Surfside PPC Podcast

What's up everyone? Today I'm going to be going over Google Ads budget pacing and a little bit about bidding and how they relate to budgeting. So kind of talking a little bit about budgeting and bidding today in Google Ads. So before we get started, I always like to mention my Google Ads course is out released. You can get it at my website surfidepc.com. You can find my Google Ads course there. I do consulting. I have free training videos that you can sign up for as well. So if you're just interested in getting the free training videos, jump on over there and you can get all of that. So let's get into our actual video itself. Basically, Today, I want to start with going over how to actually pace your budget and a quick little trick that you can use to see what other advertisers are potentially spending in your area. So, one of the things that you can do to kind of figure that out first and foremost is when you go through the process of creating a campaign and you get to the very end finish line, Google is basically going to give you some type of idea of how much you can expect to spend. So, let me do this actually in my other account. So, I create another account for tree company leads. Uh, this is another or another thing I'm working on. So I always have a couple things I'm working on. And if we come in here and we click on the plus sign, create a new campaign. Going to go through this process quickly. So the whole point of this is to show the one thing at the very end. So this is for for this particular thing, we're going to be using a search campaign. Website visits. We're going to use we'll use the tree service company I did yesterday. All right. So basically what this is going to tell you is when you set your location targeting. So for this company, they're they're based in the Myrtle Beach area. I'm going to target the Myrtle Beach DMA market. So that's a pretty pretty wide area. It says 1.5 million total reach, which actually isn't that big. Um, and then people with presence in this area, so we're going to do it that way. The rest of these look good. We're not going to use AIAX in this example. We're going to generate this. So, basically what this is going to show here is we have all of these different keywords. So, tree removal, tree service, tree pruning service, all these things. Over on the right hand side, you're going to see this is what they're basically telling you your weekly estimates are going to be, which be great weekly estimates for a tree service company. So, spending about $800 driving 13 conversions, spending about $60 per conversion. So, what this is telling you is if you're going to budget something, take this and essentially multiply it by four or divide it by 7 and multiply it by 30. But essentially, if you take this number, let's just take $800. $800* 4 is $3,200. So, basically what this is telling you is you should probably budget about $3,200 for the best results. That's one thing based on the weekly estimates. Now, if you build this out a little bit better, get all of your actual keywords here. Now, this is going to be a decent idea. We're just looking at what the overall search volume is around these keywords. And now, if we click on next, you could see this is basically what they're recommending as our average daily budget. And this is mo likely to spend somewhere around $3,200 for the month. So, this is the first thing I want to show you as part of this video. Um, I'll probably do a separate video about this because it's okay, we'll come back out over here. So, basically, you have an idea of what to budget for a search campaign depending on the market you have and the actual keywords you're targeting. So, that's something that I use a lot when people are like, "What's the forecast data that I can actually use. The other thing you could use is the Google keyword planner. They have a forecast tool in there. I generally think using that search tool is a little bit more accurate. Sometimes I've had clients who are like, "Hey, we want to spend about $50 a day." And I go through that process and it's up to like 350 400. And it's something I tell them. I'm like, "Hey, this is just just letting you know this is telling me that other people in your industry are spending about this much." So, it kind of gives you the idea of what the forecast is out there and what the right budget to set is. Now, as far as budget pacing, um, one of the good things things about Google is they kind of tell you what you're going to spend based on what you're budgeting or at least the the maximum amount you'd be charged for. So, this is saying if you set your daily budget at $81.35 for right now I'm in March 2026. It's saying I will not spend more than $2,19645 for this campaign. Now, how does that work? Essentially, what it's saying is you're not going to spend more than this budget number times roughly 30. So, how many days in a month? Take that, multiply it the real number is 30.4, but if you just multiply that number by 30, it's going to give you a good idea of how much you're going to spend. So, the easy work around for this is if a client says, "Hey, we have a $3,000 monthly budget." You say, "Okay, well, we're