-
Client’s with $500/month budgets for Google Ads.
Hello everyone!
Would you tell a client who only wants to spend $500/month for Google ads to even bother? I have a few clients who want to do this, and I urge them to increase their budget, but several have said they want to “test” if ads are right for them (again, I tell more budget is required to truly test).
I have told several from the onset that it would cost them an entire day’s budget to get 1 click, but none seem to care.
How would you approach clients like this? Would you even take them on?
Don’t worry about the margin for myself. The work that goes into these accounts is fairly minimal.
-
11 Replies
-
Don’t spread the budget for the whole month. You can still bring in good results but let them know that budget will not last a whole month.
Remove weekends / and maybe only run ads for a few hours a day even, but run them so you can get a good amount of traffic. Whatever it takes to show them results.
Then you can show them performance and have data on your side to further push the budget issue to them and help them realize more budget = more profit.
-
I think my historic recommendations about running a small budget has a lot more to do with their industry and level of competition (and average cost per click) in their area, if anything.
Selling a very unique, local product? Great.
Personal injury attorney? Don’t bother.
If they are dead set on running and you decide to take, I recommend being very clear up front to set good expectations.
-
Personally I wouldn’t bother.
If they insist, I can run it with the understanding the amount of traffic, performance and account management is going to be minimal.
-
Could work for retargeting.
-
A few considerations here. First, if they pay about $1 CPC in their niche a $500/month budget can go pretty far. If they pay $25 CPC obviously not so much. That’s the first consideration when evaluating whether a budget is appropriate.
Assuming it’s somewhere in the middle you next have to look at what the expected conversion rate is going to be. If it’s very low it’ll be extremely difficult to optimize the campaign in any reasonable timeframe.
But let’s say it is $1 CPC and a 5% conversion rate is expected. That’s 25 conversions per month… perfectly fine budget.
Is more better, yes to an extent because you can obviously optimize faster. But when your budget is too large for your niche you end up spending a much higher CPA.
-
I work with a dozen customer that have budgets this small. It all depends upon a lot of factors…
1. Everything we do is very localized.
2. CPC needs to be reasonable for 15ish high intent keywords – any more and you are wasting their money. These should also be keywords they are not ranking 1-3 in organically.
3. Conversion rate needs to be 2%+ (3%+ is probably optimal)
4. Average order value needs to be commensurate with CPC and conversion rate.Most of my customers are over $190 AOV and CPC starts about $1.25 and goes down. The higher the conversion rate the better this is, but many of our customers look at this as one-time acquisition cost as the annual value of a customer can be 5X the one time order.
Depending upon the customer, I also suggest a small budget for re-marketing in FB. That helps drive up the whole conversion rate as well.
-
$500 isn’t horrible my business was doing over 3 million a year spending 3k a month and through trial and error realized spending more wasn’t going to bring more results due to it being a small industry
-
Some good points mentioned already. We manage mostly regional accounts between 500-6000 euro per month.
If a new client comes to us with a budget lower than that we actually advice to setup their own ads. Yes their CPCs will suffer and yes it will be riddled with mistakes. But it will still be cheaper for them than the mediaspend + our fee.
If they plan to increase the mediaspend in the near future, we advice that they invest in expertise from the beginning.
-
My clients are charities. They have to be very careful about committing spend when running donation appeals. We generally start off with a smaller budget, gauge potential success, then revise the budget as the campaign progresses.
Depending on what they’re advertising, a conversion can be cheap ($15) or very expensive. It’s a competitive sector. ROAS determines long-term spend. Imagine how many charities are currently running ads to get donations for Beirut! And we’re always comparing channels, because Facebook or other ads might give better ROAS.
Problem is, as you point out: the lower the spend, the longer it takes to get enough data to base decisions on. And if they aren’t getting enough conversions regularly, you won’t be able to switch successfully to the better bidding strategies.
-
Have and will again, if the client is reasonable and the project is interesting.
I can do more with less than anyone else, as long as I’m actually allowed to. If there is an impossible mandate that doesn’t actually suit the end goal, then no, I’m not going to be inclined to bother with that nonsense.
-
If you can still charge them 2k/mo management it might be worth it. I have a few clients that get HUGE returns on their PPC spend which is under 1k/mo. Their management fees all start at 2k.
Log in to reply.