For small businesses seeking to boost sales or enhance brand awareness, PPC advertising is a tool that can make a significant impact. However, if not approached cautiously, it can lead to overspending. Hence, when working with a limited budget, it is vital to ensure that you establish a solid foundation for success while setting up a PPC account.
Paid search advertising, particularly on platforms such as Google Ads, provides small businesses with an excellent opportunity to connect with potential customers who are actively searching for their products or services.
Considering the financial aspect, it is important to recognize that small businesses typically operate with limited budgets. It becomes crucial to maximize the effectiveness of each advertising dollar spent. To achieve this, let us delve into five essential PPC strategies that guarantee successful campaigns while staying within a restricted budget.
Before you begin allocating your funds towards Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, make sure to read these crucial guidelines for managing PPC bidding with limited resources.
1. Set clear goals and base the account around them
PPC advertising offers the advantage of catering to various business objectives through different campaign types, bidding options, and a range of Google platforms available for advertising.
If your budget is limited, it is crucial to determine your main goal and develop campaigns that can assist you in achieving that objective. If you want to increase brand awareness, Display and YouTube are excellent choices for accomplishing that.
If you are an ecommerce company aiming to increase purchases and revenue, you should consider utilizing search and shopping campaigns. These campaigns are most effective when implemented together and contribute to a comprehensive approach. However, in budget constraints, it is necessary to eliminate less important strategies and prioritize achieving outcomes.
2. Make your campaigns simple and specific
When setting up your PPC campaigns, it is crucial to be precise. The objective is to ensure that your ads align with the user’s search queries to the greatest extent. Thus, it is essential to organize your campaigns and ad groups in a way that targets the selected keywords. To illustrate, consider an apparel business that offers various clothing items but wants to emphasize T-shirts and denim pants.
To ensure maximum relevance to the user’s search, create campaigns and ad groups that align with the type of clothing.
- Campaign: T-shirts
- Ad Group: T-shirts
- Ad Group: Women’s T-shirts
- Ad Group: Men’s T-shirt
- Ad Group: Kid’s T-shirt
- Campaign: Denim Pants
- Ad Group: Denim Pants
- Ad Group: Women’s Denim Pants
- Ad Group: Men’s Denim Pants
- Ad Group: Kid’s Denim Pants
Two things are accomplished by setting up your campaigns in this manner.
The first thing to consider is the simplicity and ease of understanding. By examining the performance data of all the ad groups, it is quite straightforward to determine.
- Which types of products are performing well (T-shirts or denim pants).
- Which demographic our product is most popular with (women, men, kids etc).
Breaking down these products into separate ad groups makes the optimization process much simpler compared to having all of them combined. Another benefit is that each ad group mentioned above will have its own set of keywords and ads tailored to its respective category.
If a person searches for “kid’s T-shirts,” the ad displayed to them will be specifically about kid’s T-shirts and will guide them to a landing page that offers kid’s T-shirts. In the case of having only one ad group for T-shirts, our ads would need to be broader in nature and would have a reduced probability of resulting in a transaction.
3. Use long-tail keywords
PPC advertising operates on an auction system, wherein advertisers participate in bidding to display their ads when users search for specific keywords, with the ad placement being allocated to the bidder with the highest offer. Just like in real-life auctions, having a significant amount of money makes winning considerably easier. Isn’t that ironic!
If you have a lesser amount of money compared to others at the auction, how can you emerge as a victor? The strategy is straightforward – focus on bidding for prizes that have fewer contenders. In the realm of paid search, these are known as long-tail keywords, which encompass more specific terms and are searched for less frequently.
Imagine that you are the owner of a business that specializes in producing personalized stickers. Now, let’s open our eyes and keep envisioning. Your aim is to increase sales by utilizing paid advertising, but you have a limited budget of $1,500 per month for it.
