How to Maximize Your PPC Budget

It doesn’t matter how long you have been in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising – you will always encounter challenges in your campaign. One of the toughest challenges is learning how to manage your PPC budget.

This is a crucial aspect of any paid advertising campaign, as simple decisions made in a minute can have dramatic consequences that will impact your budget for weeks or possibly months to come.

When you’re dealing with a low PPC budget, those decisions become even more important. One bad call could kill your campaign.

In this article, we’ll explore smart strategies to help you get the most out of your PPC budget, even when you don’t have a lot to spend.

How to Strategize a Low-Budget PPC campaign

It’s not easy to run an effective campaign with a low PPC budget, however, it’s definitely possible. You just need a solid strategy. Here are ten tips to optimize your spending for a low-budget campaign.

1. Specify your Campaign Goals

It’s vital to define your goals from the outset. The most common goals for PPC advertising are:

• Brand Awareness.
• Lead Generation.
• Conversions.

Decide what is most important to you, and that will help guide your bidding strategy going forward.

2. Research your competitors

You can learn a lot from the competition by conducting a thorough competitor analysis. This helps you learn more about their audience, the keywords they bid on, and the type of advertising approach they are using.

Start off by compiling a list of the top companies in your domain, then do some research on their:

• Products and pricing
• Ad types
• Ad copy
• Landing pages
• CTAs

With a deeper look at the competition, you can get ideas of what works, and what doesn’t, which can give help you optimize your spending.

3. Setting your PPC Budget

Take care when setting the monthly PPC budget. This determines the amount you are willing to pay for a specified number of conversions. To get this right, you should first consider how many clicks your ads are likely to receive each day.

In Google Ads, there may be cases where the daily budget limit is exceeded. The platform does this in order to maximize ad clicks. Don’t worry – this is quite normal, and your monthly budget should remain intact. By setting an appropriate monthly budget limit, you can safeguard against excessive spending.

4. Audience Targeting

Before you start your campaign, you must understand your audience. It’s best to focus on a smaller niche group of people with shared interests, as opposed to targeting a broad audience.

It’s a smart idea to create customer personas that detail the interests, behaviors, and purchasing habits of your target audience.

With this in mind, you can create more relevant ads and landing pages that are more engaging for your audience. This is more likely to drive clicks, leads, and conversions.

5. Keyword Match Types

In PPC advertising, match types act as a filter to help you achieve the right balance between reach and relevance. For instance, if you use broad match type keywords, your ads will get a lot more impressions, but they may be shown to users who have no interest in what you have to offer. As a result, you could incur a lot of wasted spend on irrelevant clicks.

When you have a low PPC budget, it’s best to go for a mix of modified broad match and exact match types. Ultimately, think about the products and services you offer and consider the terms that people may use to find these solutions when searching online.

6. Keywords Research

Clever keyword research is the bedrock of a successful advertising campaign. Thankfully, you have a few great tools to help you discover valuable keywords, including:

• Google Search Console
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends

By using these tools, and looking at things with an analytical mind, you can identify keywords that will attract qualified leads. Don’t spend too much on keywords with high search volume because they’ll often be difficult to rank for due to high competition. Instead, look for terms that have decent search volume, and low bidding prices.

7. Targeting Filters

Another tip to optimize your PPC budget is to refine your targeting. While good audience personas and match types are steps in the right direction, you can do more while your campaigns are running. Try experimenting with these filters to attract better quality traffic:

• Geo-Targeting – You can exclude areas you don’t do business in, and focus solely on local business. This ensures your budget goes further to attract people likely to convert.
• Ad Scheduling – Analyze your data to identify the peak times of the day and days of the week for your audience. You can schedule your ads to run during peak times, saving on wasted spend and optimizing for conversions.
• Demographic Targeting – Over time, you can segment your audience into smaller groups depending on age, gender, living status, income, etc. This helps increase personalization, as you can serve up more targeted, relevant ads.

8. Tracking the Abandoners

If you want to succeed with PPC advertising, it’s imperative that you are tracking key metrics. Google Ads and Google Analytics have a litany of metrics to keep tabs on, many of which are ideal to gauge the performance of your campaign.

When you monitor user behaviors, you can learn more about low-performing keywords, and figure out which pages cause users to bounce off your website. Tracking these abandoners will help you identify flaws in your campaign and your website. Over time, these insights will make it possible to improve the user experience, and in turn, reduce wasted spend on your budget.

9. Remarketing

Speaking of abandoners, you shouldn’t think that a potential sale is completely lost after someone leaves your website. Remarketing is the practice of retargeting previous site visitors, and through data insights, you can deliver more relevant ads that encourage users to return – and quite possibly, convert.

As it’s cheaper to acquire an existing lead rather than get a new one, remarketing is a budget-friendly option for your marketing plan.

10. Testing and Monitoring

As mentioned, tracking metrics is vital. Once you get into PPC advertising, you’ll understand you need a committed approach to monitoring and testing, where you are always trying out new settings, and then analyzing the impact on ad performance.

This approach is the only way you will be able to optimize ads for better results. Your PPC budget will quickly vanish if you leave things alone for too long, so you must get used to testing, tweaking, and measuring performance metrics to truly understand how to make your money go further.

It’s Possible to Win at Google Ads with a Low PPC Budget

So, there you have ten great strategies to make the most out of your PPC budget. If you don’t have much to start with, you may think PPC advertising is a lost cause.

However, with the right attitude, and some smart decision-making, you can use Google Ads to turn a low budget into significant profits.