If you are considering PPC to advertise your business online setting a sufficient budget is very important to make sure your campaign will be a success. Nothing is worse than spending hours of your valuable time researching keywords, setting up a campaign and writing ads, just to find out the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for your keywords are so high that you can barely get any clicks for your monthly budget.
The first step to any PPC campaign is to determine a maximum budge you are comfortable spending on a monthly basis for your campaign. The next step is to find out what you can get for this budget and if it is worth looking into PPC or if the money would be better spent on other marketing activities such as SEO or email marketing.
The main factor for your budget is the CPC for the keywords you would like your ads to show up for.Based on the average CPC for these keywords you can estimate how many clicks you can expect from your monthly budget.
To find out about the CPC of a keyword you can either use keyword research tools, such as the free Google keyword tool, which provide you with estimates or you can use PPC itself to run a quick test campaign for CPC numbers. Let’s look at both options.
1. CPC estimates from Google keyword tool
Go to the following URL to access the Google keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
To get CPC estimates for your market from the Google keyword tool type in your targeted keywords and press search.
Then click on “Columns”, check “Estimated Avg. CPC” and click “Save” (see screenshot below).
Now you will see the Estimated Avg. CPC on the right side of each keyword.
If you only want numbers for keyword phrases that contain your exact keyword make sure to check “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”.
You can now play around with this tool and see what the CPC is in your market and which keywords are the most expensive.
This method can give you a good understanding of the pricing situation and you will get an idea if your budget is realistic or not.
2. Using PPC to find exact CPC numbers
Once you have a feeling for your market’s CPC and you are thinking about running a PPC campaign it is worth running a small test campaign to see how accurate these numbers are and what it would take to rank on the first page for your keywords. All you need to do is sign up for a PPC account with Google or MSN Ad Center (MSN is now serving PPC ads to Yahoo and Bing).
In the next step select your top 10 keywords and setup one campaign in your PPC account. For the ad just look at other ads that show up when you search for your keyword and write a quick ad based on what you see. Don’t put too much thought into this, since this is just a test. However make sure to include your keywords in the ad copy, since that will help with relevance.
Set the campaign to run for 2 days and set a daily budget that is high enough to give you at least 10 clicks based on your CPC estimates. Set the CPC for each keyword at the average CPC cost you received from the Google keyword tool.
Now start the campaign and monitor it. Once the campaign is started you can look at your keywords inside of your PPC account and you will be able to see the minimum bid for showing on the first page. If your bid is lower than that raise it to this number. Now you can see how many impressions you receive and in what position your ads show. Based on this data you can verify if the estimates were correct and if your budget still is high enough to run a PPC campaign.
With proper PPC optimization and management CPC can be significantly reduced over time. However for the first 3 months of a campaign expect to pay close to the first CPC numbers from your test campaign.
If you are looking for lower CPC yo can always research more long tail keywords and see if these have lower CPC. This might be another way to enter a competitive market with a lower budget.
If you are interested to learn more about using PPC for your online marketing and how to best optimize and mange your campaign feel free to contact us.
Tags: cpc estimation, cpc estimator, google cpc estimator, ppc campaign budget, ppc campaign setup
