9 tips for Google Ads budget management

To start off, think about what you hope to accomplish by advertising online. Do you want to draw more traffic to your website? Get more locals to call you? Or build awareness of your business among a certain customer demographic?

Once you’ve determined your goals, come up with strategies to help you meet those goals, and make the most out of your budget. If you’re new to Google Ads, try Smart campaigns, where you set a maximum monthly budget, then rely on Google to automatically adjust ad bids to drive better results. You can explore bidding strategies such as Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost Per Mille (CPM) once you become a seasoned advertiser.

Google Ads will tell you how many times your ads have shown in searches (called 'ad impressions') and when they’ve been clicked, but it doesn’t give you insights about whether these interactions lead to conversions on your website. If you want to track your conversions (purchases, calls, form submissions), or other actions that your customers take on your site, use the free Google Analytics tool.

Likewise, Analytics can show you when visitors are immediately leaving your website after clicking a particular ad. If this happens a lot, this indicates that the keywords you’re bidding on might not be as relevant as you thought. Here, you might choose to experiment with different keywords, instead of sticking to the same few keywords that aren’t bringing about conversions.

The bottom line? Google Analytics is an essential tool for all business owners and marketers, and it’ll do you good to regularly review the data in your Google Analytics account. When you improve the relevancy of your landing page or keywords using this data, this could raise your ad’s Quality Score. This can help to lower your average Cost Per Click, allowing you to drive more results with the same budget. Find out more about Quality Scores.

After you’re driving results with your Search campaigns, go ahead and set up Display campaigns on the Google Display Network. Display advertising can enhance your overall advertising strategy, by helping you reach a wider audience. Although conversions from Display ads tend to be lower, these ads can help your brand grow mindshare in the long term.

If you have a local shop front and you’d like to get more customers to visit, showing your ads to the entire country isn’t the way to go. Instead, tweak your Google Ads targeting settings to show your ads only to people searching close enough to visit, or in other locations that are important to your business. By doing this, you’ll spend your budget more efficiently.

Location targeting can also be useful if your business serves customers outside of your country, or even globally. Start by targeting your campaigns to a few areas you think that your business will do well in, then keep an eye on your data to see where your traffic and conversions are coming from. From there, refine your campaigns to target the best-performing regions or markets in order to optimise your ad spend.

Your first instinct might be to believe that your ad will only be successful if it displays as high as possible in search results. Remember, though, that ads that show in the fourth position or below may still get traffic, possibly at a lower Cost Per Click (CPC). Build upon these early results and continue to optimise your advertising strategy until it drives the best outcomes for your business.

Consider trying out some 'long-tail keywords', which are longer keyword phrases with three or more words. These keywords tend to be less popular, meaning that you’ll encounter less competition and lower Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) when bidding on these keywords. Long tail keywords are also more specific than short tail keywords, and they attract searchers with a higher likelihood to buy, call or visit your business.

For example, if you want people to know about your studio’s portrait services for students, don’t just bid on short tail keywords such as 'portraits' or 'photography studio'. Instead, try using long-tail keywords such as 'graduation portrait photography'–this will help you drive more targeted traffic to your site.

Google Ads users have access to Keyword Planner, which is a tool that you can use to identify long-tail keywords. Learn more about how to use the Keyword Planner tool.

When running Google Ads, a best practice to follow is to create campaigns based on the different categories or sub pages of your website. If you want to run ads to promote your photography studio, for instance, you wouldn't want to just run one campaign around 'Portraits'. Instead, your campaigns may look something like this:

• Campaign: Wedding Portraits
• Campaign: School / Graduation Portraits
• Campaign: Events Photography

This way, you can set different budgets for each campaign, shifting your spending based on your goals (for instance, putting more of your budget toward your 'Graduation portraits' campaign in the weeks leading up to graduation season). Plus, you can show potential customers ads that are more specific to what they’re searching for, and send them to the most relevant page on your site.

One of the biggest benefits of Google Ads is that you can track your results of your online marketing campaigns and then refine your strategies, and your budget, whenever you want. This lets you test what works and make adjustments. Try new strategies and campaigns continuously, guided by data from Google Ads and Analytics, until you find the advertising formula that helps you meet your business goals.

Regardless of how big or small your advertising budget is, you can utilise Google Ads to achieve your business goals. Use the above tips to make the most out of your ad spend, and remember to continuously test and tweak your ads to optimise your Return On Investment (ROI).