going to budget $100 per day." Now, as far as pacing that budget, really the best way to pace a budget is to have it spend fairly consistently. And the good thing about Google Ads is they are actually going to optimize your budget throughout the entire month. So, if Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. end to be the times where the majority of your leads come in. Let's just say that's when most people are calling, most people are filling out forms. Most of your conversion actions are happening at that time. So when somebody's clicking on your ads, that click is happening at that time and that's when that conversion is taking place. So what Google is going to do is automatically try to spend the majority of your budget in those time periods. One thing that you can do is go here into your insights and reports when and where ads showed and actually look at when your ads showed by day and hour. I like to look at day and look at a large set of results and usually you'll have an idea of like, okay, Sundays are just dragging down our campaign. There's sometimes where I'm like, let's just remove Sunday. Spend your budget on the six days of the week that actually drive conversions. So, when it comes to budget pacing, you actually should not constantly update your budget or change your budget. And honestly, the best thing that you can do is take your monthly budget and set it as a daily budget to get started. Now, for new campaigns, new advertisers, I generally work up to this budget. So, in the case of, you know, let's say Google's telling me to spend $3,200 a month. I may start my budgeting at around instead of $100 a day, I may start it at $75 a day. So, my goal with budgeting in the initial stages is spending the least amount that I can to get conversion data into the account. It's not an easy thing to do. So, a lot of times what I try to do is get conversions in early because basically clients are looking for that. They're going to say, "Okay, we spent $200. We have nothing in here." I'm like, "Well, we have six clicks, you know, and it's expensive industry. It's going to take some time for us to figure this. out. But ultimately, that's the challenge sometimes, like you're trying to get clicks in for a reasonable cost on relevant keywords. So, I usually keep my budget as limited as I can at that point. But one thing to know with budgeting is if your average cost per click, like let's just say a law firm, law firms, you know, let's just say the average cost per click for an injury law firm is $100. Now, that's that may honestly be low, you know, in some cases, but let's just say the average cost per click is $100. You can't realistically budget $75 a day. You can't really basically budget $200 a day. Cuz if you're only if basically what your cost per click is compared to what your budget is, you need at least 5 to 10 clicks a day. That's like a minimum. 10 clicks is really where you want to be or more. So when you look at a law firm and it's $100 a day, yes, to get those 10 clicks, it's going or $100 a click. To get those 10 clicks, it's going to cost you $1,000 a day. Now, there's a lot of upside that comes with those clicks. So if you're a law firm that's able to take on a lot of clients and you're running ads, then makes a lot of sense to say yes, let's make sure that we are spending this money and we do have a high budget set. Now, you can get away with not actually saying we're going to set a $30,000 monthly budget. But the thing is, if you set a $30,000 monthly budget and you are getting leads at, let's just say $500 or $700. I mean, those leads can turn into a huge, you know, huge cases and huge payouts. So, that's the whole point and that you need to do it in bulk to make it work. So, for budget pacing, one of the most important things and Google's actually started to add more related to this where if you go into your actual campaign itself and I say okay my bidding I want to change my bidding strategy to conversions I want to set a target CPA and I want to set it for $50. Google's been starting to put they don't have it here but if you're not 50 set it for $200 still not giving it to me but basically they're giving more where if your target CPA is set too high and your budget is set too low essentially the Google ad system doesn't work. It's it kind of stinks that that's how it works especially if you're not trying to spend tons of money on Google ads, but there are companies that have been priced out because to get those clicks, it's very expensive. To make Google ads work properly, you really need to drive 200 plus clicks per month into an account. Because with 200 plus clicks, that gives you a chance at driving the conversion volume necessary. Google's minimum threshold is 15 conversions or more per month, but ultimately what you want is more conversion volume makes your campaigns work much better. So, the way that I would look at it is if you take your budget and let's just say you're, you know, using the the law firm as an examp example, you could start your budget at something like $300, $400 a day. Just know you're not going to get a ton of clicks initially. I'd probably start that budget at at least 