One of the biggest challenges for marketers and businesses is advertising their business at a limited PPC budget. Where Google ads promise the best cost-effectiveness, you still need to put in additional efforts to better utilize your ad budget; otherwise, you end up wasting your money. 

For most businesses, it’s hard to increase their budget, and they can’t work on an open budget.

Don’t worry! You can have good results even with a small PPC budget.

Here are some tips that will help you make the most out of your small paid advertising budget.

1. Prioritize Goals

An advertiser can have multiple goals, but limited budget limits the campaigns and results you can achieve. So, it’s crucial for you to know which goals are more important to you. Some of the common PPC goals are Brand Awareness, Product and Brand Consideration, Leads, Sales, and Repeat Sales.

So, you need to analyze your business and set the priorities for your goals. Once you know the top-priority goals, then optimize your campaigns accordingly and allocate the budget. Make sure you laser-focus your audience targeting to fetch better results from your campaigns. This way, your small daily budget will only be used for the most important things that benefit your business. You’ll only have restricted traffic through campaigns with this approach. If you want more, then you have to expand your target audience, or you have to increase your budget to get more traction. 

2. Geotargeting

Geotargeting is not only an important aspect of your marketing plan, but it may also help you manage a limited ad budget. Focusing on only the most important target locations is a fantastic strategy to make the most of a restricted budget. 

Because the smaller the geographic area, the less traffic you’ll get, it’s important to strike a balance between relevancy and money.

You should consider adding negative locations in your campaigns where you don’t want to appear, but the similarity of names may trigger your ads. So, hone your ad targeting with geotargeting to better utilize your ad budget. 

3. Bid on Brand Keywords

When a business doesn’t have an organic presence, non-brand clicks are high, and you’re dealing with a limited budget, you should always bid on brand terms. Moreover, the brand clicks are usually less expensive, and you don’t want your competitors to outbid you since they may bid on your brand name. You’ll only have highly relevant traffic with branded keywords, resulting in higher conversion rates. 

4. Write Ad Copies for Better CTR

CTR has a direct impact on your ad’s quality score, and a higher quality score means better rankings at less CPC. There are three factors that contribute to the quality score: Ad relevance, Landing page experience, and CTR (Click-Through-Rate).

So, write better ad copies, so more people click on your site, resulting in a high-quality score and more cost-effective ad campaigns.

5. Use Ad Extensions

In the last point, we discussed how increased CTR could help you with the quality score that will get you better visibility at lower CPCs. Alongside writing amazing ad copies, you can also utilize the ad extensions to promote better CTRs on your ads. 

On Google AdWords, there are dozens of ad extensions available, so no matter what kind of business you operate or what you’re trying to market, there’s likely an extension or two that may help your advertising stand out. You should always add at least 4 ad extensions for each campaign/ad group. 

6. Scheduling

By only showing ads on certain days and at certain times of the day, ad scheduling helps to keep costs under control. If your company is only open during certain hours, it may make sense to limit your advertising to those hours.

If you sell online, you’re always open, but it’s a good idea to check your reporting to see if there are any times of the day when you’re getting any returns.

Moreover, you should consider reducing targeting to certain locations or using a location bid modifier to restrict ad serving in those areas if data suggests hours of the day when campaigns are less effective.

7. Know and Use the Match Types Right

Match types are critical for budget management, especially when budgets are limited.

Learn about the different match types and how they affect ad placement. You may need to experiment with multiple match types in combination with ad scheduling and geotargeting to get the correct mix. When you’re working with a tight budget, you’ll have to think outside the box to get the most bang for your buck. 

Point to Ponder: Google AdWords recently removed the Broad Match Modifier match type, so make sure your campaigns are optimized for it. 

8. Utilize Google Display Network

GDN is an excellent technique to target people while they surf the web. Consider allocating a tiny percentage of your budget to the GDN by solely targeting the locations you serve for service-based firms on a tight budget. Text advertising is one type of display ad, but video, rich media, and graphics are more engaging.

On the GDN, it’s also occasionally a lot less competitive. You can see some fantastic results here using all of the GDN’s placement and targeting choices paired with a careful eye on excluding sites that aren’t appropriate for your campaigns. 

