It’s a question that I am asked time and time again and it’s one that I find quite hard to answer if the truth be told. The reason for that is that there is no set answer.

The question is “what budget do I need?”.

If you’ve followed me for a while now, you’ll know I specialise in pay per click advertising. Lots of platforms offer it, Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and so on.

And as the name suggests, the model is pay per click, so you pay for every click on your advert, but how much you pay isn’t necessarily decided by me or you!

You see, every service and every industry has its own scale of cost. For example, the keyword “MOT my car” could cost you anything between £1.78 – £8.90 and where you sit (what you pay) on that scale is largely dependent on how you perform as an advertiser and one of the first things Google looks at regarding advertiser performance is your budget!

If you have x10 keywords in your account costing you on avg £2.50 per click, but your daily budget is set to £5 per day, you can already see that the maths don’t add up, so chances are you’re not getting decent results from your PPC and you’re likely not being served where you’d like to see your ad.

Let me give an analogy of how Google looks at budgets.

Susan and Karen go to a shopping centre, there are the choice of 10 shops to go in however there is 1 condition, before they go into the shops, they have to demonstrate that they can afford the items inside each shop.

This is done by the shop seeing their budgets inside their purses prior to entry.

Susan and Karen go to shop A, it’s overall pretty affordable with their avg item costing £12. Susan has £20 in her purse, Karen has £4 in hers. The outcome is Susan is allowed in and Karen is sent right back to the end of the queue.

Imagine Google is the shop, if you want to enter that shop (show your ads), you have to understand there is a certain pricing scale that you need to pay for your traffic, if you don’t want to pay it, you’ll go right to the back of the advertising queue. Google have plenty of other advertisers, with well considered budgets to spend. You NEED to consider what your budget is for your industry traffic costs.

There are controls you can use to prevent spending your whole budgets, because the idea isn’t to go hell for leather spending on every ounce of traffic. Just because you discover that your industry and keywords require a £1000 per month budget, doesn’t mean you have to spend it all. You should be getting the most that you can out of that £1000 and spending it only on the things that matter. That is the one part of the budget that is completely within your control, what you decide to spend your budget on!!!

So next time you’re looking at your Google ads, and you can see that your avg cost per click is a certain amount, take a look at your budgets and ask yourself if you’d be allowed in that shop to buy the goods with the overall amount you’re prepared to spend….

If you want to chat anymore about budgets, get in touch – natasha@trafficsnap.co.uk