Right, let's not beat around the bush. Most paid search budgets are held together with sellotape and blind optimism. We have audited accounts where agencies were charging five grand a month to set fire to client cash. Grim.
If you're running Google Ads without a proper budgeting framework, you're not marketing. You're gambling. And the house always wins.
Start with the maths, not the ego
Before you pick a budget, you need to know your numbers. Not guess them. Know them.
- Customer lifetime value: What's a punter actually worth to you over two years?
- Target CPA: The most you'll pay to land one.
- Conversion rate: Honest one, mind. Not the fluffy one your old agency quoted.
- Close rate: How many leads actually sign on the dotted line.
Multiply those together and you've got a CPC ceiling. Bid above it and you're donating to Google's Christmas party fund.
The 70/20/10 rule we actually use
Fancy agencies love a framework. Here is ours, and it works.
- 70% on what works: Your proven, profitable campaigns. Don't touch them unless they break.
- 20% on expansion: New keywords, new match types, new locations around the Toon.
- 10% on experiments: The mad ideas. Performance Max. New ad formats. Stuff that might tank.
This stops you getting complacent. It also stops you blowing the whole pot on a hunch.
Dayparting isn't dead
Everyone forgot about dayparting. Shame, because it's still a goldmine. If your conversions cluster between 10am and 3pm, why are you paying full whack at 2am?
Pull your hour-of-day report. Cut bids where conversions dry up. You'll save 15 to 25% overnight. Literally.
Match types: the silent budget killer
Google keeps nudging everyone toward broad match. Of course they do. It spends more. Funny that.
We still run a tight exact and phrase match core, with broad match only where we've got strong conversion data to steer the algorithm. Anyone telling you to go full broad without negatives is either lazy or paid by Google. Probably both.
Fancy a proper look at your ad spend?
We'll audit your Google Ads for free and tell you exactly where the money's leaking. No sales pitch, just brutal honesty.
Get your free auditNegative keywords: your best mate
If you're not adding negatives weekly, you're not running the account. You're watching it run you.
Spend ten minutes a week in the search terms report. Block the nonsense. Jobs, free stuff, competitor names you don't want. The PPC crew at Social+Media treats this like brushing your teeth. Miss a day and things rot.
Attribution matters more than you think
Last-click attribution is dead. It has been for years. If you're still optimising to it, you're starving your top-of-funnel campaigns and wondering why growth stalled.
Data-driven attribution, properly set up with enhanced conversions, gives you the full picture. It's fiddly. It's worth it. Pair it with a decent organic strategy and you'll see how the two feed each other.
Quality Score is still king
Google won't tell you this loudly, but Quality Score still decides what you actually pay per click. A jump from 5 to 8 can halve your CPC. That's not optimisation, that's alchemy.
- Ad relevance: The keyword in the headline. Obvious, but most don't bother.
- Landing page experience: If it loads slowly on 4G in Byker, it's too slow.
- Expected CTR: Write ads humans actually want to click.
The Newcastle angle nobody talks about
Local businesses get clobbered by national advertisers bidding on generic terms. Don't play that game. Add geo-modifiers, run separate campaigns for the NE postcodes, and use location bid adjustments ruthlessly.
We've got a whole piece on local PPC if you want to nerd out properly.
Stop the panic pause
Bad week? Resist the urge to pause everything. Panic pausing kills learning phases, destroys historical data, and makes the algorithm start from scratch when you switch it back on.
Dip bids 15%. Tighten targeting. Wait seven days. Assess. That's grown-up budget management.
Reporting that doesn't lie
Impressions are vanity. Clicks are vanity. Even conversions are vanity if they don't turn into cash.
Report on revenue, ROAS, and cost per acquired customer. Everything else is decoration for boardrooms full of people who don't understand marketing.
Wrap up, pet
Paid search budgeting isn't about spending more. It's about spending smarter. Know your numbers, protect what works, experiment with discipline, and never ever trust Google's automated recommendations without reading the small print.
Do that and you'll beat 90% of the competition. The other 10% probably read this blog too.
