The world of Adwords and Pay per Click (PPC) can often be a mysterious one, with many different features and settings often confusing the average user who just wants a bit more traffic. Fear not as there are a few simple things that you can take care of to try and get the most from your budget.
In the current climate where things are hard and money is tight, it is important to try and make sure that every marketing tool you are using is effective, from newspaper adverts to online marketing, which means making sure that your PPC budget is working to its maximum efficiency at all times.
Check out some of the things that you can do to try and make your budget stretch a little bit further below:
Time And Delivery – For many online businesses, having your adverts running 24 hours a day is pointless, especially if you only take calls through office hours. When setting up your campaign you can specify when the adverts are displayed, so if you turn them off between 1am and 7am in most cases then you can save some money and have the adverts theoretically run for longer. The Adwords system looks at your budget and your adverts “on” time to try to make sure they will display correctly throughout those hours, so by cutting the time down, your budget should last longer.
Bidding – Try to be realistic with your budget to make sure that you get the most from your campaign; as if you do not control how your spending is going then you can quickly max out your budget. Work out how much you can afford to spend a month and then divide this by 30 to calculate your daily spend. So, for example, if your monthly budget was £100 your daily budget would work out at £3.33 (100 / 30) which will then mean your budget will last as close to a month as is possible.
Daily Budget – As mentioned above, if you want to make your monthly budget last longer then you should try to work out your daily budget and see if you can reduce this depending on your keyword bidding levels. If your clicks are costing £1 a time then there is little point in having a daily budget below £10 else you will probably never get the results that you want, so although you can cut your daily budget, do try to be realistic.
Your Adverts / Keywords – If you want to make your Adwords campaign more efficient and therefore save money, the best way of doing this is to make sure your adverts and keywords are spot on. The biggest cause of lost money on Adwords has to be inaccurate adverts and keywords, so that when the visitor clicks the ad and ends up on your site they cannot find what they want and therefore go elsewhere. Traffic is easy to get, but good traffic that is going to convert takes longer and is therefore worth spending time trying to achieve.
Targeting – If you are a localised business then you should make use of the excellent geo-targeting setting in the campaign settings area. Instead of having to put Plumbers Bristol, Plumbers Cardiff etc, you can simply just set up the areas you wish to target and the system will then do the rest for you, which is ideal if you have a few niche’s and cover many areas. Just make sure you get these areas spot on when you set them up else you could find your advert appearing in areas that you do not cover and this will therefore be a waste of money.
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