I’ve read a lot of articles about how to budget your internet marketing, specifically search engine marketing… most of them use Google metrics and other analytical tools to calculate a budget for the area that you want to target with your ads to come up with a budget. Yes, this works to get a general idea about how much you want to spend…
But as a business owner or marketer, sometimes you also just know how many new customers you want that month or how much new $ you’d like to increase your business by this quarter. Maybe you had a slow quarter and you want to increase business by 10%, or maybe you are an attorney that would like to gain 5 new clients next month.
I never really see articles that discuss creating your advertising budgets by starting with the RESULTS that you want to see from the campaign, so I figured I’d write it myself.
While none of this is purely scientific and going to be 100% accurate because your website statistics and Google pricing will be constantly changing… but you can literally use basic mathematics get a general idea of how much you will want to spend to achieve your desired result based off of past percentages for your own website along with averages for your industry.
Lets look at an example:
John is a roofer looking to gain 5 new clients next month. He knows through his own historical data that he closes 1 out of every 10 leads that comes in. Therefore, to get 5 new clients next month, John will need around 50 incoming leads. From here, an experienced internet marketer will be able to have a ballpark figure of how many page visitors it will take in order to generate those 50 leads. If John has a good website, he should be able to expect at about 8% of the visitors to contact him either via phone or contact form (estimate based on industry and historical data). This number will change depending on the quality of the website and call-to-actions, and the length of sales cycle for your industry. Therefore he will need around 625 website visitors to achieve his 50 leads (625 x 8%). With me still?
Through free Google tools such as the Google Keyword Tool, we can see that each website visit is going to cost the business around $2. We can then come up with a budget to generate the desired number of 625 visitors: 625 visitors x $2/visit = $1,250.
Using these numbers, John should be able to achieve his goal of 5 new customers by spending $1,250 on the search engines.
Now keep in mind that this is not a fail-safe way to look at a search engine campaign, but should merely be used as a guide to see how much you want to spend to achieve a desired result.
Realize that sometime
es the other players in the market may drive up pricing, or if there is a lot of search volume for your industry, you may need to spend more than what you want just by using this method in order to “play the game” against competition… Think of it like going to a Texas hold-em poker game… you want to have a comparable amount of chips so the other players don’t keep upping the bets to drive you out of the game. Its always best to consult an expert when getting involved with any search campaign if you do not know what you are doing.
This theory will work though to give the business owner a general idea of how much you should be spending to achieve your desired advertising result, and during the planning stage to make sure your PPC campaign will be generating a positive ROI for you.
If you like what you’ve read, you can check out other internet marketing articles geared towards local business owners and marketers at www.brettalley.com
-Bret Talley
