Losing sleep over PPC budgets? Managing paid media spend can be a nightmare – read on and let the experts put your mind at ease.
PPC budget management is a precarious balancing act. You need to ensure you’re maximising your ROI while simultaneously keeping within a, at times, tight budget. And it’s not just overspending you need to worry about – on the flip side, underspending can be just as detrimental. It’s a tricky game to play, and can create a real headache for everyone involved.
To keep your sanity and spend intact, we asked some seasoned PPC pros to share their top tips for paid media budget management. They explain the best ways to optimise your efforts while still staying on track. May their advice provide the aspirin to your budgeting-induced migraine.
💡 Visibility is key
No one feels missed opportunities more than PPC marketers, where every dollar needs to work hard, and every moment counts. Without the right visibility, valuable chances can slip by before you even know they existed. Shuvai Kawenya, Performance Marketing Director at MyProtein, explains how planning and visibility across the team is so important for managing your budget correctly.
“The way we plan our budget is we focus on the year view then break it down into 6 months then monthly. We focus on what we think will be the most impactful times of year, seasonality and how that will translate in terms of channels. We attribute budgets depending on where we think the return will be, so we like to keep visibility of how things are performing and what opportunities there are. Then it’s a case of keeping track of things. We have a lot of internal tools and dashboards set up that help to visualise things and make sure the team has visibility on budgets on a day to day basis. Definitely lean on some kind of tool or dashboard otherwise things can get time-consuming and you could miss opportunities.”
🧐 Be Realistic
Your money doesn’t always stretch the way you thought it would when you first mapped out your PPC campaign. Allocate a little here, a little there, and suddenly your budget has dwindled to nothing. Sophie Logan, PPC Lead at Beauhurst, emphasises the importance of being realistic when you set your PPC budgets.
“It can be difficult to work out a budget for a PPC campaign,” she admits. “If I’m trying to work out how much budget I need for say, a Google search ads campaign, firstly I need to make sure I’m being very realistic. For example, if you have £100 a month to spend, it might sound like a lot, but you have to spread it across an average of 30.4 days, so that doesn’t amount to much spend on a daily basis. So look at how much your clicks are costing, how many days of the month there are and work it out in that way. You will be struggling to make much of an impact with anything under £200 a month for a campaign. So remember to be realistic, and see how far you can spread out your budget across the month.”
💰 Pay Attention to Bidding Levels
Being blindsided by an overspend is something PPC marketers fear the most. AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, specialises in LinkedIn ads, and is well-versed in the fickle nature of its ad spend limits. He reiterates the value of taking control of bid levels yourself when you first set up your campaigns.
“Start really paying attention to your bid levels and what they’re allowing your campaigns to spend. Because if you ever get to a point where you think, for example, it looks like a $9 bid is what it’s going to take to get these campaigns to spend where I want them to, it would be very rare for something to massively change and all of a sudden you start overspending. So, early on into the process, learn about your campaigns, learn what you need to bid, and then get those amounts dialled in. That way you’re going to make sure that even far off into the future, that campaign is never going to overspend too much. It may overspend a little because there does need to be that flexibility, but it’s like an insurance policy.”
💥 Automate Where You Can
Automation has completely changed the game for PPC budget management. You can set your goals, point your budget in the right direction, and let it do the heavy lifting for you. Mihnea Gamulescu, Head of Product at Adzooma, is a big believer that PPC marketers should make the most of the tools now available to them.
“My top tip for budget management for PPC marketers is to try and automate as much as possible. So whether that’s automatically pulling the data into some sort of tool, or having a tool that manages that for you fully and shows you a report. So all I need to do is log in, get some alerts, notifications, and see at a glance if I’m on track or I need to make changes.
“The next step from that is to actually have something that automatically changes your campaign daily budgets to both hit your target spend and also to maximize your performance goal. Whether that’s sales value, conversions, clicks, you can automate those changes and take that time back to focus more on strategy and the bigger picture as opposed to a budget reallocation process.”
💪 Strengthen Your Stakeholder Relationships
Tools undoubtedly make things run faster and more effectively, but be careful not to forget about the real conversations that matter. Owen Gill, Digital Marketing Lead at Nottingham Building Society, reminds us that strong relationships with stakeholders are just as important for campaign success, and they shouldn’t be overlooked.
“Throughout my career, a critical element often ignored with budget management is stakeholder engagement and trust. It’s the relationship with the senior stakeholder that can help you take advantage of unforeseen opportunities.
“As a paid media manager/consultant, there are many-a-time when you’re about to reach your budget cap, and something happens in the market which may require an increase in spend to take full advantage of an opportunity. By allowing for ‘budget-flex’, you establish a baseline budget in which you optimise towards. But by having a pre-agreed licence to occasionally exceed tht budget, it allows you to respond much more efficiently.
Working with the accounts team is critical, as they’d have committed to a set number at the start of a financial year. So, for every period of overspend, you’ll likely need to have a mechanism in place to rein in activity during other periods to make up the difference.”
Conclusion
So there you have it – expert-approved ways to stop your PPC budget from giving you stress dreams and spreadsheet-induced migraines. Automate the grunt work, keep a sharp eye on performance, know your numbers, and don’t forget to actually talk to the people holding the purse strings. Budget management might never be glamorous, but with these tips, it doesn’t have to be painful. Get it right, and you’ll spend less time firefighting and more time driving real results.
Ready to take control of your PPC budgets? Let Adzooma help –get your free account set up today in just a few clicks!
If you’re interested in writing a guest post or contributing an expert quote, get in touch at amy.g@clicktech.com with your pitch.
