6 Tips for Making the Most of a Limited AdWords Budget

If you’re like most small business owners you want to make the most of your marketing budget. A quick way of getting in front of customers is using Google AdWords but setting up a campaign and making sure it doesn’t go over budget can be a headache. These six tips can not only help you cut back on the Tylenol, but can also help you grow your business, no matter the size of your budget.

Use Ad Scheduling

A limited budget means it’s important that you only show your ads during business hours, when someone can pick up the phone, or when you expect to see an increase in business. With ad scheduling you can choose to show your ads during specific hours or increase bids during certain parts of the day. For instance, if you run a restaurant and you’re open from 11 am to 10 pm then you should schedule your ads to only run during those hours of operation. Furthermore, if you know that the busiest part of the day is between 12pm and 2pm then you can increase your bids so that your ads are more likely to show in the top positions during your peak hours.

Target Lower Ad Positions

While being placed in the top three positions may result in more clicks, it may also be more costly. You could be attracting people who are just shopping around or click on the first listing they see. In fact, depending on the industry you’re in, having your ad placed on the right hand side might actual convert better. By targeting a lower position you will also pay less per click. So let’s say you have a daily budget of $50 and are getting 25 clicks a day. That’s $2 per click. By lowering your bids to $1.50, and consequently your ad position, you could bring that up to 33 clicks a day. That’s a 33% increase in clicks!

Avoid The Display Network

By default when you first setup a campaign Google sets your ads to be shown on their display network. The problem with the display network is that it generally doesn’t convert as well as search. This is because you don’t have as much control of where your ads are placed and could end up being shown next to content that isn’t favorable to your brand. It’s also much more time consuming to manage. Time you could be using to run your company!

Take Advantage of Flexible Bid Strategies

There are several bid strategies you can deploy and when you first start out I recommend setting it to focus on clicks. However, keep in mind that Google is trying to make the most money it can so you’ll need to enable a Cost Per Click (CPC) bid limit. Set it at a dollar amount you’re most comfortable with. After you’ve ran your ads long enough to collect some data you should really focus on creating bid strategies. The five flexible bid strategies available are:

• Maximize Clicks – AdWords automatically sets your bids to help maximize the number of clicks your receive within your budget. Great if your goal is driving more visitors to your website.
• Target Search Page Location – Allows you to position your ads on the first page of the search results. Great for building brand awareness and increasing visibility.
• Target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – Helps drive as many conversions as possible given your target average cost per acquisition. Great if know what your costs are per conversion and want to target a specific ROI for each conversion.
• Enhanced Cost Per Click (CPC) – Sets bids based on the likelihood a click will lead to a conversion. Great when your goal is to target more conversions and want to have more control over your keyword bids.
• Target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) – Sets bids to target an average return on ad spend while maximizing your revenue from conversions. Great if the amount of revenue per conversion differs and you just want to meet a specific ROAS.

Target Specific Locations

If you’re uncertain where you customers might be located, want to target a very specific region of the country, or want to avoid certain locations AdWords allows you to define where your ads are shown. Let’s say you want to target Texas and California, because that’s where most of your customers come from, you can go to Settings, Locations, type Texas and California, click Add, click Save. You can also exclude locations. Now, if you’re not sure where your customers are coming from it’s wise to monitor your geographic report on a monthly basis. You can see this report by going to the Dimensions tab, click on the View button, and selecting Geographic from the dropdown menu. Armed with this report you can exclude areas that are poor performing and even create new campaigns based on locations that are converting well.

Add Negative Keywords

With a limited budget you can’t afford to spend money on irrelevant traffic. By adding negative keywords you ensure your ads aren’t being seen by the wrong people. This will increase your click through rate, which in return increases your quality score. A higher quality score results in lower costs. There are four ways to find negative keywords:

• Search Terms Reports – Go to your Keywords tab, click on the drop down button Details, underneath Search Terms click on “all”. Find keywords that you don’t want your ads to show up for and add them to your negative keyword list.
• Keyword Research Tools - I personally like Google’s Keyword Planner. Use your tool of choice to search for your keywords and look for keywords to add to your negative keyword list.
• Webmaster Tools – If you have Google Webmaster Tools setup, go to your profile and on the left hand side click the drop down Search Traffic and click on Search Queries.  This is great for finding negative AND regular keywords for your keyword lists.
• Search – It’s surprising how many people forget to search for their keywords. Run a few searches and see what comes up. Look at ads, organic listings, map results, product listings…look for anything that looks weird!

These tips will help make the most of any budget, big or small. Managing AdWords campaigns is an on going process of analyzing data and optimizing for conversions. If you have the right data you can make the right decisions. Once you get all of the waste out of your account you can start to increase your budget and continue to grow your business.

BIO – Joel Casarez is the founder and lead strategist at The Kaanen Group, a full service internet marketing company. He specializes in search engine marketing strategies for small to medium sized businesses and loves Spurs’ basketball.