7 Ways How To Use PPC With A Small Budget

Google’s pay per click (PPC) advertising scheme can be a very useful marketing tool. In fact, it’s so useful, the competition for placements tends to overwhelm businesses with modest spending capability. Still, when you know how to use PPC with a small budget you can see good results.

1. Define Your Objectives

Remember, you’ll pay every time a user clicks on your ad—whether they buy anything from you or not. Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish makes successfully deploying a meager budget a lot more effective. Your awareness of your ultimate goal will help determine the nature of the responses you receive.

2. Use Long Tail Keywords

The level of competition in this arena demands creative keyword choices when you’re operating with a small budget. Look for underutilized long tail keyword opportunities. You’ll also benefit from employing exact match and phrase match options. This will focus the pool of users to which your ads are exposed. Similarly, you’ll want to avoid permitting dynamic search, as your ads will appear whenever someone types anything even close to the content on your designated landing page. This can get you a lot of wasted clicks.

3. Designate Negative Keywords

If you’re in a situation in which your optimal keywords are broad, providing a list of negative keywords for the algorithm to consider helps you focus responses more tightly. As an example, when you add the word “free” as a negative keyword to your campaign, AdWords not to show your ad for any search query containing the term “free.”

4. Focus on Mobile

The nature of your business might be better suited to having your ads appear on mobile devices rather than desktop. Granted, this could apply more specifically to a brick and mortar operation like a restaurant—but with mobile’s ever-increasing popularity, this can be a useful strategy. You can also set your ads to include phone numbers so users can phone you directly from the results list. There’s less space on mobile screens, so targeting mobile specifically with your dollars increase your chances of showing up in the top two or three spots.
By the way, if this is the first time you’re considering mobile at all, you should reconfigure your site to be mobile friendly. Purveyors of the best free ecommerce websites like Shopify offer templates already configured to render beautifully on mobile platforms.

5. Cover Your Brand

Let’s say you’re a new young upstart and you just got some good press. Your savvier competitors will take note. If you haven’t covered your brand with PPC ads, your rivals will take the opportunity to feed upon your notoriety with ads incorporating your brand name as their keywords. Always cover your brand. By the way, turnabout is fair play. You can use their brand names as keywords too—if you don’t include them in your ad copy.

6. Target Specific Locations

Why pay to reach people you can’t serve if your business is best provided to a local market? Conversely, if you’re trying to expand outside of your immediate area, you can specify the city, Zip Code, or even a specific radius within which you’d like to be included—or from which you’d rather be excluded.

7. Specify Timing

If you’ve run a test campaign and noticed, you got more action in the morning as opposed to the afternoon—or on Saturdays rather than any other day of the week—reallocate your budget to focus on those time periods. This way, you’ll conserve your spend for when it’s likely to do the most good.

Interestingly, learning how to use PPC with a small budget can make a large budget even more effective. As your business grows, sticking with these tactics will continue to serve you well—even when you have more money to spend.