When you’re paying for advertising on Google using banner ads or display ads, one of your biggest focus areas has to be your budget. Budgeting is a challenge, but on Google Ads, every click is either going to mean your business is growing or you’re essentially throwing your money away.
By understanding your budget and maximizing it, you’re in a much better position to achieve the former than the latter.
The following is a brief guide to making the most of your Google Ads budget.
Have An Understanding of PPC
It’s important that you really understand how it works if you’re new to Google Ads. Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is the underlying model. You’re paying for each click on your ad. When running your PPC ads, you control your budget and spending and how and where you want your money to go.
The most general concept is that you’re bidding on relevant keywords, paying when consumers click an ad to take action, like visiting your site or calling you.
Once you understand how it works, you need to set your goals before you can create a budget. What are you hoping to achieve through online advertising? Do you want more people to call you, are you trying to develop awareness, or do you want more traffic to your site?
If you’re entirely new to Google Ads, consider using Smart Campaigns. With Smart Campaigns, you’re setting a max monthly budget, and Google automatically adjusts your ad bids for the best results.
Once you have more experience, you can try strategies like Cost Per Acquisition.
Google recommends advertisers connect their Ads and Analytics accounts. Google Ads tells you how often your ads will show up in a search, which is referred to as ad impressions, and when someone clicks on them. It doesn’t tell you insights about these actions leading to conversions on your site. To track your conversions, you should use Google Analytics. This will also help you track and analyze other key actions visitors take on your site.
Initial questions to ask yourself as you determine your Google Ads budget include how Google Ads fits in with what you’re currently doing in terms of marketing and what your competitors are spending. You need to assess the costs per click for the keywords you’re going to bid on and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to you.
You can follow some more specific strategies to maximize your budget listed below.
Eliminate Vanity Metrics
If your goal is currently to lower your PPC budgets, you, of course, will focus on maximizing every dollar you do spend. That means efficiency is what’s going to help you out here.
With that in mind, eliminate the data columns that either you don’t use or don’t bring you value in your optimizations daily.
If you’re looking at too much data, it will distract you from what’s most relevant.
The columns you’re looking at the daily need to focus only on the essentials.
This will show you more opportunities to make relevant changes and optimizations.
Organize Your Account Structure
If your whole system is disorganized, it will not run the way you need it to, and Google Ads is no exception. You want to structure your accounts. Keep ad groups themed with relevant keywords.
This will help you make sure that your ads are reaching the right audiences, and it’s also going to improve your quality score. When you have a higher quality score, you get lower costs-per-clicks, and your ad positions will be optimal if you’re using display ads.
Add Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are those terms that keep your ads from showing up in search engine queries that aren’t related to your business. If you take some time to add negative keywords to your Google Ads campaign, it can help prevent wasting your budget on clicks that aren’t relevant.
Regularly review search terms that trigger your businesses’ ads so that you can spot the patterns to exclude from campaigns in the future. Then, you’re narrowly focusing on clicks that are most valuable to your site.
Keep Bids for Keywords Low
Google Ads campaigns rely on bidding for keywords, so businesses use a strategy of an auction where the highest bidder wins. That means you’re probably going to blow through your whole budget without any results to show.
You should lower your keyword bids and maintain those if you have a limited budget.
Then, you’re able to better structure your budget throughout the day.
There is a possible issue with this—lower bids give your ads the chance to show more often, but that means you might also be giving up the placements at the top of the page. That’s why you have to stay focused on your quality score.
Again, high-quality scores support you paying a lower cost for each click, but they can also improve your ad position on the search engine results page.
Use Remarketing
Remarketing is an effective strategy in Google Ads. With remarketing, you can create campaigns to reach your already warm audiences who have a history of visiting your site. You can specifically advertise to those who didn’t complete a purchase or take the desired action.
If you have a very low ad budget, you can get a lot for your money by adding an audience for remarketing.
Make Adjustments on Bids
Finally, if you have a limited budget or simply want to maximize how you’re spending your ad money, make bid adjustments frequently. This lets you show your ads more or less frequently, based on when, how, and where searches occur.
You can look to see if one of your ads outperforms another on a certain device, for example. Then, adjust for the device that seems to be getting the most visitors.
You can ad negative bid adjustments so that you aren’t spending on underperforming devices.
Other things available for bid adjustments include your ad schedules, locations, audiences, and demographics.