6 Tips for Setting a Marketing Budget for AdWords

This is a common question among most businesses and organizations that have considered using AdWords...and unfortunately the answer is not simple. Here are 6 tips if you are planning your 2014 marketing budget.

1. Determine what you want to accomplish from your efforts. By defining your goals first, you'll be able to work backwords and each step of the way you can ask, "will this really help me reach my goal?". If you find yourself adding a bunch of keywords/ads etc. to your account and they aren't really going to help you achieve your goals, stop. You will save on wasted spend!
2. Build a keyword list that includes general and very specific terms that are related to your service, product and ultimately tie back to your goals. Example: If your goal is to sell out of overstock that is sitting in your warehouse, the terms should be related to those items specifically, not related to getting quotes for new custom orders.
   1. Import these terms into the Google Keyword planner to determine the competitiveness and traffic estimates for the original list of keywords. This will also help you think of some new ideas.
   2. If it looks like everyone of your keywords are incredibly competitive and generate tons of traffic, you'll need to adjust your strategy or expect a higher budget.
3. Your budget will also be heavily impacted by the geography in which your ads will show. Make sure your geographic settings are set only to the appropriate target audience. If your ads are targeting very rural areas with less people and less competition, you'll be able to save on budget.
4. Do your research! Search some of the terms you will be using to see what your competition actually looks like. If find that your terms are generating tons of ads from various competitors, you'll need a higher budget.
5. Realistically determine how much effort you can put into building and maintaining your campaigns. If you can easily create new ads, keywords and awesome landing pages while at the same time adjusting bids, you'll probably end up with some great quality scores (thus lower Cost-per-clicks). If you can handle this, you'll be able to save on budget. If you don't have time to manage it and are a set it and forget type of advertiser, you'll need to set aside some extra budget or hire an agency to mange your AdWords account who can pay attention to the details and use your ad spend wisely.
6. Test. Test. Test. The budget you set in month 1, doesn't have to be your lifetime budget. Use a $100 coupon and some of your own funds and determine how far it can go and adjust accordingly.

Those are just 6 tips to get you started. If you are unsure of what an ideal budget should be...get in touch with us for a FREE AdWords Consultation, we would be happy to help. Also consider that setting a monthly budget doesn't have to be the only way to go. You can also use a cost-per-conversion method in which budget can be endless as long as a cost-per-conversion goal is met. This can be ideal for eCommerce advertisers as a conversion can mean immediate money in your bank account!

Good luck to all of you eager advertisers out there in 2014! We hope that you find it to be an incredibly successful year and we'd love to help anyone out there that needs it!