Get The Most Out Of A Small Google Adwords Budget

**Before we start, Google Adwords can work for any size business and budget. Having more budget does help, but it in no way determines the success of your campaign.**

The key components to get the most out of a small Google Adwords budget are Ad Rank, Quality Score, and Geo-Targeting Area. Notice I didn’t say bid or budget amount. Many times business owners are led to believe that you need to have a substantial budget to see any real results. This is a common misconception. With the right approach, success can be achieved with a small Adwords budget.

Ad Rank

Ad Rank is the combination of your bid and Quality Score. By leveraging the Quality Score with a higher quality website and ads, you can slowly eat away at the market-share of businesses much larger than you. A higher Quality Score effectively means that you can bid lower while still achieving the same Ad Rank. This is apparent in the Google Ad Rank Formula below.

Ad Rank = Bid Value x Quality Score (ad & website quality, CTR)

How To Increase Ad Rank

1. Bid Higher
2. Improve Your Quality Score

Increase Quality Score To Get The Most Out Of A Small Google Adwords Budget

Quality score is value generated by Google’s algorithm based on the ‘quality’ of your ad relative to their search users. It takes into account many, many data points. Some of those are landing page relevance/experience, CTR, keyword relevancy and page load time. By squeezing as much as you can out of your Quality Score, you can pay less than other advertisers for clicks. You can optimize your Quality Score by creating a user experience that aligns with Google’s expectations. The simplest way to achieve this is with a fast, responsive website and relevant ads, landing pages, and keywords.

Geo-Targeting & Adwords Budgets

The size of your budget helps determines how large of a geographic area your campaign should target. This along with your service area are taken into account when estimating budgets

How Does Geo-Targeting Strategy Help Get The Most Out Of A Small Google Adwords Budget

In any certain area, there are a given number of daily searches that people make for the keywords in your campaign. Think of it as a ‘live’ market where the value and supply of these keywords fluctuate daily. Depending on where your target area is, you will see a different supply & demand for each keyword. Subsequently, you will pay a different price depending on the supply and demand for those keywords. The amount of the ‘keyword search market’ that your campaign receives is called the Search Impressions Share (SIS). Think of this as your total advertising market-share.

Obviously, to get the most out of a small Google Adwords budget you want to have the largest possible advertising market-share in a given area. Each time that your ad shows up for a users search it is counted as an impression. Your Search Impression Share (SIS) increases when your ads show up more frequently when a user searches your keywords. In Adwords, SIS is represented as a percentage of the total possible impressions.

For example, if you have a 15% SIS, you are missing out on roughly 85% of the search market.

Capturing a significant portion of your SIS is vey important, especially in local/regional small business campaigns. If you are capturing only 20% of your SIS, you have 2 choices to make. Assuming you are bidding competitively, you can either increase your budget to get more Search Impression Share, or narrow your geographic area.

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