Pay Per Click on a Budget: 5 Tips that Work

While many businesses worldwide still, rightfully, feel that PPC (Pay-per-click) campaigns are expensive, there is no doubt that the urban adage – 'You got to spend money to make money' is true too.

PCC economics, when done on a shoestrings budget, asks for wise and calculated decisions. Various PPC advertising agencies across Dubai and UAE at large have started adopting these cost-cutting strategies, which has given them growth, both, budget and success wise. Here are few measures you can take to get the maximum out of your PPC campaign on a stiff budget:

#1 Bid and buy – Correct Keywords

Strategize to work within your budget. Buy limited, yet relevant keywords. Don't get swayed by the popularity or high CPC (Cost Per Click) keyword. To do so, you can also check out useful tools for PPC.  Buying the most expensive or popular keyword in your niche might not always get you the result your product or service desires.

The most reliable move would be to build a keyword list that has the exact phrases and words to match your services. Doing so might limit the number of clicks, but it will end up being cost-effective, and enhance your click through rate simultaneously.

#2 Day or night - Correct slotting

The smartest way to curb overspending is by selecting the right time slot for your ads to appear. Choose this time-based nature of your service or product and consumer behaviour. If nothing, you can plainly ask for the ads to run during your office working hours. Apart from helping your gather relevant clicks, you can also strategically avoid peak hours when the cost is highest. Benefits being, you will not have a face-off with major players and big competitors who would be monopolising the space at that time. So, pick a convenient time, and pay for only that.

#3 Firsts and musts - Correct Products

Right from the word go, you can start selling every vertical of your services. Not only will it put a dent in your budget, it will also dilute your presence in the market. So, pick one or two of your core products and start with it. Make sure you can provide best services for these said products. To get a head start, make sure the product you choose is the most popular, has the highest conversion rate and has the highest profit margin among all other products and services. Refrain from going overboard. Promoting all that you have to offer will run your budget dry and confuse your consumers.

#4 Where and how - Correct Placement

PPC advertising can be done in different types and placed in different places on the digital platform. Google AdWords in particular, has 3 different types of campaign that you can pick from:

1. The search network- As the name suggests, in this network the ads are place on Google's search engine result page. These basic text ads are the most conventional form, most commonly used by the PPC agencies in UAE
2. The display network- In here the ads are places all across the display network of Google. The ads here can be animated in nature, be static images or text ads too.
3. Google Shopping- Most used for e-commerce advertising, PPC companies use it to sell product by featuring in the shopping tab of Google’s main portal.

#5 Performance and Relevance – Correct Score

All the planning and execution will be in vain if the end result is not profitable. So, in order to measure the degree of success and performance of your PPC ads you need to use the metric called Quality Score. This metric gives the result by evaluating pay-per-click advertising campaign's performance, and relevance of keywords used, ads and landing page, and then it compares it to the user's search query. Quality Score, therefore, helps in understanding the progress of campaign as well as issues warning by raising when something is not working as desired. Relevant for Google AdWords, Bing and similar search engines, the higher your rank in the 1-10 ranking scale the better your ad is doing.

In conclusion

So, now that you are equipped with all there is to know about launching a successful PPC ad campaign on a shoestring budget, stay sharp and keep it fresh. Make sure to follow the rules, keep tracking your analytics like a hawk and stay up to date. For if you get this right, your business will boom from strength to strength, garner global glories, and everything else after … will simply CLICK!