PPC Budgeting Tips and Tricks

The fear of mishandling budgets is omnipresent in a digital marketer’s life.

There are often defined campaign budgets to stick to, key performance indicators (KPIs) to meet, and capricious clients to cater to.
On top of all that, software tools that make your task easier— such as Optmyzr, ReportGarderden, Supermetrics, etc.— are expensive, and not every agency relies on them.

However, budget pacing is integral to any pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and allows you to utilize budget spend effectively before the end of the budgeting cycle. It also helps marketers pace spend more smoothly throughout a cycle, ensuring maximum visibility for all advertisements.

How You Can Track Budgets on Your Own

Tracking Tools

To track budget spend carefully, you can use widely available, free tools such as Google Excel or Google Sheets. The advantage of choosing these is that they allow daily refreshing and document sharing. It’s also easier to account for daily fluctuations as you will be tracking based on day-of-week spend.
To start, list the categories you will be tracking on the left-hand side of your document. These will include:

• Budget Cycle Length
• Budget Cap
• Spend to Date (for Current Budget Cycle)
• Budget Remaining
• Percentage Budget Spent
• Recommended Daily Spend (to Achieve Budget Cap)
• Important KPIs

Next to each main category, enter the relevant dates. These will be used to calculate formulas for the budget spend. A commonly used formula is:

Fx=(Current Spend/Amount of Days)*Total Days in the Month

Remember to enter formulas separately and in their respective tracking column. The option to track redundancies should be switched on to spot errors as soon as they arise.

Account for Daily Fluctuations

When planning a budget, it is imperative that you account for day-of-week fluctuations. Some days of the week will have a higher cost than others. This matters most when just a few days are left in the budgeting cycling. Remember to adda function that will calculate the historical day-of-week distributions to avoid mismanagement.

Avoid Overspending

An easy way to avoid overspending your budget is to set parameters for ads beforehand. For instance, if you use Google AdWords, it will calculate a monthly budget based on the daily budget you set and ensure you stay within limits during the month.

To avoid overspending on campaigns manually, adjust some of the parameters:

• Get rid of non-converting networks, campaigns, keywords/placements/audiences, ads, etc
• Change budget allocation depending on the performance
• Tweak your daily spend caps based on daily/ weekly trends or promotional events
• Refine “too-broad” targeting strategies
• Add negative keywords
• Evaluate bidding strategies
• Test driving spend to lower cost ad networks/channels
• Hold back on some of the budget to boost spend on promotional days

Social Media Marketing: How to Get More Out of Facebook Ads

While planning a Facebook campaign for advertising, you can run into a lot of challenges.

The biggest concern is getting enough conversions after investing your time, effort, and money.
After all, you’ve put in a lot of ad spend (and thought process!) into designing your campaign. In order to generate returns on investment (ROI), you need more sales.

Here are some ways you can improve your Facebook Ads for better ROI.

Conduct More Research About Your Audience

The key to success with Facebook advertising lies inknowing your target audience.Facebook retail ads can be tricky in that they require you to have completed research before launching your campaign/ product. You need to select your target audience carefully beforehand.

At the beginning of your campaign, it might take some time to generate leads as the Facebook algorithm attempts to understand your audience. A process called the “learning phase” is taking place, where the ad set goes through “50 optimization events” to deliver the best possible results.

To gather more audience data specifics, you can use a combination of different sources:
• Google Ads
• Competitive analysis
• Local demographic information
• Your real-time website analytics

Optimize Target Parameters

Daily, some 1 billion-plus people use Facebook. It’s become more important criticalnow than ever to target the relevant people for your campaign.
Facebook ad targeting has been simplified considerably by Facebook itself. All you need to do is select an audience type and set parameters.

Saved Audiences

Here you can set broad parameters such as location, age, gender, and language. However, if you select “detailed targeting”, you can target customers who are specifically interested in your product by choosing a particular interest from the drop-down list.
Another useful feature is the “Behaviors” option. This allows you to target people based on their purchase history, upcoming personal anniversaries, digital activities, and even mobile usage. It doesn’t get more specific than that!

Custom Audiences

With Facebook Custom Audiences, you can choose users who have visited your website in the past, installed, and used your app or people who have subscribed to your services such as newsletters. If you target people based on past activity or engagement, you naturally have a higher chance of conversions.

LookAlike Audiences

Most retailers forget to utilize this feature of Facebook Ads. Facebook Lookalike Audiences are great because they allow you to expand your reach to users,similar to regular customers. Thus, you can target audiences where chances of potential conversions are high. To narrow down that pool further, you can add an additional layer such as interest-based or demographic-based targeting.
Remember, there is no easy hack to figure out which audience type works for your campaign. You will only realize where your strengths lie once you test the different types of audiences after targeting your potential customers wisely.

