Strategies for Creating Non-Wasting PPC Budget
Business owners generally have concerns regarding PPC advertising because money is spent without an assured return. This is a reasonable concern as poorly designed PPC campaigns can potentially lose a significant amount of money without bringing anything back. But effective campaign design and budget allocation means PPC can become one of the most efficient marketing avenues due to its inherent cost efficiency and ease of measurement.
Define Your Business Objectives First
What do you want your PPC campaign to accomplish before you set a budget? Do you want people to call you? Do you want people to fill out your online enquiry form? Do you want people to make e-commerce purchases? Every goal affects how much the campaign costs in total. Understanding the goal will help you figure out how much each lead/sale is worth.
In the scenario where you convert one out of every five leads, you could justify your costs by saying that acquiring a lead worth £100 is justifiable for your business. In this way, target cost per acquisition (CPA) justifies the budget.
Average Cost Per Click Explained
The cost of a single click on Google ads depends on the type of industry, the keywords being targeted and the level of competition for those keywords. The insurance, legal and financial services industries can have click costs exceeding £10.
Smaller or more niche service businesses can expect to pay between £1 and £3 per click for certain keywords.
Your budget will only be able to pay for a certain amount of traffic to your site, so you should determine your industry’s average cost-per-click before establishing your budget.
A good starting point would be the Google Keyword Planner, which is free with a Google Ads account, as it will estimate the cost-per-click of the keywords you would like to target.
A Starting Budget That Is Realistic
In most circumstances, small businesses that are new to PPC will need to spend around £300 – £600 a month if they wish to obtain significant data and figure out if this approach will work for the business. This figure is not set in stone; if you are in a more hostile industry, you may need to spend more than this. However, this figure will most likely be enough to obtain enough clicks to begin establishing metrics to evaluate success.
It’s common to want to impose a very low limit on your campaign, such as keeping your daily budget to £1 – £2. But, when the budget is this low, you might not get enough impressions for the ads to gather any useful information, and the settings of your campaign will be unnecessarily limited.
Pacing and Daily Budgets
In Google Ads, individual daily budgets can be set for each of the campaigns, and it is possible for Google to go over your daily budget on days when there is more activity. For a month, the actual cost will not be more than the daily budget multiplied by the number of days in that month, so keep this in mind when setting your daily budget.
To calculate your daily budget, take your goal for the month and divide it by 30.
Avoiding Budget Waste
The following is a list of the most common ways wasted budget occurs in PPC campaigns:
– If broad match keywords are used without negative keywords, your ads could show up for searches that are not related to your business at all.
Negative keywords (which are the ones that will not make your ad show) are crucial to add.
– Ads Always Running If your business only receives calls during business hours, then make your ads run during business hours so that people can respond.
– Traffic Diverted to the Homepage The landing page must match the user’s intent behind the search. If someone searches for an urgent plumber, don’t send them to your homepage. Instead, send them to the page that offers urgent plumbing services.
– Ignoring Quality Score Google loves relevancy, and so should you. If someone searches something and your ad correlates with that search, and they are directed to a highly relevant page, you will pay less for that click.
Improvement Through Adjustment
You can’t just set and forget with PPC. During the first few weeks of your campaign, be prepared to review results weekly. Which keywords get clicked? Were any of them inquiries? Lower your bids on keywords with low performance and raise your bids on those with high performance. Use ad copy to communicate what you want it to communicate.
A campaign that is updated frequently will perform much better than one that is never updated.
Management has its advantages
For the people who find campaign management tedious or too complicated, a good PPC manager will typically cut out the campaigns that are overly wasteful, and in turn, will increase the conversion rates beyond their costs. In the case of an agency or consultant, the most crucial thing is that she can demonstrate the positive effect of your campaigns.