Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. It's Regina here from Starter PPC. Today, we're going to talk about budget allocation per campaign, so how much daily spend should be given to each campaign. I just want to start out by saying there's no hard and fast rule here. There's no magical right answer and a formula where I can say x percent to this campaign and x percent to that campaign, just because everybody's business is different, every industry is different, even seasonally, things change. Things can even change if it's a new account versus an old account, right? And so also how much budget you have matters, how big your market size matters, whether it's raining outside, whether you're wearing pants. I'm just kidding. But I will tell you that there is a rule of thumb, like a formula, that we tend to default to. And then there's a million exceptions on top of it. But I'm going to talk through the formula, and then I'm going to talk about a couple of the interesting exceptions. So the formula that we tend to default to is the 60-40 rule. So 60% of your budget would go towards campaigns that focus on getting new users, cold traffic, fresh meat. And 40% of your daily budget would go towards warm users, right? Most of them are already on your website. Or if they weren't, they've already heard about you elsewhere. So they're searching for your brand name, most likely. Yeah, that is something that we tend to kind of default to. This is true when we're launching a fresh new account with zero history. And this is true when we're scaling an account that's been with us for two years. However, there are many exceptions to that rule, which I'll get into in a second. When I say new users and new customers and cold traffic, what I'm talking about is things like inbound search, right? So inbound search would be a campaign where someone's searching for tools, if you're selling tools. They don't really know about you. They're just searching for tools. So inbound search, for example, that would be cold traffic. An example of very cold traffic would be like, sorry, let me back up. DSA, Dynamic Search Ads, is another type of search campaign that's really highly automated. So we do run those quite a bit, but not with brand new accounts. We would usually wait and run those a little bit later. Another example of cold traffic account would be like outbound display, outbound video. When I say outbound, I mean that you're choosing an audience, like an in-market audience, which is one of those buckets that Google has, like someone who's in the market to buy tools. They've been searching for tools recently. They've been looking at pictures of tools on the internet and watching videos full of tools on YouTube. And so we decide to go after people that are in market for tools. And we show them images, lifestyle images, of people using your tools. That would be like an outbound display or video, right? Outbound video, showing video commercials, basically, to people that are looking for tools. Let's see. What am I missing? Shopping. Shopping is a little tough because it does tend to, shopping tends to be mostly outbound, right? Because if you're on the shopping page in Google, you're not necessarily looking for a specific brand most of the time, although people could type in a brand name into shopping. So shopping is a little bit of everything. However, some shopping campaigns are more outbound than others. Like standard shopping tends to go after the cold traffic, whereas a PMAX feed-only campaign, or what used to be called smart shopping, it tends to do whatever it wants. So if it can find warmer traffic over in the shopping area, it's going to go after that first. So someone who's in the shopping area looking for brand, or a user who was recently on the website, and now they're looking for tools, they're searching shopping network for tools, the smart shopping is going to go after those people really hard compared to fresh people. So it's a little bit warmer, but it's still considered a cold traffic campaign. Most shopping campaigns is mostly cold traffic. Whereas standard shopping, it's not really going to distinguish between someone who was recently on the site. It's not going to necessarily go after branded traffic any harder than it would somebody just searching for tools who just popped up middle of nowhere and decided to buy tools. So standard shopping tends to be kind of a heavy lifter. It goes after that cold traffic. Obviously, warm traffic campaign examples of those would be video remarketing, display remarketing, PMAX. Full PMAX campaign tends to do like 80% warm traffic if it can. It's going to try to go after the easiest traffic first. And then whatever money it has left, it's going to go after cold traffic. And you don't have much control or even insight over how much of its money is it spending on each activity. So that's something to watch out for. What am I missing? What campaign types am I missing? Those are the main ones that we tend to stick to. Here at StartupPPC, we don't tend to do smart campaigns much. We'll run local ads, but those are just an extension now. So they're kind of part of an inbound campaign or part of a shopping campaign. So it has become like an add-on. Yeah. OK, so now that you know the difference between the two campaign types, I want to talk about some of the issues that we run into. So oftentimes, our clients will say, hey, this campaign isn't working. I can see that it's not bringing a return. Please turn it off. And we spend a lot of our energy saying, no, no, no, no. We can't turn that campaign off. Here's why this is happening. Let me show you with an example. We will allocate money, for example, towards a remarketing campaign. So down here, we've got remarketing. Six czar a day, almost seven czar. Czar is like New Zealand, South African rams. That's what they are. So our client is based out of South Africa here. OK, video remarketing is a campaign that tends to not get very many clicks. And when it does, Google has trouble