How To Ensure That PPC Campaigns Stay Within Budget

Many companies invest heavily in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and need to keep a close eye on it to ensure that both return on investment and budget allowances are being met. While PPC ads are essential if your company has any kind of web presence, managing your PPC budget can often seem like more of a hassle than it’s worth. It can be frustrating to find out that you’ve gone way over budget by the end of the month or even worse, discovered you are over budget before the month is even over.

Although management of these campaigns can be difficult when usage spikes and ebbs throughout the month and year, there are ways to set controls to ensure that the campaigns come in budget and are being viewed online every day.

PPC Budget Settings

The great thing about PPC is the ability to track your advertising spending and curtail it as needed. However, even though PPC is an accountable form of marketing, when it works too well, a business may find that they have used their allotted monthly marketing dollars too quickly. If by the third week in the month the PPC campaign has exceeded the budget for the month, it would need to be taken offline or allowed to proceed over budget. Neither is a good option, one leaving the market open for all competitors and the other putting the business marketing budget in the hole.

Although the best way to manage PPC is to closely watch the campaign day by day and make changes as needed, unless a business has a marketing company handling the management of PPC campaigns for them, it is difficult to do. If you’re unable to hire a marketing company, there are ways that you can make managing your PPC budget easier.

Both Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing ads offer PPC budget settings that you can use. The nice thing about using Google Adwords, Bing ads, or both, is that each search engine provides you with various opportunities to get your ads seen. In addition, Google and Bing offer different ways for you to set , monitor, and manage your PPC budget.

Google AdWords Settings

Google AdWords allows businesses to spend PPC funds according to a daily budget instead of a monthly budget. However, it calculates a monthly budget based on multiplying the daily budget by 30.4, the average days in a month. The setting allows the daily budget only to be exceeded by 20%, which creates room for higher use and lower use days, averaging out by the end of the month.

Bing Ad Settings

Bing allows two different types of budget settings, either monthly or daily. The monthly setting ensures that once the maximum amount for the month is reached that the ad campaign is suspended. However, this could still leave a business with no ads generating at the end of the month. Instead, using the daily setting will allow ads to be shown every day within the daily budget.

As with any new online business tool, it will take some experimentation and inevitably a few mishaps until you understand how to properly set your PPC ad budgets using either Google Adowrds or Bing ads. Test out each service, and the various ways you the service allows you to set your budget until you find the one that you feel is simplifying your life the most.

The great thing about PPC is that you only pay for the ads when they work; even with this, most companies still have a budget they must adhere to as well. For businesses managing their own PPC campaigns, using budget settings can ensure that the business gets daily online exposure and still stays within money restraints issued for the campaign.

Photo Credit: Andrea de Poda