The 14-Day Learning Phase: A Google Search Campaign Simulation
Objective: Given a live-looking Google Ads search campaign dashboard on day 3, day 9, and day 14 of its learning phase, make the same call/hold/kill decisions a real account manager has to make under a ticking clock, and see exactly what a wrong-timed decision costs in wasted budget and lost signal.
You're consulting on paid search for Freshworks, the Chennai-founded, Nasdaq-listed B2B SaaS company (FRSH). The team is demand-testing a prospective project-management add-on for remote teams before committing engineering budget to build it, and a single Google Search campaign is the entire test: "Search - Remote PM Software", £600 total budget, 14-day learning phase. You're the only person watching the dashboard.
Three checkpoints, three decisions. At each one you'll see the real cumulative numbers for that day, pick what you'd actually do, and find out immediately what that choice costs or protects. The lesson gave you the lookup table already, this is where you use it under a clock with money notionally draining.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free to browse and set up, Keyword Planner and campaign structure cost nothing to explore. This entire simulation is complete without ever opening it, the dashboards above are the account.
Free tier reads landing-page engagement time and drop-off, the exact evidence behind the day-9 decision to fix the page rather than the targeting.
Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)
The free path is this simulation, complete, at zero spend. The live track is a genuine upgrade for anyone with a real product and £300 to spend, never a requirement to finish the project.
The platform itself is free, the cost is the ad spend you choose to run (see liveTrack above, £300 minimum over 14 days). Only needed if you want to replay these exact decisions against a real account instead of this scripted one.
The process
Simulation
Day 3, first look
Day 3 of 14You launched "Search - Remote PM Software" three days ago and open the dashboard for the first time since. Nothing has been touched since launch.
Search campaign · Core Terms ad group · Day 3 of 14 Impressions 5,710 Clicks 405 CTR 7.1% (industry avg 6.66%) CPC £0.26 Conversions 1 CVR 0.25% (industry avg 7.52%) Cost per conv £105.30 ROAS n/a (1 conversion is not a trend)
One conversion in three days on a campaign that's supposed to validate real demand. What do you do?
Run this for real insteadOptional
The simulation above is a complete project on its own, free, no account or spend required. This is only for learners who want to test the same decisions against a real live account.
- Create a free Google Ads account (no cost to sign up, you only pay for clicks)
- Pick one narrow keyword theme for one real product or service, not ten themes at once
- Set a daily budget that totals £300-£600 across 14 days
- Write one dedicated landing page for the exact promise in the ad, not your homepage
- Launch, then close the dashboard for at least 3 days
Final deliverable
A decision log across all three checkpoints (day 3, day 9, day 14) plus a two-to-three sentence written diagnosis of what the day-9 dashboard was actually telling you and why.
See a reference example
Day 3: waited. Day 9: fixed the landing page, left the campaign alone. Day 14: CTR held at 7.1% for the full 14 days, well above the 6.66% industry average, so the targeting was never the problem, the break was always between click and conversion. Filed the fix as a dev ticket instead of a campaign edit, which kept the learning phase intact and means the next 14-day run will tell me, cleanly, whether the page fix worked.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Chose the optimal or acceptable option at day 3, not the costly early-change options
- Correctly diagnosed the day-9 dashboard as a click-to-conversion gap, not a targeting or budget gap
- Chose option C (fix the landing page, leave the campaign alone) or can explain in writing why a different choice was still defensible
- Final write-up names which specific lesson row or mistake each costly option would have contradicted