Getting the most out of your pay-per-click (PPC) spend should seem like a straightforward goal for any business. While it should be a no-brainer, many companies don’t follow key best practices that end up with their budget either being overspent unnecessarily or being spent on channels or audiences that yield no returns.
Understanding the nuances of allocating budget and executing PPC campaigns is often the difference between what is deemed a successful campaign and a failed one. At the end of the day, a PPC budget is an investment you make into your business, and so it should be one where you see a return.
Why PPC Budget Allocation Matters
Let’s start by considering the specific goals of PPC campaigns. If, for example, the objective is to drive traffic to a specific web page and convert them into a customer, you want to ensure that you are maximizing the amount of high-quality leads you are bringing in.
To achieve this, your PPC campaign needs to be optimized in such a way that the budget is being allocated to the right audience and that you are paying the right price for the lead. If you are spending too much per lead, you are limiting yourself to the number you can bring in. Similarly, if you are attracting the wrong type of user to the landing page, they are more than likely not going to convert, which means a wasted spend. It’s important to note that maximizing your budget isn’t about spending less; it’s about shifting your funds in such a way that your top-performing assets don’t run out of gas early in the campaign.
Allocating your PPC budget in the best way possible is therefore important, and there are various ways that you can ensure this.
Start With Your Highest-Converting Campaigns
Before you hit the button to go live with your PPC strategy, step back and take a look at the campaigns that you are going live with. If you’ve run campaigns before, you first need to assess the data to evaluate which campaign worked best and why. What you’ll be looking for is the highest-converting campaign. These are the ones that brought in the best results, in terms of spend versus what you were looking to achieve.
For example, you might have a campaign that was designed to bring in new leads for your business. These leads would then be fed into your sales team to convert. What you’d look for here is the campaigns with the highest % of conversions, which in this instance would be the % of form completions against clicks. Those at the low end of the percent scale should either be removed or optimized.
Understand the Difference Between Brand and Lead Generation Campaigns
One of the quickest ways to misallocate your PPC spend is to lump your brand name keywords into the same budget bucket as your general lead generation keywords. Each of these campaigns functions differently in terms of what you are looking to achieve with each of them. Brand, as the name suggests, is about creating awareness of your brand, while lead generation is all about capturing information (leads) on your target audience.
A good example here is placing budget behind search terms that include your business name in a brand campaign. The person already knows who you are as they’ve entered your name into what they’ve searched, so that would be a wasted allocation of spend.
Prioritize Your High-Intent Keywords
A high-intent keyword is a search term that tells you that a user is very close to making a purchase or taking a specific action. It’s all in the word ‘intent.’ For example, someone cracks their tooth and searches for emergency dental care in South Florida.’ They need the service, and they need it now. In other words, their intent to get their tooth fixed is pretty high! To get the most out of every dollar you spend with PPC, you need to understand the intent behind the words that people are tying into a search engine. In the digital marketing world, we break these down into informational intent and buying intent.
PPC can also work alongside SEO, helping you capture both paid and organic search traffic from the keywords that matter most to your business.
What you want to do is make sure that you are prioritizing your high-intent keywords, which means you first need to evaluate what those are. They will differ for each industry, but what you want to think about is what people will be searching for that would drive an immediate choice to purchase or submit information.
Optimize Budget by Location
If your business services multiple cities, regions, or states, you’ll quickly notice that your data looks different depending on the specific area you’re looking at. For example, a campaign that does really well in a densely populated city might completely tank in a rural suburb, or the other way around.
When you’re evaluating your campaign, you need to break these down into regional locations and not let one influence the other, unless the specific data of that region tells you so. If you apply a blanket approach to the various areas that you service, you might be wasting your spend.
Performance-Driven Platform Spending
We are not talking about platform shoes that you can run in, but rather not treating all your digital platforms the same when it comes to allocating your spend. As with various regions, the variety of digital marketing platforms you choose to have a paid spend on will bring in different results. This is because users behave differently on each platform.
Don’t, for example, allocate the same spend and take the same approach to Meta ads as you would Google ads. Find out which specific campaigns are working on each of those platforms and optimize. If your spend isn’t working on one platform and you can’t understand why, rather allocate that budget to the ones you know are working until you can resolve the issue.
Adjust Budgets Based on Seasonality and Trends
When you plan your PPC strategy and budget allocation for the year ahead, don’t treat the months that lie ahead as one period, but rather break them down into isolated periods. If you run a landscaping company, for example, your peak season is spring and summer. If you run an accounting firm, it’s tax season. Tailor your campaigns to go big during the busy season and slow down when the low season kicks in. Don’t forget to consider key dates like holidays and promotions.
PPC Performance Should Dictate Future Spending
One of the best features of PPC advertising is that it’s measurable. You know exactly what your conversion rates are and can therefore assess the impact. It’s critical that you take the time to assess the data that you have in front of you and use that to drive the decisions you make about future spending. Some of the key PPC metrics that you should be analyzing include cost per lead, ROAS, conversion rates, and call tracking. Don’t get caught up in the vanity metrics like impressions, but rather in those that drive real revenue streams for your business.
The Bottom Line of PPC Campaigns
For any PPC campaign to be effective, you need to get the most bang for your buck. If you follow these PPC best practices, you’ll be able to deploy your money where it is most effective. It’s about paying attention to what your customers are telling you through their digital behavior and how they engage with your ads.
Lynn Martelli is an editor at Readability. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and has worked as an editor for over 10 years. Lynn has edited a wide variety of books, including fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, and more. In her free time, Lynn enjoys reading, writing, and spending time with her family and friends.