4. Define clear objectives
Many small businesses make the mistake of structuring and optimizing their campaigns without aligning them with their primary objectives, despite the fact that building a strategic foundation requires well-defined goals.
To start, first, determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) and stick to them consistently. How do you define success for your business? By quantifying what success means, you can analyze your campaign in reverse to determine the specific number of leads, transactions, or calls needed for your advertising spending to be justified. Having clear goals like this simplifies your optimization endeavors.
5. Precise geographical targeting
To prudently allocate PPC funds, it is necessary to deliberately target specific geographic locations. By using location settings, you can customize the regions where your advertisements are eligible to appear.
If you provide local services, concentrate on your immediate region instead of spending money on international targeting if your business does not ship overseas. If you are a local business, narrow down your targeting even more. Although you might attract clients from a wider area, give priority to your main audience initially. You can always expand your reach later after evaluating your performance.
Location targeting enables you to tailor your ads to specific audiences, ranging from zip codes to entire countries, to ensure maximum relevance.
6. Utilize negative keywords
Keywords are crucial in paid search campaigns as they determine how effectively they can be targeted. Although widely acknowledged, negative keywords are frequently undervalued. These keywords serve as filters and help eliminate irrelevant searches, thus reducing unnecessary expenses.
When thinking systematically, consider the potential queries that may arise with your selected keywords. Are there any areas that your business does not include? Examine the search engine results page thoroughly to find any keywords that can be excluded in order to reduce unnecessary expenses. After launching, utilize Google’s search term reports to discover more negative keywords by analyzing the queries that trigger your ads.
7. Continuous monitoring and adaptation
Do not make the mistake of thinking that your work is complete once you have set up campaigns with keywords and ads in your PPC account. Instead, view your account as a dynamic entity that demands continuous attention.
Regular monitoring is crucial in order to maintain control over your bids and expenditures, followed by the continuous process of optimization. By analyzing the data collected, you are able to make informed decisions regarding optimization, ensuring they align with your established KPIs and goals. This iterative approach serves to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns for the best possible outcome.
8. Hire a professional
Effectively managing PPC campaigns requires a set of skills that takes many years to develop. Even though platforms make it easier to get started, skilled expertise is necessary to handle campaigns proficiently. It is common to overspend, feel discouraged, and prematurely give up on PPC endeavors.
Considering each step, it is advisable to invest in the services of a seasoned expert. Their direction not only allows for monetary savings in the future, but also confirms the enduring effectiveness of PPC as a marketing tool for your company. Feel free to reach out to Digiboost, a reputable marketing agency, for assistance in developing your small business’s PPC strategy.
9. Keep your location targeting limited
Location targeting is a crucial factor that is often ignored but holds significance while striving for success with limited funds, particularly for an online business. It may be tempting to extend your services to customers nationwide or in another country if you have the capability to do so.
If your business is not in a niche market, your budget might not be sufficient enough to cater to the entire country. In such cases, it would be more beneficial to allocate that budget towards your most successful markets.
10. Don’t set it and forget it
Thanks to Google’s advancements, it has become increasingly effortless to establish a campaign with automated bidding and automatically applied recommendations. Consequently, advertisers can achieve satisfactory results without the necessity for additional efforts. This is indeed a favorable outcome.
If you find Google Ads confusing and complicated, you don’t have to be a marketing professional to handle it. Yet, if you simply set up your campaigns and let them run without any ongoing management, you are missing out on potential earnings.
Once your campaigns start running and collecting data, it is essential to periodically monitor the following:
- How much your campaigns are spending compared to your monthly budget.
- Which keywords are performing well and which are not.
Continuously improving performance over time can be achieved by simply removing non-performing keywords.
Small budget, big results
Careful planning and execution are crucial for small businesses with limited budgets when using PPC advertising, as it can be an effective tool. By following these tips, small businesses can increase their chances of success and make sure their budget is wisely utilized.
PPC can be a transformative tool for driving growth and achieving business objectives when managed consistently.
