to when you are getting high levels of engagement on your posts. Building an authentic and engaged audience who are genuinely interested in your services has no shortcuts, but providing consistent content that shows your business can be relied upon goes a long way to building your credibility. That is why Fasturtle recommends our Social Media Management program to create a schedule of posts that showcase a variety of sides of your business, and impress any potential customer who comes across your profile.

The best digital marketing methods are constantly evolving and changing as new technologies arise, meaning adjustments always need to be made to keep your business ahead of the competition. At Fasturtle, we pride ourselves on making sure that your marketing services are in the best long-term interests of your business. Reach out to us today to learn more how to best invest in the future of your business.