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Many factors affect how long it will take for an ad campaign to start working. In other words, people want to know when they’re going to start seeing money pour in from new customers and the answer is: there is no definitive answer.

What I can tell you though, is what factors go into affecting this time period before you start seeing results from your ad campaign, called the “ramping up period.”

Product purchase cycle
The product purchase cycle refers to how many times per week, per month or per year a consumer is looking to purchase your type of product. For instance, the purchase cycle for food items, like one week for milk, will be much shorter than the purchase cycle of five years for televisions. The longer your purchase cycle, the longer you’ll need to advertise before you reap the rewards.

A general rule to estimate your ramping up period is to calculate 20% to 40% of your product purchase cycle. So, if your purchase cycle is 12 months, you won’t feel the effects of your ads for about 2.5 to 5 months.

Your percentage of the total ads for your type of product
This is referred to as “share of voice.” For instance, if you sell digital cameras, when shoppers research digital cameras on Google’s Web site, how many online ads do you have on Google compared to your competitors? How many television ads do you have running in prime time compared to other digital camera manufacturers?

The larger your percentage of the total ads for your type of product, the shorter your ramping up period.

The persuasiveness of your ads
If your ads only give information and don’t persuade people to take action, your ramping up period will be longer. If you don’t include a call to action of some sort, like “Call now” or “Visit our Web site,” no customer is going to be motivated to contact you at all.

People are comparing your message to your competitors’ messages, and whoever convinces the consumer that they need this product is who wins. Your message should be informative and persuasive. Show your product’s benefits and try to get the consumer to realize that they need your product now.

Your choice of ad delivery
You basically have two options for ad delivery: visual and audio. Of course, you can also have a combination of both, as in a television commercial.

A common myth is that people remember more from seeing words, rather than hearing them, but the opposite is actually true. Think about it – how many songs can you sing compared to how many television commercials you can repeat?

So you can surmise that products with a shorter purchase cycle should go with visual ads and products with longer purchase cycles should choose auditory ads, which is definitely a possibility. It’s only a possibility though, because of the other factors that influence the ramping up period.

As you can see, there are so many always-changing factors that it’s hard to pin down a definite time period to judge the effectiveness of your ads by. Your best bet is to use the 20% to 40% estimate of your product cycle.

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