Lets all take a look at some of the highlight on managing accounts with small budgets, shall we? We are all trying to save money, right? There are a few simple suggestion that can make a small budget perform great, every month.
The first things we need to keep in mind to make PPC work with a small budget, are these:
Pause all your underperforming keywords: Let these go people. There is no reason to keep hanging onto bad keywords that are not doing what they should. Keep all sanity and get rid of these. If they did well a year ago, and are not doing well now, please use your common sense and quit using them. Put them on pause.
High Quality Score: In Google, this can be one of the most important things to pay attention to. The better your Quality Score is, the less you are going to end up paying for your clicks, due to more eligibility for keywords. Create a good account structure, have meaningful keyword choices, and great content on landing pages, and you will have a Quality Score that is far above average.
Good Structure: Don’t overdo your structure, use a tight-themed structure, with 3-6 ad groups and 10 or so keywords. This will lower the amount of data to sift through, and will also make you more profitable.
Branded Campaigns are awesome: Make a campaign that is about only your product or company. Typically, they will be a key element to a successful PPC account with a small budget. Most of the time when people type in branded terms, they are close to buying, and conversion rates will be much higher. If you are more specific towards your product, you will convert more. Phrases such as “Oakley sunglasses” will have a higher conversion rate than “sunglasses.”
Use the free crap!: Ad extensions allow you to have site links for all campaigns. They are simple, get a lot of traffic, and also show the depth on your site and that you have what searchers are looking for. Also, use odd keywords that bring in decent traffic at a lower cost. Additional negatives from SQR reports will also help. If you have a client that is promoting a pharmaceutical company that sells hormone replacement therapy, you could very possibly need to put “baseball” on your negatives list, as to not get unwanted traffic, as everyone is talking about hormones in baseball right now.
4th place is not that bad: Everyone is trying to be in spot number one. I don’t buy the garbage about HAVING to be in the first spot. If you are three or four, and are getting conversions and numbers, then be happy with it. You may be getting a better ROI, as you are spending MUCH less money!
This is basically a run through of some tips. Incorporate these into your strategy and save some money, or do more with the small amount you want to use!
KSingh
October 29, 2012 at 9:11 pm
I personally find Google Adwords quite expensive at least for a small business. As you have pointed out, use of correct keywords is vital if you want to keep costs low. It is also important to direct users to a custom landing page. Every day I come across PPC ads that redirect users to the homepage instead.
John Rampton
October 31, 2012 at 6:11 pm
This is a way to do it and many people (even large businesses do it) but I always recommend having a custom landing page. If you can have a separate landing page per ppc adgroup. It’ll help your clicks go a lot further!