In last month’s newsletter, we provided tips on how to run a successful PPC Campaign across various platforms and different types of ads. In this article, we share strategic ways to define ad budgets along with bid strategies and how to tailor your target audience, interests, location and search terms.
Defining Ad Budget and Bidding Strategy
Once you’ve set a PPC campaign budget, this should dictate how much you can pay for the clicks you receive on ad placements. For Google Ads, it’s wise to set a daily budget, while for platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, the norm is to have you select the increments you want your payments to be.
An example would be if your marketing team is allocated $1,000 for PPC, the first item would be to find out how many campaigns will run. If there were eight, this would, in theory, make each campaign worth $125. After determining how much of that budget is available for each campaign, you can then divide this number by the days you want the campaign to run. If you want it to run for 14 days, your daily budget would be roughly $8.93/day.
Still, there is an additional element to budget-setting in the realm of PPC: Not every topic or audience are the same value. This implies certain interests, audience segments and especially search terms will price in different amounts per click.
Many PPC platforms have “auction” systems that assist you in determining how much your audience criteria will cost. In turn, you have several bidding strategies offered to help you make a cost-effective purchase for your campaigns. For Google Ads, the bidding strategies consist of:
- Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding
- Cost-per-thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) bidding
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding
- Cost-per-view (CPV) bidding
Forbes provides more information about Optimizing Lead Generation With Google Ads Lead Forms here.
Customize Your Location, Search terms, Interests and Target Audience
For all PPC platforms you select, you have the capability to choose who your ads will reach. The “who,” in the context of Google Ads, involves your audience’s location, searches, interests and apps they use. You can also build custom audiences that have their own “custom affinities” and “custom intents” to aid in pushing your PPC campaign to the appropriate audience.
Once you’ve formed your target audience, you will further define it with specific search terms, whose SERPs you want your ads to appear (this is assuming you’re creating Google Search Ads). Caution the quantity of keywords you select for each ad. Contrary to what Google Ads might suggest, the more keywords you place on an ad, the greater chance you’ll actually wind up in front of the incorrect audience.
Begin with only one or two keywords high in search volume and match the intent of your target visitor.