Tips and Tricks for a Budget-Wise PPC Campaign

If you’re a marketer, entrepreneur, or small business owner, your primary objective is to stay profitable. Most marketing campaigns consist of a series of actions, decisions, and intuitions. When we’re speaking of PPC marketing, all these elements come into play. They’re extremely relevant and important for every PPC campaign, yet many marketers and webmasters encounter a struggling block.

Your campaign’s budget, or simply put, the amount of money you afford to invest and risk in order to gain results that are both profitable and realistically predictable. There are many entrepreneurs and marketers that live with a false belief concerning Google AdWords’ advertising system. Many believe that without a very big budget, you cannot stand a chance in front of the competition.

That’s extremely wrong to assume, especially because you can never know what’s actually going on until you test it first. We are experiencing a very rough marketplace, where change is present and dominant. The success of a PPC marketing campaign is based on a number of things. I believe that in order to do well – at anything – you must know what you’re doing.

This applies especially to PPC campaigns, as you can reduce your overall costs and enroll in a budget-wise campaign by taking smart and calculated risks. In today’s article, we’re presenting some tips and tricks that will teach you how to develop profitable PPC campaigns without you leveraging a significant budget:

Create Specific, Smart, and Realistic Objectives

There are two types of objectives you must set when launching a brand new PPC campaign.

The first is your result-oriented goal, which refers to an outcome that you’re seeking after the end of your campaign. So the question is…” What is the end result?” or…” How do you know when your campaign is successful?” Are you looking to improve your brand’s awareness? Are you looking for new subscribers and leads? Or you’re looking for pure profit by cold-selling your products? Always know your objective before starting any PPC campaign.

The second goal is measurement-oriented, and it refers to the main metric that you’ll follow and keep track of throughout your campaign. For example, some companies wish to improve their database of followers and email subscribers, so they will track their ads’ CTR (click-through-rate) because the more people click the more will subscribe.

So when you have a primary metric to look after, you will be able to see whether your campaign successful or not.

Decide the Total Budget

Considering that you took the time to establish specific, smart, and realistic objectives which are also results-oriented, it’s time to move on to the next step of the process. Now, you are going to estimate how much money you can afford to invest in your next campaign. Allocate a specific budget for each campaign you start and don’t mix them up.

Estimating your total budget might seem terribly hard at first, but as you get into it, it’ll become very simple. Here’s a good way to start:

Let’s say that your results-oriented objective is to acquire 1000 email subscribers through AdWord’s PPC advertising platform. This number should be realistic and in accordance with the “ideal” budget that you’d like to spend.

Next, consider the following costs:

• The ideal CPL (Cost-per-Lead), which in this case will be $10
• The ideal CVR Conversion rate (the number of leads turning into customers) –calculated in percentages, and in this case will be 25%

To estimate the total budget for a PPC campaign that would lead to your clearly defined results (1000 subscribers), do the following math:

1000 subscribers / 0.25 (coming from the 25% conversion rate) = 4000 CLICKS (PPC Leads)

If we multiply the number of clicks needed for our campaign to be successful with our ideal CPL ($10), we will obtain the total budget.

4000 * $10 = $40.000

We can see the final number is $40.000, even though this was a simple and exaggerated example. Use the same metrics and calculations and calculate your own budget.

Spend Your Budget Wisely and Improve Your CPA

The next thing you must look after is your Cost-Per-Action indicator. A smart and strategic PPC advertiser understands how critical a cost-efficient CPA is for any campaign. And so should you. By consistently improving your CPA, you’ll save a lot of money along the way.

PPC marketing takes patience. You learn from your mistakes, and you only grow by experimenting on your own. Here’s how to lower your Cost-per-Action cost on AdWord’s Platform:

• Lower your CPC cost (which is initially lowered by well-performing keywords and targeting)
• Improve your conversion rate (by providing a great user experience, value, and relevancy through your ads and content)

Two aspects that go hand in hand. Improve both your online platform and your marketing and Google will reward you.

Always Do Effective Keyword Research

PPC marketing is basically based on keywords and demographics. If you can match these two elements successfully all the time, you will generate a lot of profits and witness high ROIs. Every strong PPC campaign starts with a well-researched list of relevant keywords.

Choose your primary keywords depending on your campaign’s objectives. For example, use informative keywords for building brand awareness and leverage buyer keywords for drawing the attention to your products.

“In order to successfully and securely optimize your AdWord’s campaign’s costs, pay close attention to your performance metrics. Your keywords performance is very important as they show concise results and feedback. Find out the best-performing keywords and ‘put more money in them’. Scale until their performance drops and move on.” – says Mark Shindy, Content Management Specialist at BestEssays.

Takeaways

PPC advertising is a unique and special way of sending a fruitful traffic juice towards your website. Expert PPC marketers will seize every opportunity they have and they will improve their campaigns over time. When your budget is limited, start optimizing your strategy. Pay with your time and not with your money. Get used to finding quick solutions, and most importantly, get used to constant optimization. Measure and track your ROI while keeping into consideration both the stats and your intuition.