Google or Bing pay per click advertising offers a great opportunity for brands to reach users on search engines without necessarily having to claim the top spots in organic search results. But, of course, pay per click advertising costs money. How can you make sure your PPC spending is a true investment, and not just money spent? Here are the three biggest steps you can take toward making smart decisions about your PPC financials:
- Setting a Realistic Budget
The amount of money you’ll need to spend on PPC in order to actually bring in new customers will depend largely on how saturated your industry is, which can make it tough to set a budget without doing some PPC keyword research first. If the keywords related to your industry are going for $10 a click and your total monthly budget is only $200, you’re simply going to have a problem. Try to calculate out how much every lead is worth to your business to determine whether it’s worth spending more on PPC.
- Hiring a PPC Marketing Agency
Once you decide that PPC marketing is potentially within reach for your business given your budget and industry, the next step you’ll want to take is hiring a great PPC marketing agency to handle your campaigns. Actually choosing the right keywords, bidding on them through the appropriate advertising platforms and then monitoring their performance is a time-consuming and technical process requiring near-constant attention — and mismanagement can cost you literally thousands of dollars. That means the PPC management fees you’ll pay to hire a professional PPC marketing agency will actually probably save you money in the end.
- Measuring PPC Progress
PPC doesn’t work instantly, but it works faster than some other online marketing methods (search engine optimization, for example). That means that you should make sure whatever agency you hire will be tracking all the clicks you get and helping you analyze their performance. If you’re not seeing the conversions you expect, then adjustments should be made as quickly as possible to avoid wasting your money on clicks that aren’t ultimately bringing you any more business.
What else can business owners do to improve their ROI when it comes to PPC advertising? Discuss in the comments.
