If you’re a small business, your visibility in search engines can play an integral role in your company’s success. However, in addition to your organic search rankings—how your website naturally ranks without ads—a strategic ad campaign can help you get seen and build your business.
But if you’re considering Google Ads, there are a few key things to consider. Many smaller companies wonder what an optimal budget for Google Ads would be. More importantly, they need to know how to optimize that budget to make their advertising dollars go as far as possible.
Let’s find out how you can determine an optimal small business budget for Google Ads and how you can maximize that budget.
The Level of Competition
First, you’ll need to know the level of competition and what keywords are going for in your niche. While keywords at a lower level of competition may only be a couple dollars per click, competitive ones may be $20 or more.
Google Ads has a keyword planner tool so you can search potential keyword costs before committing to anything.
The cost of the keywords will depend on your target area for your ads. If you’re targeting a smaller city, the price may be lower. However, if you’re going for a well-known or large area, expect keywords to be more competitive.
Knowing the level of competition will help you determine a realistic budget for your ad campaign.
Your Daily Budget Ceiling
Small businesses wanting to take advantage of Google Ads need to establish a daily budget ceiling. A budget ceiling is the amount you are willing to pay per day for ads.
If you can, set the ceiling as high as you can afford. This way, you can get the maximum exposure for your business. This also gives you a solid starting point to see how your budget will correspond with your search value.
Although a budget ceiling doesn’t necessarily mean that you will spend that much on ads daily, it allows you to take advantage of maximum visibility. If your budget is too low, you may not get the most exposure for your money.
Strategic Scheduling of Ads
Your ads most likely don’t need to run 24/7. Instead, you can schedule your ads to run on certain days or during specific hours that make the most sense for your business. This is a good place to start, and you can always readjust your schedule based on performance metrics as time goes on.
Another way to schedule your ads is to use blocks of time to break up the day’s schedule. So if you want your ads to run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., you can schedule them from 9-11 a.m., 1-3 p.m., and then again from 4-5 p.m.
Breaking up the schedule allows you to increase bidding during different parts of the day for maximum exposure. You can reallocate your resources to more popular times or when you see the most traffic for the most impact and best return on your investment.
Continue to Measure and Refine Your Efforts
Once you have your budget and schedule set, don’t forget to measure the progress of your ad campaign so you can adjust it as necessary. Set up conversion tracking in Google Ads so you can measure the ROI of your ad campaign.
You’ll also want to keep evaluating your keywords to see if they are still relevant for your ads and remove ones you may not want to target, such as negative keywords.
Continuing to measure and refine your efforts is a crucial part of any successful ad campaign, so don’t assume that your current budget, keywords, and schedule will stay the same forever.
Build an Ad Campaign With High ROI
By determining your budget for ads, you can make and stick to a schedule to start getting more traffic to your site and growing your business. Are you ready to build a strategic ad campaign with high ROI? Contact Gazz Digital today to learn about your ad possibilities as a small business!
