How can you begin using AdWords in a competitive market if you have a small budget? 

We all are aware of the fact that spending is very much important in any industry so you need to allocate a certain amount of money out of your total budget to start a new company or business. Everybody doesn’t possess a budget of 20,000 pounds to start a campaign but for the startup purpose, you need to have at least 20% of the budget readily available with you something like 4,000 pounds or maybe about 5,000 pounds that make around 20-25%. This money is quite less as compared to the heavy spending of the people who have well-established business setups but it will provide you the foothold for your new startup.

Moreover, you need to conduct competitor research regardless of the amount of the budget you have either it’s more or less. You should do extensive research into keywords that are in low competition and won’t feel heavy on your low budget.

It could be a good base to start if you limit the number of keywords you bring in the campaign. For example, if a specific industry has 50 key terms, you may not be able to compete with them due to budget constraints. So it’s suggested to use 20% of the terms depending upon your 20% of the budget. Moreover, you can use certain terms that bring more traffic and keep them broad for getting more information and data that will enable you to get an idea where to spend your 4000-5000 pounds in the coming weeks.

You can use a broad match modifier on some of the phrases to go after those terms that get triggered by using the department modifier or a prod match. It all depends on the strategy for a small 5,000 pounds campaign. When it comes to the competitive industry, you may look at a few different options like looking at long-tail keywords. If you look at low search keywords then also look at the product key that allows you to start a campaign and then wait for the data.

With the campaign structure, you need to make sure your research is solid that is set up properly and you can use the data that you receive, for making the decisions about your campaign.

If someone has a campaign that is not performing well – what steps should they take to turn it around?

If someone has a campaign that is not performing well, there could be a few small things that have a significant effect on uplifting the performance of a campaign. In case of a small budget campaign, if you have spent 5,000 pounds, you must have the data to see where it’s actually been spent. A lot of decisions can be taken if you have the data and the search history of your campaign.

If you expect a PPC campaign to offer 85% to 90% relevant traffic and 10% irrelevant traffic, the only way you could get the desired results is by doing the optimization on a weekly or fortnightly basis based on the data you get back. Suppose you have planned to work towards your new campaign where you use broad match terms, broad modified terms and all different kinds of similar terms there, if you have 60% of relevance in the searches, the first step is to go back and improve that by adding more negatives there.

One more thing that could be considered during deep research includes the type of devices used in conversions like 90% of the conversions come from mobile with 50% budget and the rest 10% come from the desktop and the tablets with the other 50% budget. So in this case, all the budget should be directed towards the mobile. This small optimization will give considerable results in just 2 weeks. Last but not the least point is the optimization related to the gender-based improvement. 

What’s the best way to improve your click-through rate on your ads?

All the steps mentioned above are quite helpful for negative cables and help towards improved CTR. Check your copy and see what’s working and you must have a minimum of three to four ads per ad group where you will find that maybe two of those ads will be working better for you.

If the other ads are not working well, you can pause, rewrite and test again and refine it. You also need to show in your ads what people actually want to hear back from you. For example, if you sell a coffee machine, people might want to know which all coffee machines are rated high. 

Nescafe is five-star rated compared to any other coffee machine and if people try for a coffee machine and you’re bidding for that generic keyword, you should mention that Nescafe coffee machines are available here and we are the five star rated sellers, to win their confidence. This phrase will entice them to click down to the ad book or right-click and in return, you will improve your CTR with the trust signals in your ads. 

At what point should you be looking to scale your campaign?

You may look to scale your campaign when your company achieves the desired ROI and you see a good pattern in successive weeks. Scaling is completely up to you, but it is also highly dependent if you’re ready to spend more money, I think you should as long as you have it, as long as you’re hitting the targets.

You need to focus on the things that for every pound you spend, you get five pounds back. Once that starts happening consistently, that is the point should you be looking to scale your campaign.

Scaling is typically dependent on the returns you’re getting back and the profit you are making from the campaign. You can start at 10%, 15% or 20% as an improvement and you could quite easily go up to 50%. When you go higher as 50% of the budget, then see how it works and you need to test it again for its optimum performance.