Smaller PPC budgets can be a challenge when you or your client team has a ton of ideas and not enough budget to execute them all at once. This doesn’t mean that smaller budgets can’t be executed effectively- it just means that it will take more focus, and understanding your goals to yield the results you want. Here at Clix we work with everything from very small start-up companies looking to just make their digital footprint, to large, established companies with quarterly budgets set in stone months to a year in advance.
Oftentimes the smaller budget accounts that are looking to just get off the ground and start awareness, top of funnel campaigns are some of the most flexible accounts even if they do have smaller budgets because they are looking to test and find what works best for them, and navigate the digital landscape quickly and effectively. Here are some ways we have made the most out leveraging small budgets while still yielding results for our clients:
Strategize Placements
A lot of advertisers with small or even large budgets don’t think strategically about placements on specific channels. Most PPC channels like Google and MSFT Ads have networks which usually consist of a lengthy list of partner sites where the channel have ad placements available if you advertise with them. If you don’t strategically opt out of some of these partner sites that may not make sense for your advertising budget and goals you most likely will be wasting budget with no results. Looking into where your ad may show on each platform and eliminating what doesn’t make sense for your team may save you a ton of money in the long run.
Another great example is Facebook’s Meta ads and Instagram. Both Meta and Instagram ads are deployed by the advertiser on the same ads manager account since Meta owns Instagram. However, you can dictate where you show your ads. If for example, Instagram makes more sense to test over Meta placements you can easily switch to manual placements inside the ads manager while building your campaign and dictate where your ads show. This also goes for image sizes to manipulate if your ads are shown on desktop, mobile, stories, newsfeed, etc.
Ad Scheduling
Does your team have someone to answer the phone or reach out on the weekends? If your goal is to generate leads and possibly utilizing click to call ads and no one is reaching out 48 hours of the week those leads may be going cold from Saturday morning until your sales team picks up the phone again on Monday morning. Ad scheduling allows you to dictate when your ads are showing so that you can make the most of your advertising spend.
Geographic Targeting
Making sure to set geographic targets on campaigns will help tremendously with generating the right traffic and leads from your PPC ads. A general costly mistake we often see is blanket targeting costly geo areas. For example, a client wants to generate leads in the San Francisco Bay area. Instead of targeting the entire bay area we can dial into zip codes and eliminate areas that we feel might not generate as much success. This is particularly helpful when targeting areas in large metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, New York City or even Miami.
Set Negative Keywords
Search campaigns that target too broadly can be a huge budget suck. One thing we often notice is the misunderstanding of negative keywords in that they will hinder performance. While this may be true if you are negatively targeting keywords you’d like to show on and have overlap, most of the time negative keywords help to exclude queries and keywords that are irrelevant from your business and cut unwanted traffic to help your budget go further with searches that are relevant and more likely to convert. An easy way to keep track and consistently manage negative keywords is to create lists in your account – just be sure once you set your negative keywords at the account, campaign or ad group level to consistently manage them, and remember it’s up to you how many makes sense as long as they make sense to eliminate from your campaigns!
Stretch your Budget
Figuring out your daily spend, length of campaign duration and how to break that cost down to make sure that your campaign won’t end sooner than you’d like because it’s over-paced will help your campaign results tremendously. Rule of thumb is to cut your daily spend down by 20% so that fluctuations on daily spend on-platform don’t offset your total campaign budget. For example, if you have $100 a day to spend on your Google Search Brand campaign cut it down to about $80/day so that you have some wiggle room for variable days where there’s high traffic on your keywords and Google may fluctuate to help drive traffic and conversions.
The beauty of PPC is that it is all real-time and very easily manipulated at the advertiser(s) discretion which makes it a fantastic way to test on a small budget, see what is working and navigate away from what’s not quickly and effectively! Happy testing!
