To PPC or not to PPC?!

[fisicx]

My cynical nature aside, what kind of ballpark budget per month works for you?

It depends on what you are selling, how many, to whom and for how much.

People have spent £10,000+ per month. Others get by on £10/day.

 

[JEREMY HAWKE]

I have always been suspicious of marketing companies in the past, who perhaps create false inquiries (usually around direct debit renewal time) to give an impression that they are doing a good job. Competitors are also keen to click on your ads.

My cynical nature aside, what kind of ballpark budget per month works for you?

A good one with an even gooder return

 

[Paul Carmen]

I have always been suspicious of marketing companies in the past, who perhaps create false inquiries (usually around direct debit renewal time) to give an impression that they are doing a good job. Competitors are also keen to click on your ads.

My cynical nature aside, what kind of ballpark budget per month works for you?

You're working with the wrong companies then!

The lead planning and ROI for PPC can be modelled with a fairly decent level of accuracy. You should be getting a decent number of leads that gets better over time. There are things that impact this month to month; e.g. seasonality (a bit in most industries), January sales (massive in some industries), COVID-19 (a big hit in many industries, but lots are now in big growth online), however, in general a decent agency will grow your leads and reduce your cost per lead over time.

Competitors don't click on your ads if you set them up properly, a campaign where competitors are likely to be clicking on your ads is easy to resolve, you use click tracking software and exclude multi clickers, competitors and anyone else running adverts.

As @fisicx says, each campaign and customer is different; we have clients who spend tens of thousands per month, they receive thousands of high quality qualified leads/sales... we have customers who spend a few hundred a week, they still receive tens or even hundreds of highly targeted leads a month.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Return on investment is the key the amount you spend on selling does not matter unless the return is crap

To my thinking SEO should be in house as only you understand your customers and your products, there is no secrets in SEO google tells you what it wants to see

PPC though would be nice in house but is quite time consuming but not impossible to learn just start with a low set amount and experiment

Google shopping is also a good way to get sales and worth consideration

Biggest problem is all area's are full of cowboys at every price level and you may be paying for a couple of hours work at monthly pay rate and poor results apart from a fancy report that looks professional but full of bumf

 

[Digital-Marketeer]

A business consultancy is a pretty hard sell with PPC. Google Ads are now insisting Partners use their optimisation scores to optimise ads, some people would suggest the optimisation is to benefit Google, so even getting a "professional" in might not help. I could suggest Facebook can target "business owners", but ads on social media really need to be subtle.
With search if you think of a problem (that you can solve), it might work as an ad. An example might be appraising staff. An ad addressing this problem, with a dedicated landing page, will draw prospects into your larger sphere. Look for a problem, and then offer to help people fix it.

 

[estwig]

I've been doing my own PPC since it started, almost 20 years ago now, I dropped yellow pages and went straight for it.

I have had marketing guys over the years take a look, they always get it completely wrong. PPC is very complex and requires a lot of effort to get it right, or even close to right. If like me you're a one man band, they only way is to learn and do it yourself.

I'm old skhool and like books for this kinda thing, a good start is: Ultimate Guide To Google Adwords by Perry Marshall

 

[Paul Carmen]

A business consultancy is a pretty hard sell with PPC. Google Ads are now insisting Partners use their optimisation scores to optimise ads, some people would suggest the optimisation is to benefit Google, so even getting a "professional" in might not help.

This is the sort of problem that people have when they get advice like this from a so called professional, the trouble is it's all palpable nonsense!

No proper PPC professional would initially target "business consultancy" or "business consultant" as the keywords for @Stas Lawicki. Those terms have thousands of searches and are just too generic to be of any benefit, unless you wanted to dominate a market and had a huge marketing budget.

You'd work with the company/individual to understand the key services and USPs, to ascertain the solution the OP provides for his clients; e.g. what's the problem and what's the fix. You'd then target longer tail keywords that show buying and problem resolution intent, to drive a profitable targeted lead strategy.

As to "Google Ads are now insisting Partners use their optimisation scores to optimise ads", where did that being a problem come from? They've always provided recommendations for improving campaigns since they updated the Ads platform, however, Google Partners can dismiss these in the same way any other user can. This is where the professional bit comes in; some recommendations are useful, some show things you should investigate further, some are a waste of time and will spend more money for poor return... the professional knows which is which.

 

[Digital-Marketeer]

This is the sort of problem that people have when they get advice like this from a so called professional, the trouble is it's all palpable nonsense!

No proper PPC professional would initially target "business consultancy" or "business consultant" as the keywords for @Stas Lawicki. Those terms have thousands of searches and are just too generic to be of any benefit, unless you wanted to dominate a market and had a huge marketing budget.

You'd work with the company/individual to understand the key services and USPs, to ascertain the solution the OP provides for his clients; e.g. what's the problem and what's the fix. You'd then target longer tail keywords that show buying and problem resolution intent, to drive a profitable targeted lead strategy.

