Google Adwords Budget Estimator: How to Create Your Advertising Budget
Want to increase your business’ online presence by investing in Google Adwords?
Expanding your digital presence is key to growing your business in this day and age, and with Google’s PPC (pay-per-click), you don’t pay for an ad that hasn’t brought traffic to your site. In fact, Google Adwords has continued to grow in significance. This is especially true since Google moved all paid results out of the sidebar in 2016, pushing organic results further down the page.
But where do you even start? Without a Google Adwords budget estimator, you may feel clueless about how much money to commit to your Adwords budget and what sort of results to expect in return.
There are several factors that come into play when it comes to deciding on a budget, and it is important to plan carefully to get the best return on your investment.
3 Key Factors In Your Google Adwords Budget Estimator
Keywords
Your overall cost will depend on the price of the specific keywords you want to target. You may pay $5.83 for an ad with the keyword “orthopedic practice,” but $25.80 for “home mortgage.” Your product and services, as well as the popularity of and competition for your desired keyword, will determine the cost.
Fortunately, you don’t have to guess in the dark for these numbers. Google’s Keyword Planner Tool is an incredibly helpful part of any Adwords budget estimator toolkit.
We recommend using other keyword strategy tools, such as Spyfu, to help you narrow down a comprehensive target keyword list.
Time Frame
In estimating a budget for Google Adwords, you also need to determine how long the ad should run.
To determine your time frame, there are a few important pieces to keep in mind.
- Consider the search volume for your intended keywords; lower search volumes may require a longer running campaign.
- If this is a brand new campaign, it can take up to three months to gather a significant baseline of data before you can adjust and optimize your campaign. This should factor into both your time and cost estimates.
- Keep in mind the seasonality of your products or services; if you typically see a summer slump in sales, you should expect a similar slowdown in Adwords performance.
Sales Cycle & Conversion Rate
Finally, to create an effective estimate for your Google Adwords budget, you need to have clear data about your sales cycle and conversion rates.
If you don’t know what your cost-per-acquisition is currently, it’s a good time to calculate that now before implementing a Google PPC campaign. A few questions you should be asking yourself are:
- How long is your typical sales cycle?
- After a visitor arrives on your website, what other conversions (or actions) need to take place?
- What is your conversion rate for each of these actions?
- What’s to total investment in each complete sales cycle?
Once you have these numbers pinpointed, combine them with the time frame and keywords you’ve targeted to determine your estimated Adwords budget. This will help you determine what reasonable expectations to set for the PPC campaign and the budget you are able to provide your Adwords campaign at this time.
Setting Realistic Expectations from Adwords
Is Google Adwords the only way to build your online presence? Of course not. Organic SEO can be a highly successful strategy for many businesses, especially when they incorporate the best practice of local SEO.
Just remember that Google has moved paid advertisements to the main search results area of the page results, moving organic rankings lower on the page. A professional SEO consultation may be the SEO boost you need if a Google Adwords campaign just isn’t a part of your marketing budget at this time.
Can Google Adwords get you great results? Yes, with testing, adjustment, and patience. It’s vital to keep in mind that Google Adwords is not something you can start on Monday and see wild success in by Friday.
It takes time, trial and error, and constant adjustment.
Action Items & Takeaways
- Brainstorm the keywords you would like to run ads for. Estimate their cost using Google’s keyword planner.
- Determine your ad time frame, based on keywords, age of the campaign, and seasonality.
- Identify your on page conversion rate and your sales team’s close rate.
- Calculate your potential spend using your Google Adwords budget estimator.
- Set up your ads and start testing!
- Once your ads are running, schedule a consultation to find out how to get the most out of PPC by increasing your on page conversion rate.