Advertisers with a small budget need to make sure that they are spending their money effectively and when it comes to PPC this is especially important. For large accounts with a big budget, there are opportunities to take risks and more room for errors. Accounts with small budgets don’t have this wiggle room and so need to get things right from day one. In this article, we’ll look at a few easy wins to make the most out of a small PPC budget.
Schedule your adverts
If you know when your audience is most active, or when people are generally looking for your services, then you should be using the advert scheduling feature. Not only will this let you target your adverts to certain times of day, but it will also let you increase your bids for selected periods to help improve your chances of getting the click.
You can also do the reverse of this and reduce your bid at certain times of the day when you still want to have a search presence, but don’t want to pay top prices for the clicks. Ad scheduling is a useful tool that is available to all advertisers and can really help you maximise your budget.
Use geographical targeting
Chances are that if you have a small budget then you won’t want to be targeting customers nationally. Using geographic targeting is the smart thing to do to help limit the reach of your ad campaign and ensure only people in the local areas will see your ads. You can also use location extensions to show your address and contact number which allows people to get directions to your business, see your opening hours and get in touch.
Geographical targeting also lets you target locations that are valuable or important to your business, even if you are not located in those areas. This can then be combined with dedicated landing pages that help to engage the target audience for that area.
Make the right keyword match
It’s all very well using broad match keywords to help you drive traffic, but in reality, you’d probably be better off with a combination of phrase and exact match keywords. Broad match keywords will spend your budget a lot quicker than the equivalent phrase or exact match variants for the simple reason that they can show your adverts for terms that you are not actively bidding on. Without careful management, broad keywords can ramp up the cost of your campaign and may not lead to an increase in business.
Get negative
No, we don’t mean acting like a stroppy teenager. Using negative keywords you can help to stop your adverts appearing for unwanted search terms. Want an example? Let’s look at the search term “Nike running shoe repairs”, this is probably a search that you don’t want to appear for if you sell brand new Nike trainers. Adding negative keywords should be done on a regular basis, weekly or even daily for low budget accounts to help minimise wasted ad spend.