Does the age of an adWords campaign affect the amount of traffic?

There’s sometimes a start-up period for a new adWords campaign when ads aren’t shown for all keyword matches and so the traffic is lower than it “should” be.

I covered it in this post on what to expect from a brand new PPC campaign.

My assessment of the reasons for lower traffic has been that it’s because a new campaign has no history and therefore the keyword quality scores are predictive and probably pessimistic. Google doesn’t show all variations of broad matches for keywords (accounts?) with a low quality score hence the waiting period for the full quota of traffic due. When actual data comes into the equation a high performing campaign can have superior quality scores and traffic will start to increase when ads are shown on broader variations of keywords.

There’s another interesting theory about the adWords “sandbox” on the RevenueWire PPC super affiliate blog. This is that Google puts a “go slow” on new campaigns until they have established that the advertiser can pay the bill.