Pay-per-click advertising, in a nutshell, is an all-in-one DIY online advertising machine. You add in the sale information, splash on some eye-catching images, decide who should ideally see your ad, and then assign a budget that will be charged to a bank card of your choosing. These online ad platforms, like Google Ads, require that users engage in a bidding system – based on keywords and their popularity – to see which advertiser’s content will appear in position 1, 2, or 3 at the top or bottom of Google’s results pages. How do we know what our budget should be, and which keywords should we be betting on the most? Here are a number of helpful tips for setting your PPC budget like a pro:
1. Research Keywords
Pay-per-click advertising, at least on search engines, will use specific keywords that advertisers bid on. Before thinking about how much to throw at a PPC campaign, write down keywords and phrases that your customers may use to search for your products, then do some research to see what those keywords are being sold for by the PPC platform.
2. Establish Costs Per Click
It might be not easy to get exact figures here, but try to establish what your cost per click will be on average. Add up the CPC amounts for each of your campaign keywords, then divide that number by however many keywords there are. That’ll give you your average CPC.
3. Locational Targeting
If you forget everything you read here, try and remember this: poor PPC targeting is the number one reason for campaign failure and wasted budgets. When you don’t specify geographic locations to target your campaign on, PPC platforms will advertise across the entire South Africa. Why waste money on getting clicks from customers on the other side of the country?
4. Time Awareness
Another big waste of PPC marketing budgets is the when behind advertising. Again, PPC platforms are going to show your ads at all times of the day by default. You can narrow the timeframe down by specifying times that ads should either show up or go into hiding, thereby only spending money on click during the periods when the ads are active.
5. Monitor Key Metrics
A final idea to ensure that your PPC budget remains relevant and effective is analytics. PPC managers should constantly monitor key campaign metrics, remove underperforming keywords from campaigns so as not to waste money, and assess things like bounce rates to ensure that other PPC elements (like landing pages) contribute to conversions.
PPC advertising is a field that many have managed to optimise fully, and they are reaping the rewards for their clients.
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