tracking that user through to the sale. It's a really interesting phenomenon. I don't want to get into the technical details right now. You just have to trust me that when you run a video remarketing campaign, a display remarketing campaign, and even a standard shopping campaign, these three campaigns tend to be very, I'm sorry, let me back up. If you run any video campaign, any display campaign, whether it's to a remarketing audience or not, or a standard shopping campaign, these three campaign types tend to be much less likely to be able to track the users than something like a brand campaign, right? Brand is oftentimes the last click before the sale, right? People have already, they know about you. They're looking for you. They're ready to buy. It tends to have a one-click conversion. So our clients will come and say, oh, look, these aren't bringing a return. Look, I can see here in the return on ad spend column that it's getting the lowest return compared to the rest. So let's take the money from these campaigns and give it to these campaigns. Well, that messes up our 60-40 rule, first of all. Second of all, we just can't rely on the tracking to tell us whether these campaigns are working or not. So what we want to do is we want to trust that we need to spend at least 50%, ideally 60% of our daily efforts doing the hard work of looking for new users to try to build awareness and bring them into the site. And then less than 50%, ideally 40%, nurturing those users and bringing them back. OK, so we have to look at the account holistically because some campaigns are better at tracking than others. And we can't rely on this particular column on a per-campaign basis to tell us what's most profitable. Oftentimes, you shut off these campaigns that aren't good at tracking, and suddenly the other campaigns take. It happens all the time. In fact, sometimes with clients, we do what they ask because we try to explain it to them, and they don't understand. And so we turn it off and prove with data that it brought down the return for the overall business. And then they say, yep, go ahead and turn it back on. Hi there. Quick interruption. Do you know the main thing that prevents small business owners from getting their Google Ads account into a position to grow and scale? Budget. A lot of businesses, especially those that are just starting out, have limited budgets. And so because of this, they're turned away by most ad agencies because most ad agencies have minimum budget thresholds that they're willing to work with. So what happens is the business owners end up learning Google Ads themselves. And the problem with that is that most of the advice online is geared towards larger accounts. And the advice doesn't have any of those strategies or tricks that can kickstart the algorithm into giving a small account a leg up over larger competitors. So it often just doesn't work, and the business just ends up losing money month over month. If this sounds familiar, Starter PPC can help. We offer Google Ads management services that are designed for accounts that have between $1,000 and $5,000 budgets. And because all of our clients are just starting out, we've come up with ways to keep our management fees significantly lower than most agencies because we know that every dollar saved on management fees just goes towards the ad budget, which is going to help the algorithm gather speed and power. So if you're serious about growing your business and you'd like a team of Google Ads experts to help you without breaking the bank, check us out at starterppc.com. OK, back to the video. All right, I want to talk about some exceptions to the 60-40 rule. For example, an exception might be a financial planning business, right? So a financial planner has a very long sales cycle. Somebody might take months before they decide to hire this person. And there's a lot of competition out there, too. And you're selling yourself, right? You have to build trust before this person's ready to hire you. Maybe you've even talked to them and they're still not ready. So they're still kind of in your pool. You're still advertising to them for months. This would be an example of a business where we wouldn't mind spending more than 40% on warm traffic, just a little bit more maybe. We might skew it towards remarketing. Because it's such a long sales cycle that we have to make sure we're investing properly into converting the leads that we did find, because each lead is so expensive and they take so many touch points before they convert, that remarketing is really important for that particular business. So we make sure to try to max out as much of the warm traffic campaigns as we can. And we might do 50%, 50%, for example. OK, other exceptions are like, let's say we have a brand new Google Ads account. It doesn't have any history. Well, first of all, it's probably not going to run remarketing yet, because it takes Google. Well, Google has to build a list of recognized users. I think about 1,000 people. And so depending on what your ad spend is when you first get started, that could take a month or two or three, also depending on your cost per click, right? And so sometimes there is no remarketing in the beginning. And so we'll take that money and we'll just put it into cold outreach efforts. And so oftentimes, that's hard, because for the first month or two or three with brand new clients, they expect wild returns right out the gate. And sometimes there's this uphill battle in the beginning with Google Ads where you have to build that remarketing list. You have to do lots of marketing. You have to do a lot of marketing. You have to build that remarketing list. You have to do lots of cold prospecting. You have to nurture these people. And you have to start to get recognition for your brand. And so the first few months is less profitable than it will be. We will oftentimes, in those cases, build the campaigns. But we won't give them any budget. We'll give them like $1. And then when they start to spend, we'll allocate a few