When you pay Google for your PPC campaign, you don’t take out your credit card every time someone clicks on your ad.
Instead, you set a daily budget on the campaign level. So for each campaign, you can dictate how much money Google can spend on those ad placements per day.
I can say, I want to spend $300/day on my shoe campaign and $200/day on my shirt campaign, and Google won’t exceed those amounts.
What if all that money is spent in only an hour or two? After all, if you have highly relevant
or very popular keywords, you do run the risk of blowing through your budget quickly.
Well, Google also offers a feature that allows you to request that your budget be spread
out throughout the entire day. This works well for brands that want to establish a presence
throughout the day.
The daily budget cap is certainly a reassuring feature, especially for those who are just
starting out with paid search.
You can set a low budget when you get started, slowly begin measuring success and lead quality, and try your hand at optimizing your campaign before you really invest a lot of money in it.
Optimizing Ad Copy
Now, just because you set a daily budget of, say, $500, doesn’t mean that the entire budget will be spent every day.
Google will try to spend your full daily budget, but the ability to do so ultimately depends on your keywords, but also on the effectiveness of your ad copy.
If you can’t get anyone to click on your ads in the first place, you’re not going to be paying anything. This is why your ad copy is critical to an effective PPC campaign.
When it comes to creating your ad, there is essentially a formula for it, since Google limits
the number of characters you can use. The numbers you need to remember are: 3×30,
2×90, and 2×15.
You have headlines (30 characters each), which are displayed in blue text as the first line of
the ad. Then you have 255 characters (35 shown) for the display URL (also called the
“vanity URL”), which is not the actual URL to which your ad directs viewers, but is simply for display purposes.
For example, if my ad is about polo shirts, I could set the display URL to be www.acme.com/polo-shirts, even if this isn’t the site to which I’m redirecting.
The URL to which you actually direct clicks to your ad is called the “destination URL.” These will often be longer and may contain tracking codes, which makes them messier – so of course, you wouldn’t want these displayed in your ads anyway.
Then you have two description lines of 90 characters each. You’ll notice in the sample ad
below that there are actually a few incentives there.
The first line informs viewers that they can get a new office renovation. Even if they’re not convinced, they can learn more about the costs and benefits for free with an expert.
This is the typical format of a paid search ad, but Google is constantly testing, so if your ad
is displayed at the top of the search results, it may look different.
Whichever ad structure you’re working with, make sure you maximize use of the limited
number of characters you’re given, and make your ad as effective as possible.
