If you’ve been following our series on pay per click advertising, you should have a well organised collection of keywords and corresponding adverts. You’re almost ready to go, so it’s time to talk cash.

How deep are your pockets?

First things first – how much money do you have available for your PPC advertising campaign? If you’ve claimed your Google AdWords vouchers, free with web hosting, Virtual Private Servers, online shops and instant websites, you’ll have a bit of a head start for the launch of your campaign  That aside, though, for the sake of keeping track of your finances you really need to be thinking in terms of a monthly budget.

So, what can you spare? Figure out from that how much you want to spend per day. You’ll see that Google recommends a daily budget based on your keywords – if your budget is lower than this, Google aims to deliver the ads when demand is greatest, which means you should have presence at the busiest times but your ads won’t be available to be seen 24/7. The trick is to find the best possible balance between what you can afford and what the market will deliver.

Here’s a bit more from Google about campaign budgets.

Setting your bid prices

You’ll also need to give some thought to bid prices. For each keyword, you’ll need to consider both what you can afford to bid and what the market price is – if other people are paying over £1 per click your ad won’t get displayed if you’re only prepared to pay 50p. Inevitably, some keywords will cost more than others because they’re more popular so you’ll need to balance the higher cost per click against the higher potential rewards of a popular search term.

Here’s a bit more from Google about bidding.

It’s time to launch your campaign!

Now that you’ve built your campaign and sorted out your budget it’s finally time to go live! Once you’ve done so, you can check that your ads are appearing without racking up impressions at: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Don’t just fire your campaign off into the ether and leave Google to it, though – to get the best results you need to keep an eye on how all your keywords are performing. We’ll talk a bit more about ongoing campaign management in the next article.

Earlier Articles in this series

Part One – Generating your keywords

Part Two – Keyword match types

Part Three – Writing your adverts