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It can sometimes feel that as a business, you’re always needing to spend more money in order to succeed. A good marketing campaign doesn’t come cheaply, and it can feel like an impossible task if you’re on a small budget. For small businesses, you need to spend wisely, but it is possible to create a successful PPC campaign on a smaller budget.
Have Realistic Goals
If you’re working with a smaller budget, it’s important to set realistic expectations for your goals. Focus on what you can achieve with the budget you have. For example, if your budget is $200 a month, and the average cost-per-click is $2.50, you can get 80 clicks a month. Don’t go in expecting 500 clicks, or you’ll be disappointed.
Prioritize Goals
With a smaller budget, you don’t want to try and achieve too much at once. Focus your budget into one goal at a time and prioritize what you want to achieve to get the most bang for your buck.
Decide if you want to go after brand awareness, product advertising, lead generation, sales or repeat sales. Invest your budget into just a few goals with each PPC campaign. A more focused campaign will work better if you have less to spend. If you’re setting restrictions, remember this could restrict traffic to a campaign. Try loosening up your restrictions of you aren’t getting traffic to your ads.
Use Geo-Targeting
Like SEO, getting your adverts seen locally can be the best way to go if you don’t have the budget to play with on a PPC campaign. You need to balance getting your ads seen by customers, without narrowing down too much and killing the traffic. Balance relevance with the budget. You add also add locations not to show your advert, so you’re not wasting budget on areas where you know you don’t get customers.
Schedule Your Ads
Don’t waste your budget and schedule your adverts to only run at specific times. You could set up ads to run only on certain days and at certain times of the day. For example, run ads only during your business’s opening hours. If you’re always open, use your reporting tools to see if you get a better ad response at better times of day, and schedule for busy times.
Think A Little Differently
A small budget can be a challenge for PPC, but if you think a bit outside the box, you can make it work for you. Forget the standard rules of how a PPC campaign should work, and instead change things up to best suit your budget and your business.
For example, most businesses will direct PPC campaigns to different landing pages and test to find the most effective. This is expensive to do. However, if you do a lot of business over the phone, you could ditch the landing page altogether and instead put a ‘Call Now’ call to action on your advert.
In your advert settings, find the settings for portfolio bid strategies, and use them to beat out your competitors with the ‘target outranking share’ option. You can create a rule by adding the domain to outrank, the amount of time to outrank and the maximum bid. Choose your top competitors. The insights report can show you who is competing for the same keywords that you are targeting.
Use Tracking
You can get all kinds of useful information about your customers and their interests by tracking your PPC results. Set up tracking through your PPC platform and monitor your website analytics to see how your PPC is performing. The data will be useful to tell you what worked and how best to optimize your adverts moving forward.
Use The Right Keywords
Be sensible about which keywords you target If you’re bidding on more generic keywords, you’ll find your budget runs out fast. Instead, do some research and find longer key phrases. They’re more unique and you can compete on a smaller budget.
Long-tail keywords can be found using your analytics account. Look at organic search terms that lead to your site, Google autocomplete, and Google’s Keyword Planner.
Stay away from high volume keywords too. Competitive keywords can easily become very expensive. To avoid putting too big a dent in your budget, set a cap on how much you’re willing to spend.
Set Negative Keywords
A well-thought-out list of negative keywords can save you money on PPC too. Brainstorm keywords that might trigger your adverts to appear by mistake. Look at reports to see what irrelevant searches led to people clicking your ads. Create a list, and set these as terms you don’t want to be matched. Keep this updated throughout the campaign.
