If you’ve decided to create a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign, the budget will be one of the most crucial parts of your campaign. The budget you set can make or break your campaign and it’s no easy task to manage a PPC campaign budget. However, this doesn’t mean that you need a huge budget in order to put together a successful or far-reaching PPC campaign. If you’re running a small business, you may not even have much money to spend on PPC. This is why we’re here to tell you how you can maximize your PPC budget no matter how small it is.
Tips to Help You Maximize Your PPC Budget
Looking at this broadly, the best way for you to maximize your PPC budget will be to plan. Making a good plan will ensure that your campaign runs smoothly and without going over budget. But what should you focus on when creating this plan?
Specify Your Campaign Goals
Before you do anything else with your PPC campaign, you need to specify your goals. Without first setting your goals, how will know if your campaign has been successful? Failing to set goals will also lead to issues like overspending or taking on unexpected costs. Determine what’s most important to your business, how you’re going to reach these goals, and use this to lead your campaign strategy.
Examples of some common PPC campaign goals include brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions.
Research Your Competitors
Having an understanding of what your competitors are doing is another way you can maximize your PPC budget. This is especially true if what they’re doing is successful. Create a list of your top industry competitors, then conduct a competitor analysis focusing on their audience, keyword bids, and their advertising approach. You’ll also want to research their products, pricing, ad types, ad copy, landing pages, and CTAs.
Knowing this will give you a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t, particularly within your industry. You can use this knowledge to better optimize your ads and increase your chances of conversion.
Set Your PPC Budget
Of course, in order to maximize your PPC budget, you need to set a PPC budget. This will decide how much you’re willing to spend on a certain number of conversions. Because of this, you should start by determining how many leads you want to gain from your campaign.
After this, figure out how many clicks your ads will likely get each day. In order to successfully do this, you’ll also need to clearly define what your business considers a good lead.
Focus on Audience Targeting
If you want to run a successful campaign and maximize your PPC budget, taking a look at your audience targeting is essential. You need to have a strong understanding of your audience in order to create ads they will engage with.
It’s best to target a focused, niche group of people with similar interests. Broad audiences will likely bring many people who won’t become leads to your ads. This will make your ads more expensive than they need to be.
So how can you determine the most focused audience for your ads? Create customer personas that include detailed information about their interests, behaviors, and purchasing habits. Having a detailed knowledge of your audience will help you create ads and landing pages that are relevant to your audience. This will drive clicks, leads, and conversions.
Keyword Match Types
Keyword match types control which searches will trigger your ad. They’re like a filter that will assist you in finding the balance between the reach and relevance of your ads. A broad match will show your ad to a wide audience while using an exact match will show your ad to a smaller, more focused audience.
There are pros and cons to both of these types. Although broad match keywords will get more impressions on your ads, many people who see them may have no interest in them. This can potentially result in wasted ad spend or irrelevant clicks.
If you’re working with a small PPC budget, your best bet will be to use a mix of broad match and exact match types.
Keyword Research
This is the foundation of a successful PPC campaign, so don’t neglect this step if you want to maximize your PPC budget. In order to conduct effective keyword research, identify the keywords that you feel will attract the most qualified leads. You should also avoid keywords with high search volume because they will have high competition, making them difficult to rank for. Instead, focus on terms with moderate search volume and low bidding prices.
Your keyword list should also be thorough, relevant, and dynamic and they should resonate with your audience.
Of course, continuously monitoring your keyword performance is important to maximizing your PPC budget. Doing this will help you keep track of whether or not your keywords are effective. If they aren’t, you can then re-allocate your budget to avoid spending on keywords that don’t work.
Targeting Filters
While creating quality audience personas and having good match types are part of this, there are other things you can do during your campaign as well. Honing your targeting will help you maximize your PPC budget. Experimenting with your filters will help you attract better quality traffic and leads.
You can experiment with the following targeting filters:
- Geo-targeting: focus on local areas where you do business and exclude any areas you don’t normally do business in. This will make you more likely to reach people who will convert and become customers. Focusing your geo-targeting will help you avoid wasting your ad spend.
- Ad scheduling: figure out which days of the week and times of the day when you’ll be most likely to reach your target audience. Again, having your customer personas mapped out will help you with this. Once you’ve figured this out, you can schedule your ads to run during times when you know you’ll reach your target audience. This will help you save money and optimize conversions.
- Demographic targeting: don’t forget to segment your audience! Segmenting your audience into smaller, more focused groups based on demographics will also optimize your ad spend and conversions. You can segment your audience based on demographics like age, gender, living status, income, and more.
Track Abandoners
You can’t successfully run a PPC campaign without tracking key metrics, especially if you’re trying to maximize your PPC budget. If you use Google Ads or Google Analytics, tracking your key metrics will be made easy for you. Keep in mind that the metrics you track will be based on the goals you set for your campaign.
When monitoring key metrics of your ads, you’ll learn about user behaviors like low-performing keywords, and which of your website pages lead to bounces. Knowing this will help you find the defects in your ad campaign and website. This will not only help you maximize your PPC budget but will also help you improve the user experience on your website.
Remarketing & Retargeting
Since we’re on the topic of abandoners, remember that just because someone left your website, this doesn’t mean that you’ve lost a potential customer. Through remarketing, you can use data to retarget these people who’ve left your website and serve them even more relevant ads that may convince them to return to your website and convert. This strategy will help maximize your PPC budget because it’s cheaper to acquire an existing lead than it is to get a new one.
Remarketing will also improve both the relevance of your ads and your campaign conversion rates. Keep in mind that most people will need to familiarize themselves with your business before they’re ready to make a purchase. This is why remarketing is a very important part of any ad campaign.
Test & Monitor
In anything you do in marketing, tracking metrics is crucial. When running a PPC campaign, you need to continuously monitor and experiment with your strategies, try out new settings and analyze the impact they have on your campaign’s performance. This is necessary if you plan to optimize your ads in order to get the best results.
You should also perform A/B testing on a regular basis to gain more insight into what’s working and what’s not working. Assessing your campaigns will also help you see trends earlier than you would if you weren’t monitoring your campaigns, so you’ll be able to adapt more quickly. It will also alert you to any sudden changes which may be due to changes in the online marketplace, shifts in consumer behavior, or an update to a platform’s algorithm.
Focus on Your Quality Score
If you’re using AdWords, a Quality Score will be assigned to your cost per click as well as your conversions. Quality Score is very important to Google, and your cost per action (CPA) will partially depend on this. If you’d like to have a lower CPA, you need to make sure you have a good Quality Score.
Here are the best ways to do this:
- Create ads that are relevant to your target audience.
- Focus on keywords that right for your audience.
- Keep your ad groups well organized and structured.
- Hone your landing pages to be helpful and relevant to each of your ads.
- Focus your ad copy in a way that will improve your click-through rate
- Make sure your AdWords account performance improves your reputation.
Once you start building up and improving your reputation, you’ll start saving money on your keyword bids. This will allow you to rank higher without having to spend more than your competitors.
RESULTS ARE VITAL
Remember, your strategy is more important than your budget, so if you’re running a PPC campaign with a small budget, don’t be convinced that you can’t get great results. We hope that following these tips will help you maximize your PPC budget so you can run a successful campaign.
However, if you feel that your business could use some help with PPC ads, Vital Digital is here to help!
We provide digital marketing services including, but not limited to content marketing, search engine optimization, and website development. We also provide HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier consulting to ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible. Request a free quote today and let us know how we can help!