5 Tips to Better Optimize Your PPC Budget

Whether you are trying to acquire new customers, generate more leads, or simply sell the product, paid advertising can come to your rescue. The advantage of paid advertising is that people are already searching for your product/service. As opposed to conventional marketing, a paid search audience already has the intent to buy or learn more about your product.

Apart from the benefit of having qualified traffic, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has many other positives. First off, it is easy to start. Setting up your account is simple; you can start off with a budget that you are comfortable spending. Secondly, PPC offers flexibility. You can test out different versions of ad copy, headlines, and call-to-actions. Lastly, paid ads are great way for increasing brand awareness. Even if people don’t click on your ad, just showing up in the search results for your key terms builds trust factor and brand recognition.

However, there are challenges involved in paid advertising. With more marketers turning to PPC advertising, the paid search space is becoming  competitive. More and more brands are fighting for the top ad positions. Because your competitors are bidding on some of the same keywords as you are, this could result in a price war. Keywords which once cost few cents a click now can cost considerably more. This isn’t a problem if you have a large budget to work with. But if you have a limited budget, you need to keep an eye out on your account spend.

So how do you stick to your budget and still get the most out of your PPC ads? Here are 5 tips to better optimize your PPC budget:

1.  Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are search terms that you don’t want your ads to show up for. Look through the search query report and make note of such keywords. Once you’ve identified these keywords, add them to the account. You can add negatives at the ad group, campaign, or account level.

2.  Device Targeting: You can set your ads to show up on desktops/laptops, tablets, mobile devices or on all of these devices. If your website is not mobile ready, users will struggle to read the content on your site. In such a case, it makes sense to exclude the mobile audience and just target your ads to people searching on desktops/laptops and tablets.

3.  Ad Scheduling: Ad scheduling lets you specify certain days of the week when you want your ads to appear. You can also adjust bids for your ads during certain time periods in a day. Review all of your campaigns and see what days and times are best converting. Shut off your ads during the low converting period.

4.  Ad Delivery: Ad delivery determines how quickly your ads are shown each day. You can have the ads show up evenly throughout the day, or you can have them show as quickly as possible. If your campaigns are consistently hitting the daily budget cap, switch the setting to allow your ads the opportunity to appear throughout the entire day.

5.  Bid: Keywords can be very expensive. If you are running on a tight budget, being at the top ad position might as well drain your daily budget in a few clicks. In such cases reduce your bid, be at a lower ad position and use that saved budget in getting more clicks.

These are some quick tips that we’ve found useful in better utilizing the budget. How do you optimize your account spend? Share your thoughts in the comments or tweet us @451Heat.

About the author

Nikhil Inamdar, Search Engine Marketing Specialist, 451 Marketing @NikhilInamdar

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