7 Things You Need To Know About PPC Advertising Costs

One big aspect to advertising is cost. Luckily, with PPC, there is no minimum or maximum amount you can spend on a search engine. Maybe you only want to spend $5 a day and some other days you want to spend $5,000 a day. No matter your budget, your Boston PPC company will make it work. GoingClear is also a certified Google Partner, which means one of the top items we excel in within the paid search platform is managing a budget of any size. 

1. Small Business or Mega Sized Company?

Depending on the size of your business, we can also recommend a monthly budget for you. We have the ability to do research within Google Ads. This forecasting tool lets us know how competitive your keywords are, and how many conversions you can expect to see based off previous historical data Google has gathered from similar accounts. We are also able to give a rough estimates of impressions and clicks, which is helpful if those are part of your company’s goals or key performance indicators (KPIs).

2. How Much Does A Click Cost?

A cost per click, or CPC, can vary. A click can be as low as 2 cents or as high as a thousand dollars. The average CPC on the web now ranges from $1-$5. Clicks also depend on the industry. Some types of businesses have more competition than others. This can be a law firm, a real estate agency, or a college, for example.  These are all very competitive areas on the SERP. Clicks also change in value depending on the time and day, as well as the seasonality of your business. Another example would be a winter holiday business promoting during the month of December. You might see higher costs during December but when your season is over and you still have ads running in the summer, your costs may go down significantly. Overall, GoingClear will focus on your cost per click to monitor performance and spend. 

Sometimes clicks aren’t the only thing that you can be charged for. Display ads can either be charged based upon clicks or impressions. Display ads tend to spend more than normal search ads, but they do show on a wider platform. This can help bring in a wider audience for your business. The partner sites these ads show on are usually related to your industry’s content, which makes this audience even more qualified to click on your Display ad. The spend here evens out as we see just as great success as we do with search ads. 

3. Ad Rank 

Ad Rank is made up of two parts – your CPC bid and your quality score. Your ad rank basically determined where and when you will show up on the SERP. If you have a really good quality score, your CPC will be lower. But sometimes if you have a bad quality score and want to continue showing you ad, you’ll have to pay the price (literally). If you bump your bids up on a low quality score keyword, you’ll still be likely to show on the SERP. The best way to keep costs down is to optimize your account weekly. This will ensure you have a great ad rank, as well as keeping costs to a minimal. 

4. Big Adjustments

Other costs can come from bid adjustments that we set up in your account or may currently have engaged. Bid adjustments are a percentage increase or decrease in your bids. Depending on if you want to show your ads more or less frequently, you can set a bid adjustment. This comes in handy when you consider locations, demographics, and audiences. For example, let’s say you own a hair salon that specializes in men’s haircuts more so than women’s. You can set a 50% increased bid adjustment towards males and leave women’s as is. If you don’t want to show as much to women, you can set a negative bid adjustment towards females. This just means that your ad will be a little more competitively priced when a male searches for a hair salon compared to that same search of a female. 

5. Campaigns

Depending on how many campaigns you have active in your account, you want to be efficient with spend. Some questions to ask yourself are: Which ones do I want to focus on more? Which ones are more likely to bring in more leads? Is one directed more at our goals than others? As your Boston PPC company, GoingClear wants to make sure the structure of your campaigns aligns with the needs of your company’s goals.

This can help determine spend. You want to focus your budget on campaigns you know will perform well. Your account might have smaller campaigns that don’t need a lot of attention. This is where you can put aside a bulk of your spend to bring in lower funnel leads. If we notice a campaign or ad group that isn’t performing at all, we will recommend pausing it and putting that money towards a higher performing campaign. Campaign management is another strategy we like to focus on when it comes to spend. We know businesses can have tight budgets, which is why we like to be most efficient with it. 

6. Day Parting

Google Ads allows us to set a schedule when your ads will show. Depending on when you get your most traffic, we can focus your budget to show at certain times of the day or even certain days of the week. GoingClear might notice a trend – let’s say we see a good amount of clicks on the weekend but no one is converting. We would recommend setting an ad schedule to show your ads only Monday through Friday. This would save you money on the weekend and focus more money on your campaigns during the week. 

Depending on what type of company you run an account for, day parting can be beneficial there too. If you’re a local business looking to drive customers to your physical location, we’ll only run your ads during your normal business hours to save you on spend when you are not open. 

7. Additional Fees

Using your local Boston PPC company as your management source, we charge based on your PPC account spend. You can contact us directly for specific pricing.