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?
