<\/p>\n
PPC advertising can be a game changer for small businesses looking to drive sales or increase brand awareness. Unfortunately, it’s also very easy to overspend if you’re not careful. <\/p>\n
When your budget is tight, it’s crucial that you set yourself up for success when setting up a PPC account. <\/p>\n
Just a couple of bad months of PPC spend can be the difference between growing or closing your doors forever. <\/p>\n
So, before you start pouring money into Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, read these five essential tips for doing PPC bidding on a budget.<\/p>\n
One of the best things about PPC advertising is that there are ways to achieve any business’s goals. <\/p>\n
You can choose from many different campaign types and bid options, and there are numerous Google platforms where you can advertise. <\/p>\n
When you’re limited by your budget, it’s critical that you figure out what your primary goal is and create campaigns that help you achieve it.<\/p>\n
Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Display and YouTube are good options to do this. <\/p>\n
Maybe you’re an e-commerce business looking to drive more purchases and revenue. Next, consider search and shopping campaigns. <\/p>\n
These campaigns work best when they work together and drive a complete funnel strategy. But when the budget is tight, it’s time to eliminate secondary strategies and focus on results. <\/p>\n
When creating your PPC campaigns, it’s important to be specific. <\/p>\n
You want your ads to be as relevant to users’ search queries as possible.<\/p>\n
It’s important to structure your campaigns and ad groups so that your ads match the keywords you’ve chosen.<\/p>\n
Let’s use a clothing company as an example. They sell all kinds of clothing, but want to focus on t-shirts and denim pants. <\/p>\n
I want my ads to be as relevant to the user’s search as possible, so I create campaigns and ad groups based on clothing type:<\/p>\n
Campaign: T-Shirt Ad Group: T-Shirt Ad Group: Women’s T-Shirt Ad Group: Men’s T-Shirt Ad Group: Kids’ T-Shirt Ad Group Campaign: Ad Group of denim pants: Denim pants ad group: Women’s denim pants ad group: Men’s denim pants ad group: Children’s denim pants<\/p>\n
Setting up your campaigns this way accomplishes two things: <\/p>\n
The first is that it is incredibly simple and easy to understand. If I look at the performance data for all of these ad groups, I can very easily say: <\/p>\n
What types of products work well (t-shirts or denim pants). Which demographic is most popular with our product (women, men, children, etc.). <\/p>\n
This makes optimization much easier than if all of these products were lumped into one or two ad groups.<\/p>\n
The second is that each ad group listed above will have keywords and ads specific to its category. <\/p>\n
So if someone searches for “kids t-shirts”, the ad they’ll be shown will be about kids’ t-shirts and will direct them to a landing page with kids’ t-shirts. <\/p>\n
If we only had one ad group for t-shirts, our ads would have to be much more generic and less likely to lead to a purchase.<\/p>\n
Get the daily search newsletter marketers trust.<\/p>\n
PPC advertising is an auction-based platform, where advertisers bid to display their ads in searches for specified keywords and the ad space goes to the highest bidder. <\/p>\n
Just like real-life auctions, winning is much easier when you have a lot of money. Imagine! <\/p>\n
So if you have less money than other people in the auction, how do you win? Simple, you look for the prizes for which there are fewer people bidding. <\/p>\n
In paid search, we call these long-tail keywords: keywords that have more qualifying words and lower search volume. Let’s see an example:<\/p>\n
Close your eyes and imagine that you own a company that specializes in creating custom stickers. Okay, open your eyes so you can continue reading, but don’t stop imagining. <\/p>\n
You want to generate more sales through paid advertising, but you only have $1,500 per month to spend. <\/p>\n
Do some keyword research with Google Keyword Planner and here’s what you find:<\/p>\n
The first thing you think is “let’s see how many people search for stickers every month”. <\/p>\n
And wow, 165,000 is a lot of people! <\/p>\n
But to appear at the top of the page for this search, you may have to pay up to $8.29 per click. With a budget of $1,500, that’s just 180 clicks to try and get your brand out there. <\/p>\n
If you choose to be more specific with your keyword choices and focus on bumper stickers, your average monthly search volume drops significantly, but so does your estimated cost per bid. <\/p>\n
At a cost per click of $4.49, you can generate 334 clicks with your budget. That’s almost twice as many clicks just for being a little more specific with your keywords.<\/p>\n
Taking it a step further with “custom bumper stickers” and “design your own bumper stickers” will further reduce monthly searches, but their intent is much more specific. <\/p>\n
If someone searches for “bumper stickers”, it could mean that they want to create a custom bumper sticker. <\/p>\n
But they could also be looking to buy a specific bumper or they could be researching the origin of bumper stickers. <\/p>\n
On the other hand, the intent of “design your own bumper stickers” couldn’t be clearer. <\/p>\n
Bidding on long-tail keywords saves you money and increases your chances of conversion.<\/p>\n
Location targeting is an easy to overlook but important factor when trying to succeed on a budget, especially if you’re an online business. <\/p>\n
If you have the ability to serve customers from the United States or another country, you may be tempted to do so. <\/p>\n
However, unless your business is in a niche market, your budget may not be large enough to serve the entire country. <\/p>\n
Instead, you’ll be better served allocating that budget to your best-performing markets.<\/p>\n
Let’s review my sticker company from before. For the sake of the example, let’s imagine that this company is based in Seattle and ships all over the US <\/p>\n
The volume of searches for stickers-related keywords is too much to cover my $1,500 per month, so I want to be more strategic about where I show my ads. <\/p>\n
Just considering the shipping costs, I find it much cheaper to ship my products to the West Coast than to ship to the East Coast. <\/p>\n
As a Washington-based company, I also have more brand awareness in my area and customers are more likely to know and do business with me than someone based in Florida. <\/p>\n
So, to save myself some money and increase my chances of conversions, I’m going to set my campaigns to show to customers in the US West.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Google has made it exponentially easier to set up a campaign with automatic bidding and automatic application recommendations.<\/p>\n
Advertisers can have decent success without having to work harder – that’s a good thing!<\/p>\n
Using Google Ads shouldn’t be so confusing and complicated that you need to be a marketing professional to manage it. <\/p>\n
However, you’re leaving money on the table if you set up your campaigns and let them run without ongoing management.<\/p>\n
Once your campaigns start running and collecting data, you should, at a minimum, check:<\/p>\n
How much your campaigns are spending compared to your monthly budget. Which keywords are performing well and which are not. <\/p>\n
Removing non-performing keywords is an incredibly simple way to continuously improve performance over time.<\/p>\n
PPC advertising can be a valuable tool for small businesses with limited budgets, but it requires careful planning and execution to avoid overspending. <\/p>\n
By implementing these tips, small businesses can maximize their chances of success while ensuring that their budget is used wisely. <\/p>\n
With ongoing management, PPC can be a game-changing tool to drive growth and achieve your business goals.<\/p>\n
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.<\/p>\n