9. Call-Only Campaigns

Advertisers who want to get phone calls from their PPC advertisements should use Call-Only campaigns. Instead of wasting your users’ time by sending them to a landing page form they may never complete, you can run a Call-Only campaign that allows them to call your company directly from your ads. This way, you don’t lose any prospects that you would have if you direct people to some landing page. Moreover, customers who are highly interested in your business will call you, resulting in a higher conversion rate. This isn’t the case with the landing pages. So, better utilize your small PPC budget with call-only campaigns. 

10. Employ “Target Outranking Share”

Your advertising is a waste if it’s not performing well. You may have a small budget, but you should make sure you beat your competition at some keywords to drive some business. You can use the portfolio bid strategies settings to get the upper hand over competitors with the Target outranking share option.

By including the competitors’ domains, the percentage of time to outrank, and the maximum bid, you can make a rule in the Target outranking share option. This way, your budget will be used in an effective way to outrank your competition and drive the potential results in the given budget. You should choose your area’s top competitors. The auction insights report will reveal which competitors are vying for the same search terms.

11. Fine and Bid on New Keywords

Going after completely new keywords is one of the most effective ways to save money on PPC. Mostly, people reduce their spending or bids to economize the advertising, but bidding on new keywords is a better way. Identifying and targeting new keyword scopes and long-tail keywords can significantly improve your click-through rates, resulting in higher Quality Scores and lower expenses.

12. Make a Plan for High Volume/CPC Keywords

You can’t completely ignore the high competition keywords when you are on a small budget, but keywords with a lot of competition and high volume can get expensive and affect your marketing budget. You should consider organizing these keywords into their own campaign and employing “exact match” for the keywords if they have a high volume/high cost. This way, you can better monitor the spending and performance of the campaigns. You can also put a limit on how much you can pay. 

13. Optimize Mobile Bids

Due to the significant shift in search volume from desktop to mobile, your device targeting settings should be on your list of account adjustments. Mobile uses are increasing day-by-day, and even queries that convert from desktops may have started on a mobile device. After you’ve double-checked that your device targeting settings are correct, have a look at your bids. Take a check at your mobile bidding strategy to make sure you aren’t wasting any budget. 

Mobile CPCs, which were once dirt cheap, are progressively rising to reflect more mobile traffic and competition. You may also set mobile bids at the campaign or ad group level, giving you a lot of flexibility in terms of how much you’re ready to pay for mobile clicks.

14. Use the Stacked Bid Modifiers Right

For a single keyword, stacked bidding allows you to bid on two or more match types. For example, you are targeting a keyword with both Broad and Exact match types. Now, you’ll get both greater volume and relevancy due to the combo of match types.

However, if you’re utilizing stacked bidding, you might be overpaying for some keywords, especially if you haven’t checked your account for a long time. You should examine your campaigns for any keywords that you’re targeting with stacked bids. Make sure you are getting reasonable results on the given CPC; otherwise, you need to optimize the stacked bidding or stop it. 

15. Don’t Use Dynamic Search Ads

In the dynamic search ads, your ads don’t appear on the keywords you provide; rather, they’re presented depending on keywords in your landing page’s content. It seems reliable, and it is, but it frequently generates irrelevant impressions and clicks, which you can’t afford on a small ad budget. 

16. Do Remarketing

You’re essentially wasting all of your time, money, and effort attempting to persuade prospects to convert within a single session. Use remarketing to reach your existing site visitors and cart abandoners and make them re-visit your site for final conversion. It’s an effective way to get better results from your PPC budget.

17. Insert Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are used to prevent your ads from triggering on the search terms that drive irrelevant traffic. It’s an amazing way to increase the relevancy of your ad campaigns that will promote the appropriate use of the ad budget. Negative keyword-optimized campaigns don’t have a wastage of budget and deliver better ROI.

Here you go!

How many of these tips are you already using to better use your ad budget?

Certainly, you are missing some. No worries, implement all these tips and track your performance and ROI against your budget. 

If you are not competent with PPC advertising, then hiring a PPC ads agency is also a way to get potential results from your small PPC budget. Because you can’t do the best optimizations without expertise, and poorly optimized campaigns waste the budget.

So, do what suits you best and make the most out of your PPC budget.

Author BIO: 

Gajendra Singh Rathore is a digital marketing expert and associated with a PPC ads agency Toronto. He is always eager to learn, experiment, and implement. Astronomy is his escape from the outside world.