We are very frequently asked what is a reasonable monthly budget for a pay per click campaign. The answer is not simple. For example, the competition for keywords differs greatly between markets. The CPC (cost per click) for the keyword “make a website” is much higher in the United States than in Australia. So for example a $100 a month budget in Mexico can be the equivalent of a $1,000 in the United States as the average cost per click of the keywords in Mexico is much lower than in the US.

With that said, in the United States, we recommend a minimum of $250 per month for campaigns. We find that at spend of $250 the campaigns have enough traction to provide consistent sales and leads. Furthermore, it allows the campaigns to have enough volume to gather insightful data and see what works and what doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that campaigns with budgets of $100 per month wont work. It just means that the budget is constrained between many keywords so it will be difficult for all the keywords in the campaign to get clicks. In such cases, when the monthly budget is $150 or less, we recommend to have a small set of keywords that clearly represent your products and services so each keyword gets enough clicks for you to evaluate them.

So what is a good mix? $250 per campaigns, 20-40 relevant keywords, 3-5 ads with different messaging and a bit of time, 1-3 months. In that amount of time you will be able to clearly see what is working and what is not and then optimize the campaign. You will be able to see what messaging is most effective by performing ad copy a/b testing. You will also see what category of keywords are driving the traffic that is converting on the website. You can then manually pause the elements that are not working well and concentrate the traffic to the best performing keywords and ads. If you use campaign optimization tools such as SiteWit, this process will be automated and they keywords and ads that are most effective will receive the lion share of the budget automatically.

What about higher budgets? The more budget you have, the more clicks your campaign will receive. The more clicks, the more keywords and ads your campaign can evaluate. Therefore, the rule of thumb is that you could effectively optimize and manage more keywords and ads with a higher budget. The more volume you have the better are the opportunities for optimization. You can learn more about actual search queries and compare them to the bought keywords to learn good keywords to buy on phrase and exact match and also negative keywords that are driving performance down. Furthermore, you will be able to have more statistical data to evaluate keywords and their conversion ratio and return on investment. The biggest problem is data analysis and good ROI measurement. Manual bidding also takes longer and is more complex. Bid management and optimization tools are good to help lower the bidding burden and provide good ROI improvement insights and recommendations.

SiteWit’s suite of campaign management tools include bid management, ROI optimization, day parting recommendations, geographical recommendations, automated A/B testing, and keyword discovery tools. There are other tool sets in the industry and we recommend you do your homework to find the tool set that best fits your needs based on budget under management and campaign complexity. If you have any questions on how SiteWit compares please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will help you evaluate if SiteWit is the right product for you.