In difficult times, the ‘rich’ get richer and the ‘poor’ get poorer. Sad, but true.
Whilst there are lots of reasons why this happens, at the core it is because the ‘rich’ are in a financial position to invest aggressively.
Now, we’re not saying that if you invest in PPC you will become rich, far from it. However, there is some truth that those that are able to be brave in the face of uncertainty can prosper.
In this article, we discuss the process of operating PPC on a tight budget, in order to efficiently pick up market demand.
You Don’t Need a Huge Budget
It’s a common misconception of PPC that advertising platforms like Google & Facebook need large budgets in order to work and generate results.
However, the best thing about PPC platforms is that you set the budget and the bids, meaning you don’t have to spend any more than you can afford.
1. Focus on small, tightly targeted ad groups & high-intent keywords.
Keeping your ad groups small and grouping only similar keywords together will be more beneficial when utilising a small budget, as you’ll see better results when focusing your spend on fewer high performing keywords than trying to bid on any and all keywords your users might be searching for.
Plus separating ad groups by similar groups of keywords, or better yet into single keyword ad groups (SKAGs), will mean you can keep the ad copy super relevant to each keyword which will help when writing ad copy that’s relevant to what the user is searching while improving click-through rates and quality scores.
Take the time to carry out your keyword research and find high intent searches with good levels of search volume so that you’re targeting users who are more likely to convert based on the fact what they’re searching suggests they are towards the bottom of the conversion funnel.
It’s also worth keeping an eye out for long-tail keywords as opposed to shorter, broader keywords as these could be less competitive and result in a cheaper cost per click so that you can get more clicks out of your daily budget.
2. Keep Quality Scores In Check
Having a good quality score is really the holy grail to reducing your cost per click and getting the most out of your limited budget. Having a quality score above the benchmark of 5 could mean your cost per click is discounted, giving you a better chance of outranking your competitors.
The factors that influence the quality score are:
Expected click-through rate (CTR)
Relevance of each keyword to its ad group (this is where the first point about keeping small, relevant ad groups comes to play)
Relevance of ad text
Landing page relevance and experience for the user
Historical ads performance
Working on each factor and improving your quality score could make the world of difference to your cost per click, allowing you to not only get more clicks and traffic to your website but also achieve a lower cost per conversion.
3. Negative Keywords & Match Types
Keeping your spend for only the areas that are relevant to your business will help you keep costs low and negative keywords are one way to ensure your ads aren’t triggering for any irrelevant searches. When carrying out your keyword research, you’ll be able to filter out any searches that crop up which aren’t relevant to you and it’s worth moving all those irrelevant searches into a negative keyword list to apply to all campaigns.
Choosing match types for your keywords is another way of keeping the search terms relevant and preventing irrelevant searches triggering your ads. It’s best to steer clear of broad match keywords when keeping a strict budget for PPC as broad match opens up the gates for a lot of different variations of your keywords. Phrase match and exact match are your safest bet so that you can stay in control of the searches that trigger your ads.
If you’re finding that your search volume is too low when using phrase and exact, then you could try broad match modified match types which will open up the searches coming through while ensuring that your key terms are still present. But it’s a good idea to monitor your search terms regularly so you can add to the negative keywords list if necessary.
4. Bid strategies
When it comes to choosing bid strategies on a small budget, it can depend on what your goal is but ultimately, if you need full control over bids to control your spend your best option is manual bidding.
However, there are options for semi-automated bidding strategies where you decide your maximum bid and Google will optimise the bids within that limit to try and get you as many impressions/clicks for your daily budget. These kinds of bid strategies are good if you’re focusing on brand awareness or bringing traffic to your website.
Conversion based strategies, such as ‘maximise conversions’ and ‘target CPA’ don’t give the option of putting in a max bid and they tend to need a high volume of traffic to work effectively, so might not be the ideal strategy if you’re on a tight budget.
Another thing to note is that if you’re planning on using a shared budget across multiple campaigns as a way of stretching your daily spend further, then you won’t be able to select the maximise conversion bid strategy for the campaigns on these shared budgets.
However, if getting as many conversions as possible within your budget is your main focus, then you could always try building up historical data until you can distinguish the highest performing campaign with the lowest cost per conversion and separate this campaign with its own daily budget to test using the maximise conversion bid strategy to see if this improves your conversion rates.
It’s definitely possible to drive results with a small budget across Google Ads and the other advertising platforms - it just means prioritising your budget in the areas which you’re confident will generate results and being smart with your keyword research. If you have any further questions about running PPC campaigns on a limited budget or need help generating more results, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.