How long should I run a PPC campaign for?
 

I want to run a PPC campaign for a dating site. How long would you give it before you pull the plug if it is not converting? What are the typical rules of thumb when it comes to buying traffic and the payoffs please?

Generally speaking, if you are buying PPC traffic for example, from a single site and your required ROI is negative by a factor of 4, you are very likely to have an issue that needs fixing or need to stop the campaign. In other words, if you need say 6.00 per sale and you are 24.00 spent and no sale, its far enough outside the normal deviation to tell you with almost 100% confidence that something is wrong. This assumes you've given it enough time for the numbers to stabilize, which is relative to click volume and the action(s) required by the user for you to get paid. In other words, you can run a DOI dating campaign on Xhamster and traffic could come much much faster than the leads are approved/user confirmed etc etc. depending on how effectively they get to the inbox, not spam folder, user the confirms the registration and maybe the program then also reviews them. So you have to allow the numbers to stabilize based on your specific circumstances and make sure you have enough statistically significant data before making decisions. If you are doing RON campaigns, it generally takes a while for numbers to stabilize when you have 1000 sites sending 1-2 clicks each for example and you can really only look at conversions through each individual conversion path.