As a small business owner or freelancer seeking to advertise your services, you may find it difficult to include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in your strategy because you’re constrained by a limited budget.

If you aren’t careful, costs can pile up and you’ll finish with no more available funds and little to show for your investment. It’s useful to note, however, that everyone — even people and companies who have an extremely limited budget — can use PPC ads.

You just need to know how to maximize your money and increase the efficacy of your ads.

Helpful tips for maximizing your PPC budget

If you have less than $300-$500 per week to spend on paid advertisements, you’re probably feeling pretty limited. Even large organizations who can spend thousands of dollars a day may feel constrained without the right approach.

That’s when it becomes helpful to implement the following tips:

• Utilize Google AdWords giveaways. Are you new to Google AdWords? This popular PPC platform offers new users as much as $50-$100 in ad credits when they sign up. That’s more than enough money to get started, and will allow you to launch PPC with a bang. It’s also not unheard of for Google, Facebook, and other major PPC platforms to offer special deals or bonus credits for completing certain tasks. Keep an eye out for these opportunities and use them to stretch your budget.

• Spend time researching keywords. When you have a limited budget, your biggest enemy is negative and irrelevant keywords. In order to maximize the money you spend, you need to take the necessary time to research keywords so you only use the ones that make sense for your target market. When they seek to drive users to Park View Legal’s Facebook page, campaign managers tirelessly examine every keyword to see which ones are working and which are not. That puts them in a position do design future campaigns for optimal efficiency.

• Learn to love geotargeting. One of the neat things about both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads is that you can geotarget specific locations. This is especially useful for small local businesses. For example, a modest boutique in the suburbs of Nashville probably wants to show ads only to people who live or work within 25 miles of the store. Without geotargeting enabled, ads would appear to anyone, anywhere, which can quickly deplete the budget and likely bring in no valuable return at all.

• Target specific times. Think about the times that your target market is most likely to surf the ’net and interact with your ads. Is it in the morning before work, on the weekends, or right before bedtime? Honestly, it’s probably not going to be one particular window of time, but being able to home in on the most valuable time frames will empower you to maximize the funds you spend. This is known as dayparting; it’s a strategy that’s implemented by all successful online marketers.

Make your ads work for you

Every dollar you spend on PPC ads has the potential to garner a multi-fold return. If you don’t know what you’re doing, though, you can end up blowing through your limited budget in a matter of hours.

Use these tips to ensure you’re maximizing the money you spend and positioning yourself for long-term success down the road.

Categories: General