Monthly Ad/SEO budget for...

[toddmeister]

Hi Guys

How does £2000 per month budget for Facebook Ads, Google ads & some SEO sound for a competition website? I'd want most traffic to come from facebook/instagram so that's where the bulk of the budget would go. What kind of exposure could I expect for that sort of investment?

Many Thanks

 

[fisicx]

Depends on how big your target group and how good your targeting. Without knowing the product or your target filters everything is just guesswork.

When I last did google ads £50 netted me just over £600 of new business. But a mate spends £500/day to get £1500 per day.

 

[Opinion87]

100. And a piece of string.

How is anyone going to give any useful advice based on that?

 

[toddmeister]

Thanks fisicx for your response appreciate it

 

[fisicx]

You often find spending more doesn’t scale. You reach a saturation point when there just isn’t enough new business to make spending more cash worthwhile. This means you needs to diversify if you want growth.

 

[Alan]

£2,000 is a reasonable amount for a small business, in that it is enough that you can pay a professional to optimise your campaigns and have enough budget to experiment.

The general idea is you spent £X and get back £X++

 

[Darren_Ssc]

What kind of exposure could I expect for that sort of investment?

Your exposure will depend upon the cost per click. That cost will be dictated on how much money other people are willing to chuck at the same target, the quality of your ad and the quality of your landing page as well as how people react to them.

Setting a budget before you know any of this would be foolhardy. Your biggest problem really is not how much coverage you get but how well your ads convert and this, again, is not something you're going to gauge just by the size of your budget.

The market for your product (as fisicx alludes to), your ability to deliver it and the margin per unit will all be limiting factors also.

 

[Paul Carmen]

As Darren says, your exposure and effectiveness can and should be worked out up front. Asking on a forum without giving detail is pretty much akin to saying "how long is my piece of string?".

£2,000 a month is neither a small or large budget, we have clients who spend less and some that spend dramatically more. The key detail here is that we've modelled the spend, measured and then regularly optimised the effectiveness, so their budget achieves or exceeds their aims.

You need to view the whole process in reverse; e.g. what am I trying to achieve as the starting point. I'm guessing, because you haven't told us, but I'm assuming people need to sign up and enter competitions for you to get any value from the process, so you should be targeting a number of visits and then conversions as they key metrics. This combined with your spend on each channel, advert, keyword etc allows you to work out the profitability (ROI) of each area down to a granular level.

You can model a lot of this in advance, especially for Google PPC, as you can see an average cost per click by keyword, then model what this would mean at different click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates. You can do this to an extent with Facebook/Instagram, but depending on your planned ads, may need to work on a cost per impression basis, what you get the visitors to do is also key, as many people get likes and little else. For SEO its harder still, as there is usually an element of online and external work/spend involved to rank anything competitive.

This is just the start, as what really makes the difference is improving the performance once the marketing is live; so testing adverts/copy, landing pages, sign up processes etc. This all improves key metrics like Quality Score, CTR and conversion rate, meaning your 2k spend may not yield that much initially, but it should improve quickly if you target the right keywords, demographics and optimise the conversion processes, stopping what doesn't work.

 

[James Laden]

With SEO you will not see ROI until 5/6, but in the long run if you pick the correct key words it will yields great return. So I feel this depends on the position of the business. For a startup I would say 70%, 30% towards Ads. Then as you grow more 50/50.
Good luck!

 

[Marketing Hub]

What you should be asking is what kind of conversion rate i will be getting. The idea is to put £1 into yours ads and get a £2 return

 

[Fagin2021]

What you should be asking is what kind of conversion rate i will be getting. The idea is to put £1 into yours ads and get a £2 return

That's a figure often quoted - including by Google, and it's rubbish. Maybe ok if you're selling something with a low marginal cost of sale - like a subscription or downloadable software - but if your making something or buying in and selling on you'll need at least £3 to break even and £5 or more to make the advertising worthwhile.

 

[makeusvisible]

£2k for what you have described is reasonable. However, I would be factoring into that an email campaign and remarketing.

You are going to be spending a fair amount per click to get people to the site, either via social or GAds, so its key that you get those people into a remarketing audience so they keep your brand name in their minds and are hit with some ads after they have left the site. Especially important with a product such as yours where the decision to pull the trigger might be more likely after a few vinos on a Friday night!

As a side note, If the site relates to gambling, you will need to show google and FB various licenses and jump through a few hoops before you get up and running.

Key things, especially with FB/Insta, is to segment your Ads, and analyse it like a hawk. Start broad with the audience, and split test your ads.

So for example.... you might want to start by targeting 20+50 year old with 4 ads, targeting professionals and blue collar (for example). Let the ads run, and then dig into which ads perform best, and which segments of the audience engage with them. Narrow the audience down, and as it rolls your cost per click will come down as you start to remove the waste.

Always have 2 ads per campaign minimum, and continue to remove the weaker performer, so performance doesn't dip. Dont expect the same click thrus in month one, as you'll get in month 3,4...5 etc.

Important.... don't have too many campaigns for your £2k budget, or you'll end up with so little data (exposure) per campaign, that you cant make sensible judgments on how to improve.

Hope that helps