1.000 $ / Day Budget?

15 replies
  • PPC/SEM
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Aloha PPC warriors,

I recently sat down with a friend who runs a marketing firm. Part of their service is to monitor / improve / create PPC campaigns of large law firms.
We were discussing ways on how to test new campaigns most effectively when first setting it up and he told me that some of the clients insist to start with a daily budget of a few hundred dollars ( if not more). Now from all that I know that is nothing but plain stupid.

Yes you will gather more data but you will burn a LOT of money until your campaign is even close to being as effective as it could be.

How do you guys approach this? What kind of a budget do you reccommend for new campaigns? I usually start them with 5 $ a day and then I go from there.

When determining what budget, what's some of the criteria on your list?

I look forward to hearing your experiences!

Thore
#budget #day
  • Profile picture of the author Bright Future
    Hi, Iamthore

    Spending a few hundred dollars a day can be profitable if everything is done right.

    Big companies need volume. They don't care if the cost per lead is cheap if they only get few of them per day. So, their approach would be much different than that of a small company. And a 5$ a day campaign probably won't fulfill their needs which is constant supply of new clients.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sergio80
    $1000 a day is not much for law firms - (especially personal injury / accident lawyers) You need to get at least 100 clicks from Adwords to see how things are going and if you are in law field you can spend that much easily in a day.
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  • Profile picture of the author dimager2003
    There are affiliates who run few thousand a day budget campaigns for skin care on bing so for law firm it should be peanuts...
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  • Profile picture of the author iamthore
    Thanks for your input guys. What is your approach when starting campaigns? How do you calculate the initial daily budget?
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  • Profile picture of the author 60XCustomStrings
    I would do some research on what the average cost per click is for the targeted keywords. If it's 50 cents I would try to spend $50 or $100 over a few days to see. If it's $5/click then you're going to have to spend more for the same results during testing.
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  • Profile picture of the author PBScott
    Just forget about the money side of it, simply set that as the daily limit and go to town doing keyword research, and working on ads.
    Over the coming days you can start refining out the garbage keywords, do some onpage SEO which will bring down the ad costs etc etc. Don't focus on price until you start getting some conversion data. If your keywords are relevant they will begin to drop in cost on their own as time goes by, and you will get more clicks for your money.
    I would always start my advertising conservatively then scale up, however this is not your money, and needs to be spent the way the money owner requests... in the end it will work out his way also, you just end up getting more data quicker by spending more. I would guess he is probably thinking of a billboards and magazine approach to advertising as opposed to targeted ads, but that should be fine from your perspective, and brand awareness still does count for something.
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  • When I take on a new client, they typically ask about the budget. I say to have a budget that will reach 100% of those searching for their product or service. That's the point of advertising after all, to reach those looking for you. So taking the search volume per day for their keywords, assuming bidding to get at or near the top (which I recommend), a 10% CTR (I feel confident but may not reach that right away, but sometimes more), a quick and simple calculation gives $X.


    As long as the landing page converts, no problem. You are not burning money. You are doing exactly what you want to accomplish. If you are not converting, then you need to re-assess, usually the landing page. I've actually refused work until a page is redone believing it wouldn't convert (these were really terrible pages).


    Don Burk will probably chime in and say the same thing, learn from this so don't worry about spending a little money, it's part of the game. Unless you figure to spend just pennies per click and the numbers (search volume et al as above), a $5 budget is fine. But typically that's not going to get you anywhere. Depends on the niche. A new client for example providing debt settlement, he would not get any clicks since a click can go for $20. I suspect law related keywords would be in that range so a $5 budget won't cut it.


    You need to be realistic and you need to know your numbers. If you are happy getting a handful of clicks (say 10 for $5), and converting, nothing wrong with it. But realize that you may be doing much more business with a higher budget if your keyword volume is higher.
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    • Profile picture of the author iamthore
      That's some great insight in those posts! It's super interesting to see your different approaches and opinions on this topic.

      Originally Posted by LucidWebMarketing View Post

      When I take on a new client, they typically ask about the budget. I say to have a budget that will reach 100% of those searching for their product or service. That's the point of advertising after all, to reach those looking for you. So taking the search volume per day for their keywords, assuming bidding to get at or near the top (which I recommend), a 10% CTR (I feel confident but may not reach that right away, but sometimes more), a quick and simple calculation gives .
      Thanks so much LucidWebMarketing for breaking it down in such detail. How do you approach new clients? Or is it mostly word to mouth now that you established a name in the PPC field?
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  • I wouldn't say I'm a well-known or established name in the PPC field, unless you know something I don't. I'd be busier if that were the case. But I try to get clients wherever and however I can, those I know looking for someone with my talents. Some approach me.
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  • Profile picture of the author jumbo7901
    CPC for law firms are routinely $30 onwards so $5/day is not going to cut it. I recommend the budget that generates minimum 10 clicks per day. So we get enough data to optimize campaigns (finding negative keywords etc.).
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  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi iamthore,

    As Lucid, and Jumbo have pointed out, it isn't practical to start with a $5 daily budget limit in this particular niche since the CPCs start much higher than $5 and such a small budget would prevent your ad from generating but a handful of impressions and even fewer clicks.

    A budget limit only serves to delay the progress of your campaigns.

    If you know what you are doing, limiting your initial ad budget serves no purpose other than to delay the gathering of the amount of data you need to begin the first round of optimizations. The only reason to limit a budget is to make sure the client has the resources available to finance the campaign and the capacity to process the conversions.

    A law firm is likely to have millions of dollars in working capital and a $5 budget limit will likely send a message that you are the wrong person to handle their advertising needs.

    To fully optimize a campaign you need data to determine the value per click for each ad group, keyword, and search term. The only way to get that data is to spend money on ads. Your initial budget simply determines how long it takes to get the data you need to fully optimize your campaigns. The smaller your budget, the longer it will take to gather the data. The larger your budget the quicker you can gather the required data and the quicker you can optimize your campaigns to maximize profitability.

    Now if you are too busy to pay close attention to your campaigns, then you may need to set a smaller ad spend budget. If your client has a long selling cycle you may need to limit it to available working capital. You might also need to limit ad spend in order to avoid exceeding the current capacity of your client to process leads, or to produce goods and services, other than that you should not set any budget limitations if you can help it.
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  • Profile picture of the author VanteenCatering
    $1000 not a big prize is a smallest in PPC. you needed 100 clicks in Adwords to easily get in a per day.
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  • Profile picture of the author webbill
    1000 is price that is used to trigger your campaign the real work starts afterwards when you will see the roi .
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  • Profile picture of the author tonga07
    if can i just want target $2 perday and 0.001 perclick
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  • Profile picture of the author spartan14
    I think this amount its huge for us but for companies its not such a big number
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