Deciding how much you sbould spend on your Google Ads Campaigns is a tough question to answer. But in short it is all about scaling. If your running profitable campaigns in your ad account and the ROI is great then thats were budget shouldnt come in to play as much as it would be a matter of scaling up your spend to scale up the ROI. However, for many the money isnt there to get their ads scaled up to a 10, 20 or £50,000 Ad account. Shoogle PPC Agency specialise in exactly that, scaling of campaigns through agressive optimisation.
So for small businesses its about starting small. Our Essex PPC agency recommends having a starting budget of around £1,500 per month to gain traction in Google. The key here is to run very well optimised campaigns that are going to maximise the conversions and therefore, facilitate growth. This post is all about scaling and starting advertising on Google Ads with little budget.
First Tip - Find The Losses
As a PPC Agency when we take clients on who already have Google accounts our first step is to find all areas where money is being lost. for example they may have keywords or search terms they spend £10 on and return 1-3 conversions. They may have others were they spend £50 and have never had a conversion. This sort of thing really hurts low budget accounts and needs to be rectified.
Another issue is keywords that bare no relveance our Chelmsford PPC agency look at every single keywrod and search term on your account and analyse how relveant they are to your business. After this is done we can then develop negative keyword lists for that campaign.
Google Search Networks
Google is a little sneaky on how they set up your campaigns by automatically pre-selecting some settings. By default, Google will recommend that you show your content on search partners. Search partners refers to Google owned companies such as YouTube and Gmail. Whilst this sounds great for getting additional conversions, its not always the case. Take Google, when your on google you search for something, therefore you have a direct interest in whatever you are searching for. Now if your on YouTube watching cat videos and an add pops up for Plant-based meat your probably not going to have the same level of intent to click or buy. This is a good way to save money by turning off search partners and allowing your budget to be spent on consumer clicks that have a direct interest and intent.
Search Queries
This should be one of the first considerations when looking to maximise your budget and plug any holes where budget is just being wasted. Our PPC Agency looks at these search queries as much as 3-4 times a week manually for relevance and results. When reviewing search queries, we always advise pretending to be the consumer. Are lots of irrelevant terms showing at once? Trying to uncover the main search querie can be much quicker then going through them one at a time as a simple negatvie keyword with broad match can remove all of those and prevent future wasted clicks.
Ad Scheduling
Alot of agencies dont look at this enough but its very important for those looking to save money on their spend. Ad scheduling is simply setting bid adjustments based on the time of day or, day of the week. A simple bit of research will tell you when consumers who buy are most active online and therefore you have your best chances of converting. At our Essex PPC Agency we ensure this is set up for all clients regardless of budget. Bidding the same amount for someone searching at 4am and 4pm is kamakazi. In general setting up ad scheduling and then reviewing after a month will give you a good inisght as to when it is is most and least profitable to advertise, you can then adjust your bids accordingly.
Location Targeting
This again can be a really important bit of money saving. Google Ads allows you to target certain locations, you can even target all the way down to individual postcodes. As a general rule of thumb we advise targetting to town level, this will give you around 820 different locations. Again, this is something you need to collect data on. Generally our PPC Agency recommends 30-60 days to get consistent data. Once you have this, similar to ad scheduling you can scale up and scale back different locations based on results to maximise your budget and conversions.
Second Tip.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket
Whilst we always promote PPC, it is important not to put all your budget and energy in to PPC. Whilst it is great for immediate results and getting your brand out there, it does cost, will always cost and there are plenty of variables. We advise all clients of our Colchester PPC Agency to look at SEO. SEO is free advertising, if you can get your product or service high up in the organic search results you are winning! Not only that, by Google recognising how relevant your service or product is and rewarding you with a higher ad position, they are also going to reward you with a higher Google Ad Rank. This means your adverts will cost less per click.
In addition to SEO there is on-site work that can be done. Its important to ensure that your wesbite landing pages are straight forward and easy to naviagte as, once you have that customer on your site you dont want them to click off or leave because they have struggled to find what they are looking for or didnt like what they saw.
Our Final Word
When it comes to Google Ads, if you dont have the expeirence to run them or the budget then start small. Use this guide as your base and build on from that or, Speak to our Essex PPC Agency. See how we can help and lets do this together,