more dollars from other campaigns into those. And make sure, by the way, while we're on the subject, that you're not overspending on remarketing. We have these columns over here, average impression frequency per user to decide how much to spend. So for example, this video remarketing campaign on the top is doing pretty well. I think it's showing videos about seven times for every user every month, seven times here. I think this one needs to be slowed down. I think just seeing the video 32 times in a month is just too many times. So we'll give it a dollar or two by taking it away from this campaign and moving it to other campaigns. So we fine tune it over time to make sure we're not overspending, because we don't want to just exhaust the audience. Do keep in mind there's multiple videos inside of each campaign. So it's not like they're seeing the same video 32 times. It's rotating through those videos. And we try to add videos as often as our clients give us videos. And one way that you can try to help prevent overspending on video remarketing campaigns is we always add a cap. Frequency capping here in the settings, limited to right now three impressions per day and one view per day. A view is when somebody watches beyond the Skip Ads button. So we try to cap it. We might need to just either lower this cap or just move money away from that campaign. Either one would work. We might do some of both. Another example of an exception to this rule would be brand. So again, if you're a brand new brand, maybe you're really small, maybe you're just starting out, there might not be very much brand traffic searching for you. So you might decide to hold off on brand. If your budget is very limited in the beginning and there's not a significant body of people that are searching for you, don't bother with brand. Because you want to have enough data in each campaign so that the algorithm can start to gain patterns. If you're not getting a couple of conversions a week or at least like five or six conversions a month at a minimum, it's probably better just to not bother setting up a brand campaign and put your money into cold outreach until you have that body of people that are looking for you. And you can see if you pull up these columns, Search Impression Share and Click Share, this is a pretty good gauge for the brand campaign to figure out how big the market size is. You can also go into the Keyword Planner tool, which is up here in Tools and Settings. You can type in your brand name and Google will try to estimate how many people there are out there that are searching for your brand name every month. But here you can see we're kind of, and this is the other end of the exception to our 60-40 rule, is when you have so much brand that you could max it out at 100%, but we never recommend that. In fact, we try to not go over 80%. I think this one's a little bit too high here, 80%. Some people push it to 90%. It's just that it becomes very inefficient, meaning that last 10% or 20% of the clicks that you could be getting if you put more money into brand, it doesn't go as far. And you might as well spend that money on cold outreach. So some exceptions where we'd go, ah, brand is maxed out. Let's not put more money into that warm traffic area. We don't really need to. It's not going to be as efficient as just using that money for cold prospecting. I don't use these columns much for the inbound search because it really confuses me how it can have 12% of the total available search impression share being used up, and yet 80% of the total available click share. Google needs to explain that one. I was trying to figure it out before I hit record. And I think it might mean that the click-through rate is much higher than the competition because it sounds like we're not maxing out the search impression share, the total available search impression share for these keywords. We're not even close. So we have low impressions. But we have high clicks compared to the total click share. So I think that means we're really efficient with the impressions that we do get. That's my theory. I'm going to go with that. Anyways, I just use these columns mostly to figure out how much we're maxing out on the brand because this is a pretty closed target audience. This is a pretty specific keyword. There's just one or two keywords in these campaigns. Whereas inbound search is all over the place. It gets very complicated to decide who's being targeted. What even is the total available impression share on 50 keywords that are all broad match or phrase match? So that's why I don't use those columns for this campaign, these types of campaigns. OK, well, those are my thoughts around budget allocation. I hope the 60-40 rule provides at least a starting place for you guys when you're trying to decide whether to keep that cold standard shopping campaign that doesn't look like it's doing much or whether to turn it off. Just keep in mind, if you turn off that campaign, make sure you're keeping a very close eye on the other campaigns to see if they suffer. You might be better off just finagling the budgets on that campaign rather than shutting it off completely. And try to decide how much money is efficient to allocate towards those cold traffic campaigns. And we do find that 60-40 on an overall account is where it's at. And these are big numbers because it's ZAR, but I think if we added them all up and divided them between cold and warm, I think you would find the 60-40 allocation or at least something to it. All right, well, that's all I've got for today. Thank you for watching. If you like this video, don't forget to hit Like and Subscribe and I'll see you guys later. Hey, everyone, it's Regina at Starter PPC. We often work with new businesses, businesses that are just starting out, or maybe they've been around for a few years but they haven't really pushed for growth yet. They haven't really done the Google Ads thing or done any ads, really. So we often get asked the question, is my business now ready for Google Ads? What?