How To Maximise Your Digital Advertising Budget
Having a small budget to spend on PPC (pay-per-click) Advertising doesn’t mean it’s impossible to see results.
What it does mean is that with less to spend, the payoff for being efficient and economical with each dollar is huge.
Maximising your budget is the name of the game, and in this blog we’ll walk through three fundamentals you need to be aware of when advertising online.
Being In Control
With a precious and finite resource you can’t afford to lose track of a dollar here and there.
With the introduction of things like Smart Bidding, algorithmic targeting and Broad Match keywords, platforms like Google have continuously made it harder to keep that control.
With a small budget, you benefit with more control not less.
This means thinking intentionally about the keywords you target, the bid strategies you use, and how your account is structured. You have to be intentional and careful.
For example, Broad Match is a powerful tool for finding relevant related traffic that you may have not have been aware of in your planning stage.
However, opening your campaign up to this uncontrolled traffic opens you up to indiscriminate clicks and cost based on Google’s algorithms best guess as to what is ‘relevant’.
With this strategy you can very quickly end up with multiple clicks at varying CPC’s (cost per clicks) that could be completely irrelevant and therefore incredibly inefficient.
Sticking to Exact Match keywords may limit that scope, but it also limits Google ability to search and spend on your behalf. These are the trade-offs.
However, anything that puts control in your hands is valuable when operating on a small budget.
The Importance Of Picking Winners & Losers
Testing and gathering data is a very important part of building anything successful, including an advertising campaign.
It’s a form of investing. In the early stages of your campaigns you are investing money to gather data.
At some point that investment money needs to be reallocated to more effective uses, like extra budget for high performing areas of your campaign.
The bigger your budget is, the more runway you have in your data investment period.
The smaller your budget is the earlier you will have to pick winners, and more importantly shut off losers.
Each campaign has different goals and metrics, but in general a keyword that’s getting clicks but very few conversions looks like a loser.
It’s not just keywords however that you need to audit and adjust. Signals like time and day your ads are shown, devices and campaign structure are all things that should be questioned and optimised to squeeze as much productivity out of every dollar available.
Aligning Objectives and Metrics
If you can’t measure your success how can you succeed?
Clarity in your business objectives will allow for clarity in your measurement.
Assuming your targeting and tracking is working from a technical standpoint, clarifying your business objectives will make which KPIs and metrics are most important to you obvious.
Looking for traffic or brand awareness? Watch your impressions Ad Impression Share. You could also keep an eye on your Brand Term keywords and see if they are growing in traffic.
Looking for sales volume? Conversions, cost per conversion and conversion value are going to be important to pay attention to.
It’s not as simple as ‘line goes up, successful advertising requires context and alignment.
For example, you could take your budget and spend it exclusively on your Brand Name and terms.
Because most people searching directly for you are doing it for a reason, your metrics from those searches will look great with high click through rate, conversion rate and cost per conversion.
But if you’re not growing your customer base in any other ways, you are paying to acquire customers that were already in the bank for you, rapidly exacerbating any financial weakness with extra overheads.
All this while the metrics look good.
This is the danger of misaligned business objectives and metrics and the importance of business objectives in maximising your budget.
