There has been some absolute nightmares for advertisers who don’t properly budget for their PPC campaigns that have resulted in paid search disasters. Spending under budget generally means that you are missing out on opportunities for visitors, however if you go well above your budget the results can be catastrophic and leave your business struggling or worse. Today I will be going over how to set a proper budget strategy so you can avoid any paid search budget disasters.
1: Types Of Budgets
Google AdWords has two types of budgets available for you to make use of. The first type are campaign budgets. Campaign budgets are the total euro amount that you want to spend on all of your keywords for a campaign. Google AdWords works this out as an average per day spend which adds up to a monthly figure. If your ad is over performing on a particular day Google may go over budget by up to 20%. AdWords gives you the option to set monthly campaign budgets, you can either prepay by credit card or receive an invoice once a month. The second type of budget is the shared budget. This allows you to group together several campaigns and set a budget for them, sharing the budget among them all. When either your campaign or your shared budget has been depleted the add simply stops running.
2: Initial Budgets
When starting out with Google Adwords every advertiser will need to know how to set up their initial budget. Firstly you will have to divide your monthly budget by 30 (days) in order to get your daily budget, then you must divide your daily budget by the number of campaigns or organizational goals you have. Gather all your data together and adjust each campaigns budget, doing so by which metric is most important to you e.g. ROI or click traffic. Pausing or dramatically reducing the campaigns that aren’t running well and reallocating their share of the budget to the top performing campaigns is essential.
3: Maximizing Your Budget
If your initial budget has is running well and has proven to be effective you may want to try maximize your budget so that you miss the least opportunities possible. To do this you should set the budget higher on priority changes and review Adwords tools for performance estimates as well as check to see if the recommendations are correct and could be implemented smoothly. You can then switch on Accelerated Serving, keeping an eye out for ads that end early in the day or that don’t have enough high volume keywords. Then you should start using Broad Match keywords. When using broad match keywords it’s vital that you keep your ad relevant to searchers through the use of negative keywords.
4: Containing Budget
This is useful if you have a lower budget and still want to be effective as it allows you to micro tune things such as choosing specific times when your ads run so you won’t run over budget. Firstly you should set your budget to serve Standard in order to serve your ads evenly. You should then use data to determine which day or days are best for running your ad using ad schedules and/or bid modifiers to ensure you don’t go over budget and stay in control. Then you should use analytics data to determine where your best demographic geographically speaking is. You can then adjust geo-targeting and use bid modifiers to hone in on high quality opportunities.
Budgets for Adwords can be challenging to get your head around for any advertiser, but with this guide and the use of proper tools you should be in a great position to get started and avoid any paid search budget disasters.