With enough funds on hand, pay per click (PPC) campaigns can be an excellent way to accelerate the performance and growth of your company, helping to generate increased traffic, amp up conversions and ultimately, significantly add to your bottom line.
You may think that this is only the case if you have enough free capital to spend on your advertising, and without that cash — that you could be left out in the dust.
Of course, the more money you have to invest into certain aspects of your digital marketing strategy, the better. But here’s the thing, you can actually run a very effective PPC campaign on a lower budget, as long as you are running the campaign realistically from a financial perspective in accordance with how your business operates and your marketing goals.
And you can absolutely maximize your results on a lower budget. In this article, we will reveal some of our best tips and tricks for doing just that —— making the most of a lower PPC budget, while still yielding powerful results!
How Do You Choose the Right-Sized Budget for Your PPC Campaign?
Before we get into what those strategies exactly are, let’s discuss a little bit about how to determine what the right budget is for your PPC campaign. After all, everyone always wants to know exactly what their budget should be for their PPC campaigns.
The answer is that there is no one one answer and it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of situation. There are just too many factors to consider when it comes to figuring out your budget that makes this a very individualized decision based on the particular needs and goals of your company.
However, identifying the right-sized budget of your PPC campaign for your business is a different story. The idea here is that you want to be working with a budget that is realistic in terms of how your company operates and makes money and the attainable goals you wish to reach with your PPC campaign. Therefore, in trying to determine what size budget you will need, it is important to assess your finances, and have a good understanding of the revenue coming in as well as the expenses coming out to identify how much free capital you really have to put towards your PPC campaign budget.
And then, you have to maintain a realistic perspective as you run the campaign and give your business enough time to make it through a sale cycle to be able to determine the efficacy of your PPC campaign strategy. Companies can dramatically differ in how long their typical sales cycle is. For instance, a company in the consumer sector selling a health and wellness product on various e-commerce marketplaces will likely have a comparatively much shorter sales cycle with a much smaller return on investment than say, a B2B company selling a heavy-duty, complex digital solution in which it takes months to close the deal, but each contract is worth six figures and above. Therefore, you have to stay in the game long enough, and can’t get out just because you don’t see results right away. You may have to stay at it, plugging away for months until your type of business can realistically begin to see results from your efforts in PPC.
Ok, so let’s now take a look at some of our top strategies for maximizing your results from a lower PPC campaign budget.
Strategies for Getting the Most Out of a Lower PPC Budget
Set out to reach realistic goals
When it comes to any facet of digital marketing strategy for your business, it is important to hone in on clear, succinct, and realistic goals that your company expects to achieve through implementing your strategy. So, in terms of your PPC budget, you should plan accordingly beforehand to determine what your goals are for your business, and figure out how much you will need to invest in your PPC strategy to reach those goals, without going over budget or selling your company short.
Strategically distribute your budget to improve your CPA
In order to devise an effective PPC budget and strategy, it is important to reach for a cost-effective CPA (cost-per-action). You, of course, want your cost per action to be lower to help yield a better ROI for your business. To lower your CPA, you need to therefore, increase your conversion rate (CVR) while reducing your cost per click (CPC). In order to do this, you have to be very strategic about how you are prioritizing your budget for PPC. This could mean for example, concentrating your funds on the best performing ads to maximize your results.
Conduct effective keyword research
Keywords are of course integral to many aspects of your digital marketing strategy. It is important to zero in on the best, attainable keywords to reach your audience and generate higher traffic to your site. Your list of keywords should have both popular, more generalized keywords that will widely appeal to your audience, as well as long tail keywords that help you focus on more targeted sub-sections of your audience. After you have selected your keywords, you then have to monitor them to make sure you are allocating your budget for those keywords effectively and adjust as needed to ensure you get the best results from your PPC campaigns.
Increase the relevance of your ads to your audience with more specific targeting
It is important that your ads resonate with your audience, and in order to do so they need to have relevance to that particular section of your audience. You can use geo-targeting to focus your campaign on a specific geographic location your audience is in to encourage stronger conversions in that area. This can help you more strategically and wisely use your PPC budget, enabling you to make the most of your funds by concentrating on one specific area of your audience rather than potentially wasting money, trying to appeal to your audience on a more global level.