As to "Google Ads are now insisting Partners use their optimisation scores to optimise ads", where did that being a problem come from? They've always provided recommendations for improving campaigns since they updated the Ads platform, however, Google Partners can dismiss these in the same way any other user can. This is where the professional bit comes in; some recommendations are useful, some show things you should investigate further, some are a waste of time and will spend more money for poor return... the professional knows which is which.

Anyone dealing with Google should be aware that although Google offer many freebies and are generally on a mission to improve the browsing experience (and hence keep their dominant search engine status), the Ads part is were they make their money and pay for this.
They will take your money freely and as some posts note, the advertiser is never sure of the return.
So although "optimisation" and "smart bidding" sound clever, and indeed in many cases are, it is not necessarily the best option, especially as Google would like you to spend more. Remember Google Ads is supposed to be an auction and a canny auctioneer gets bidders to raise the bids against each other, more commission to him.
Against this background, Google are now actually making it a condition that continued "Partnership" status requires the "professional" to apply these optimisations. As Paul notes a professional would exercise his judgement to obtain the best deal for his client. This is effectively removing the "professional discretion" to work for the client's best interest. This is not saying that "Partners" aren't worth engaging, but some form compromise has been made, dare I say it in Google's favour.
I have used Google for over 15 years, I even received a payout from their spam clicks settlement years ago. I love many of the things they do and offer and hold many of the course certificates in search and analytics. However I have never lost the idea that in playing ball with them, they could always potentially hit you with a bat!

 

[Paul Carmen]

@Digital-Marketeer this is again disingenuous, while Google do change the rules all the time and could make it so you have to only use automated bidding, or implement all their recommendations, they haven't.... if they do you'd have to make a call on whether the Google Partner badge does much for you (it's never found us a single customer, although it adds some cache). At Insite Web we'd drop the badge and continue to deliver the requirement for the client if they did that, as I suspect would many agencies...

What you have to do currently is hit a 70% optimisation score overall, this is pretty easy to do by setting the accounts and campaigns up properly and applying a few recommendations.

 

[Digital-Marketeer]

@Digital-Marketeer this is again disingenuous, while Google do change the rules all the time and could make it so you have to only use automated bidding, or implement all their recommendations, they haven't.... if they do you'd have to make a call on whether the Google Partner badge does much for you (it's never found us a single customer, although it adds some cache). At Insite Web we'd drop the badge and continue to deliver the requirement for the client if they did that, as I suspect would many agencies...

What you have to do currently is hit a 70% optimisation score overall, this is pretty easy to do by setting the accounts and campaigns up properly and applying a few recommendations.

It cannot at all be disingenuous to be wary of Google's intent to make money. I love them, but handle them with care. They do push clients on optimisation, like it's a magic bullet to get results. I have felt over the past few years they are more focused on revenue. Daily bid limits for example, have effectively become monthly ones, with the latitude to spend double the set limit, then there was Adwords Express.
I attend live auctions (or used to!) bidding for antiques. We always had a bidding plan to try and "game" the auction. If everyone played on the same plan it would have led to higher prices. This is the danger with some of Google's strategies. I am sure you advise well, but how many "Partners" really give a monkeys? If I was selling snow in Greenland someone would take me on, after all they get paid for it, and they would leave it up to me to work out it's a futile exercise. As long as you turnover £10K, going up to £20k a quarter as "proof" that you are a successful marketer, Google don't really give a monkeys either.
Which is the real point of this thread, when it comes to PPC, as auctioneers used to put it, "caveat emptor".

 

[Andrew Bolton]

Apologies, if this question has already cropped up in this thread, but has anyone managed to get compensation from Google over click fraud ? Over the last 10 years we have paid around £15k per annum on PPC, and recently discovered that for a couple of weeks, hundreds of £s had been clicked up by fraudulent robotic visits from India, even though we are location specific in our Campaigns. Google weren't interested in our complaint, so I have stopped this regular not insignificant monthly outlay, of up to £2k ..and the good and surprising thing is, that our customers are still finding us organically. But I still feel we should have been supported and compensated by Google in this

 

[Aleksander_Gramm]

Apologies, if this question has already cropped up in this thread, but has anyone managed to get compensation from Google over click fraud ? Over the last 10 years we have paid around £15k per annum on PPC, and recently discovered that for a couple of weeks, hundreds of £s had been clicked up by fraudulent robotic visits from India, even though we are location specific in our Campaigns. Google weren't interested in our complaint, so I have stopped this regular not insignificant monthly outlay, of up to £2k ..and the good and surprising thing is, that our customers are still finding us organically. But I still feel we should have been supported and compensated by Google in this

Usually Google compensates the missing money. I don't know how their system works but our clients got a money on Google Ad account after few days the finish of a campaign.

 

[Armorica]

Probably it is a better idea to hire a professional to set up a successful campaign.
Anyway, you can try to work on the relevance of your keywords. PPC is all about various tests, so you can waste budget and time till you find the proper combination of all factors.