How to Lower Costs Per Click and Increase Traffic to Your Site

As digital marketing expands, the paid search industry gets more and more competitive.
With rising competition come rising costs to generate traffic and draw attention to your site.
Once you understand the techniques you can use to rank your website higher on search engines, you can automatically bring down your costs per click (CPC) and optimize your marketing strategies.

To improve your rankings, you need to work on your website’s quality score.

Quality Score

The quality score is a rating assigned by Google and other search engines to your digital campaigns or advertisements. It directly determines your ranking and affects the costs per click (CPC). There are three things that factor into calculating the quality score:

• Keywords relevance
• Landing page experience
• Ads relevance

Why Do You Need a Good Quality Score?

If your ads are highly specific and relevant to the queries and terms used by people on search engines, your click-through rate (CTR) increases. An increase in CTR immediately leads to a better quality score. This, in turn,lowers your cost per click (CPC).

Thus, you will be paying less and receiving more traffic.

But to get there, you will have to design campaigns more effectively. This means putting in more time and effort researching relevant keywords and making sure users have a great experience when they reach your landing page.

Keywords

Learning how to use keywords effectively makes your task significantly more manageable. Here are some tips to keep in mind when it comes to keywords.

Create Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs)

As the name suggests, SKAGs use only one main keyword and center other words and ad groups on that keyword. The main keyword acts as the root word and makes it easier to manage your campaign. It also makes the ad more specific, thereby improving your quality score.

Use Keywords with Low Bids

Keywords with low bids will have a lower CPC. If a keyword is very generic, more people tend to bid on it, making it more competitive. Usually, the more competitive the keyword is, the higher the CPC.

Don’t Shy Away from Long Tail Keywords

Using long tail keywords makes your intent very specific. These keywords have a lower search volume and are most likely used by people searching for something very specific. This ensures that your ad spend will not go to waste. It also improves your quality score and lowers CPC.

Landing Page Experience

Once users click your ad, they will arrive at and interact with your landing page.You need to ensure your landing page is user-friendly and easy to follow. Here are some things to keep in mind to improve the landing page experience:

Loading Speed

If your landing page takes time to load, you’re more likely to end up with fewer conversions and money wasted on resources. Users expect a website to load within two to three seconds, after which they generally move to a better performing site.

Compatibility

It is necessary to check the compatibility of the landing page on different devices. Make sure the landing page is both mobile and browser-friendly. Users should be able to get the gist of your message immediately regardless of which device they access your landing page on.

Geo-Targeting: A Geo-Marketing Strategy for the New Age

Geo-marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in the marketing industry these days.
Everything is now connected to location.
Businesses are slowly figuring out that it is a colossal waste of time, money, and resources to market to consumers that might remain out of their reach.
Location-based technology is providing new marketing techniques to business owners and marketers alike.

So Why is Geo-Marketing a Big Deal?

Using geo-marketing, businesses can conveniently and effectively make decisions about which customers to target, and when is the best time to target them.
They can make use of location data from a specific location to create an all-encompassing digital map. The map can break down consumers’ data by city, suburban communities, and even neighborhoods.
Using tools such as Google Analytics a business owner can map out very specific details of prospective customers and utilize them when the need arises.

What Goes Into Geo-Marketing?

Consumer data is collected via their social media or smartphones. Most businesses now use Geographic Information Software (GIS) to obtain data in real-time.

What is Geo-Targeting?

Geo-targeting is a highly specific form of geo-marketingused to create and deliver content to consumers based on their geographic location.
In geo-targeted marketing a consumer’s online IP address is used to determine their geographical location. Here is where geo-location services come in handy. Using tools such as GPS signals or geo-fencing, a business owner can figure out the exact location of their customers and calculate demands per location.
Then, when a business needs to create online advertisements using Facebook ads or YouTube Video ads, they can select a specific location and run relevant advertisements for that location. This allows marketers to schedule sales for particular consumers in a particular locality.
Geo-targeted marketing can greatly improve returns on investments (ROI) for businesses. By figuring out the needs of their consumers in real-time, they can launch effective advertising campaigns at the right time.
For instance, if a restaurant business wishes to drive sales, they can make use of geo-marketing. Using data from search engines and Google Analytics, they can figure out the top searches and demands in their vicinity. Once they have that information, they can create mobile ads for customers in that locality offering the very specific items customers were searching for. Or they can time their social media posts to coincide with customers’ searches.

Geo-Targeting on Facebook

Geo-marketing using Facebook’s geo-targeting tools is now becoming increasingly popular. It is a simple, inexpensive, and easy-to-follow process that drives great results. A marketer simply needs to create an Ad Set and curate their Audience based on locations.
They can select as small a radius as they desire (the range is usually between 1 and 50 miles) after entering an audience and selecting the number of their target audience, and launch their advertisement.