If you allocate some of your marketing budget towards PPC campaign, how do you know exactly how much to allocate? Setting the right budget and taking various factors into consideration is challenging, especially in a service-oriented business. With the right PPC budget, you can deliver real value to your business and scale your campaign, all of which will help your company grow. Do you own a service-oriented business and need help with your outlining your budget? We reached out to Farah with High Level Marketing, a company that specializes in digital media marketing to get some insight in helping small businesses with structuring their paid advertising for success.

Below are the 5 most crucial tips she identified to help establish a PPC budget that will help get you started on your path towards scale.

1. Goals
To start your budget planning begins with truly understanding what you want out of your advertising campaign. This means understand what you want from a customer’s click; whether it’s driving sales, driving engagement, etc. Using different keywords effectively can allow your business to target users in various stages of the buying cycle. For a service-oriented business, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of the value of each conversion to your business.

2. Cost Analysis
Once you set your goals, you can spend time on thinking about how much you can afford to spend on your campaign. You need to first start off by calculating how much you would be willing to pay for a sale and go from there. Keep in mind; you always want to shoot for a campaign that produces a conversion rate between 1-5%. To work out the costs, you can use various tools such as Google KeyWord Planner, which can help you decide whether or not you are targeting cost effective keywords as well as determine how competitive a particular keyword is and how much it is likely to cost.

3. Location
A key component of establishing the right budget is knowing how far you want your ads to reach. The size of the geographic target market you are trying to reach will determine the size of the budget required. If you are trying to target your audience nationally, you need to invest more into the campaign. Conversely, if you are trying to target a small city, you can look at a smaller budget since the potential audience is smaller.

4. Checking Reports & Analyzing
One of the most essential reasons of reporting is ensuring you have accurate conversion goals. You want to make sure that your budget is being spent on the right keywords. If your goals are not being reported accurately, you will not be able to review your campaigns (a costly mistake!). If you focus your budget solely on the keywords that are delivering a solid ROI, you are able to scale your campaigns with confidence and grow your business. You will be able to review your current keywords that are costing you money and remove them, which leaves you with adequate information about what’s working and what’s not. You want to be consistent with your goals that are driving you the most traffic in order to ensure your campaign is using your budget properly.

5. Initial Budget
There are several ways to optimize a PPC campaign for your business, but if you run out of money too soon, you may not be able to implement the necessary changes to see whether or not PPC could deliver the growth you want for your business. During your cost analysis, it is important to have a fundamental understanding of what good and bad scenarios look like from a budget standpoint. You must allocate a budget to sustain poor performing results for the short term. If you have a big budget and can plan ahead, then you must plan a budget of an amount that you can afford to spend over a period of 4-6 months in order to ensure you have enough time to rescue a failing campaign. Use your initial budget as a starting point, and adjustments will be made on a regular basis depending on the performance of your campaigns.

Setting the right budget for your campaign is critical, but if you start by following the 5 tips listed above, you are taking the right steps towards maximizing the value of each and every conversion to your business.