500. And my goal initially would be getting clicks in for, you know, $125 or less. If I'm using exact match keywords with maximized clicks, uh that would be with a $500 budget here. So, when you're looking at budget pacing, the main thing to keep in mind is whatever budget you set, if I set this budget to $500 a day, Google will basically say you won't be charged more than this times 30. So that's a big number. You know, if I set it at a,000, it's $15,000 obviously. So it's, you know, that that's a big number. And sometimes what can happen is if you set your budget too high, you'll notice just random spikes in spend, some random spikes in your average cost per click. So always keep in mind that your budget and your bidding really do work hand in hand. And you, you know, the ultimate scenario and where I usually find the best success is when I'm working with a client where they're like, "Hey, we want to get leads at $25 or less and we want to spend $200 a day or $300 a day. It's like perfect. We're we're driving two, three, four leads a day. Sometimes more, sometimes maybe slightly less, but over a 30-day period, we're getting tons of conversion volume and we're able to optimize more effectively because we're getting those conversions tied back into Google Ads. So, when it comes to budgeting, main thing that I would say is you always want to work off of a monthly budget and set your daily budget to get there. If you're working up to a specific budget, then ultimately what you want to do over time is say, "Okay, we can expand this budget cuz we're seeing really good conversion data and we're ready to kind of take that next step of spending double or triple what we currently are and then pacing multiply this number by 30 and that essentially sets a budget for Google for you and there are times where Google may tell you in here in this forecast data the campaign budget simulator they may tell you hey you can go up with your budget by 50% and not really see much of a drop off in terms of your overall efficiency. So the main thing is keeping in mind that your your bidding should improve at as you continue to run your campaigns and you're budgeting ultimately you would like for this to increase. So if you have a higher budget, it gives you a chance to enter more auctions in Google Ads. If there's only, you know, 500 premium auctions for the keywords that you're targeting that month, it's like you want to enter there's generally a lot more than that, but you want to enter every single one of those. And the best way to do that is making sure your budget is high enough and make sure your bids aren't very low so that you are bidding effectively to actually drive the right clients to you. So little overview of budget pacing, how to figure out what to actually spend. The final thing is if you know if you go into tools and you go into your keyword planner here, we'll just stick with our tree removal. So, if we do tree removal near me and we'll say we're targeting, let's pick a state. We'll do Oklahoma. I never do Oklahoma. Okay, so we have 5 million people in Oklahoma according to this. Get results. This is saying to do tree removal near me in Oklahoma. These are very low numbers. I need to target some Oklahoma tree removal companies, but you'll see tree service near near me. tree trimmers near me, tree cutting service near me. So, we have all of this, you know, basically looking at this data, it's saying we can bid 5, 10, $15 and probably get some clicks. If we bid at $15, even at a $13 cost per click, the way that I always look at this is if we take this as this is what our cost per click is going to be. Generally, it's somewhere in the middle here. What I always do is multiply it by 10, that's a 10% conversion rate. That will give you $130 per conversion. So, pretty good results seeing it that way. Multiply it by five, That is how you kind of simulate a 20% conversion rate and that's going to be somewhere around $65. So not a bad top of page, you know, not a bad cost per conversion estimate as far as, you know, tree removal. I'm sure South Carolina is probably similar numbers to this. So ultimately, these are really good numbers, honestly. So I think the the the thing you want to do is try to set your budget as high as possible and then over time when you are not in Google Search Console, when you are in your campaign, We want to set your target CPA to a point where it's like, hey, this is where we feel comfortable driving conversions. You know, if we're like, hey, keep cost per conversion under 100 bucks, we're happy. You can set target CPA to 100. You can set your budget really high. Generally, if the numbers make sense, you know, if cost per click isn't $50 per click, then your cost per conversion will come in under this number. But setting it a little bit higher gives you a little bit more leeway with I want to spend this budget. I want to drive my leads. Just try to keep my lead costs under this amount. So, that is budget pacing. A little bit of how bidding works with it. But if you have any questions about budgeting, costs, anything like that, please leave them in the comment section. Thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel.