How Much Should You Spend on Google PPC?

How much should you spend on your Google PPC campaign? Spending too much on your Adwords could be lost dollars, but not spending enough might risk your results. In this post, we’ll talk about the right mix.

Spending Too Much on PPC

There is one simple way to know if you are spending too much. You’re already feeling it! If you are already thinking you are spending too much, you probably are.

So the next step is to understand what you are doing to help you fix the problem.

Spending Too Much Means You Are Not Getting Results

No one complains about too much business in most cases, so if you are not getting the business you are looking for in your PPC campaigns, you are spending too much. Period.

The answer is not stop spending, but optimize your spending.

Optimize 1: Review your Keywords

Make sure your keywords are getting the right amount of traffic and views for your potential sales. You can loosely understand if your keywords are good if you are getting the right amount of impressions. Without impressions, you’ll have no place to start actually gaining results.

Optimize 2: Review Your Google Ads

Your ads are the mechanism that converts those impressions to actual visitors. Most problems with PPC are in the Ads. 

Try to change the Call to Action to something simple. Try not to sell the vacation home, sell the picture of the view first. Know that sales is a progression, not a body slam.

Try to make sure your quality score is high. Without a good connection to your landing page you’re going to be paying too much for the clicks you are getting.

Optimize 3: Your Landing Page

This aligns with the previous point, but your landing page design should be optimized for conversion. This should follow the best practices for design and UX. This includes:

1. Removing the navigation on the page
2. An image of your intended offer, or goal
3. Simple, minimal text
4. Simple form, just the essential form fields
5. Don’t distract

Optimize 4: Geo-Target Your Adwords And Other Limiters

Yes, you should be very specific on your exposure of your campaigns. You should never use the Google Partner Network if you are starting out. This will kill your budget super fast and it’s has very low conversion historically for us.

You should limit to a geographic area that you can service well. If you have less than $10K a month, you need to pick a state or city to focus your efforts. You can’t cover the whole U.S. well with a small budget. We have clients that spend $3K a month on one city, and its not even a big city.

Also, use time of day limiters. Don’t show your ad from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. Most of the time, it’s dead clicks happening. But don’t negate someone who is up at 11 p.m. We’ve all had late nights looking for solutions to our problems.

Now, What Should Your Adwords Stats Look Like?

A common question is what should your stats look like for PPC. Well, Google says anything above a 1% conversation rate on your ads is good. I’d say that is OK, but you should really be looking for more.

Make sure you have the conversion metric set up. Without the conversion metric, the PPC data is incomplete. Having conversion tracking setup on your site so you can track not only your clicks, but you can see which ads, which keywords actually make a conversion to your intended goal. THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Ideally, you are looking for 2-7% on any given campaign. Clients don’t hit the runway on a campaign until they see a really good return on the PPC campaign. If you can get into this range you are doing somewhat successfully with your campaign and you can focus on the landing page to increase your conversion there.

A Couple Bonus Google Adwords Tricks

Here are a few industry tricks to help get your campaign moving in the right direction. These are some simple pieces, but worth trying.

• Buy your own name. Seems strange, but you should buy your own name as a keyword.
• Rotate your ads every two weeks. Do three ads, and eliminate the worst performer each review. Then make a new one from the best ad.
• Create a mix of broad and exact keyword matches. Getting the keywords right can change your results.
• Be generous on your negative keywords. Put as many as you can in there, when they are really not the type of business you want.

Good Luck! If you need more help with your PPC campaign, check out our PPC marketing service, or reach out to us for a free consult. We’re here to help.