Controlling your ppc budget!
Keeping costs down on your ppc campaign!
So by now you already know how useful a ppc campaign can be! It’s an excellent way of getting immediate targeted traffic to your site (making it perfect for new sites!), and it’s great for small and large businesses alike. There are low set-up costs, and you can see quick returns for your investment, making it a cost effective method for online advertising. It can also help to boost brand awareness, and as it’s been shown that 60% of individuals will click on organic results; that leaves another 40% left to target! You can allocate whatever budget you choose to your ppc campaign, and adjust this whenever you want. But in order to keep costs down, you should definitely consider the following:
Set your budget for ppc!
This will be driven by what you can afford, and by your ROI (return on investment). To determine your budget for ppc, you first of all need to calculate how much a ppc conversion is worth in profit to you. Say your profit on each conversion is £10, you are receiving 100 leads per day and have a 20% conversion rate, then over the course of a 30 day month you will realise £1,500 in profit. So if you spend £500 as your ppc budget for the month, then you will have made £1,000 profit on your ppc campaign!
One of the great things about ppc is that you can measure your ROI, so if your ad stops paying for itself – you can pause your campaign and change the ad, or just cancel a campaign that’s not working.
Target your ads!
Reduce your CTR (click through rate) by ensuring you only get targeted traffic to your site. The idea of reducing your CTR might sound an odd thing to do! But actually when you think about it, the only visitors you want are those that are actually interested in your site. And as you’re paying for every click, make sure you are getting traffic that’s actually interested in your site. Otherwise, they will click on your ad and then just click away. The best way to avoid this is to make sure your ads are aimed at your target audience. It sounds obvious, but you only need to do a google search to see how often ads come up for eBay that aren’t really relevant to the search term you used. So make sure you word your ads carefully and include all relevant info and keywords. If you do that, you will keep the costs down on your ppc campaign, as well as increasing conversions. Basically what you’re aiming for are qualified leads that give you the lowest CTR with the highest conversion rate!
Don’t forget to check out your competition’s ads, what keywords and terms are they using that you aren’t. Also, wherever possible try and find relevant keywords with little competition, and don’t forget to include common mis-spellings in your campaign. Most important of all, think about what people will actually be searching for!
Make sure you link directly to the product you’re promoting rather than to a generic page – it makes a difference!
Some more tips to refine your ads (and lower your ppc budget!)
When you set up your ppc campaign, begin with a higher bid in order to build up your. Basically, the top spots get more clicks. As more clicks mean a higher CTR, starting with a higher will actually lower your CPC whilst maintaining your ad position!
You need to run your ppc ad for a full 24 hour period to see how it’s working, but if you have set your ppc buget too low, then your ad will stop running during that period, and you won’t get an accurate view of how your test has been running.
Use negative keywords to help target your ads. You may discover your ad is showing for search terms that are unrelated to your ad, but just happen to include your target keywords. So for instance if your ad is for white wedding dresses, you could use red as a negative keyword to stop your ad appearing for “red wedding dress”. This is easy to deal with, simply add the negative keywords to your ppc campaign to stop this happening! After all, you don’t want to target anyone who is not actually looking for your ad!
With google adwords, you have the option of using broad match, phrase match and exact match to help you refine your campaign. Broad match is the default option, if you include terms such as wedding dress in your keyword list, then your ads will also appear for searches such as wedding and dress. But if you enter your keyword in quotation marks, then your ad will only appear when a user searches on “wedding dress”. Alternatively, you can use brackets, i.e. [wedding dress], to ensure your ad only appears when someone searches for that specific phrase without any other terms in the query.
Don’t forget!
Having a long-standing ppc campaign and a good, will mean you will be more likely to get lower bids/higher positions. So get that campaign up and running!
Use the ppc engine of your choice to find out what your top priority keywords will cost if you try to get in the top 3 ppc ranks for most of your keywords. And don’t worry too much if you can’t afford to grab that no 1 spot, because you could well find that it isn’t the best spot for you in terms of optimum ROI. In fact, you might find the no 3 spot actually converts better for you! Basically, you’re aiming for the lowest CPC rate you can, whilst still placing your ad in one of the top positions. So aim for somewhere between the 2nd and 5th spot. Positioning yourself on the first page is important if you can achieve it, but the no 1 spot is often not essential, because quite often people will click on the first two ads of a search results page, and in fact they will often click on the first ad, leave and go to the second ad!
And lastly, don’t forget to consider your own level of enthusiasm! The bigger your campaign, the more the work! (i.e. more keywords and more adds = more effort!) So don’t take on more than you can realistically handle!
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