How can you avoid common budget mistakes in your search ad campaign for e-commerce?

1 Define your goals and KPIs

Before you start bidding on keywords and allocating your budget, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your search ads and how you'll measure your success. Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or boost conversions? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your goals, such as impressions, clicks, cost-per-click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), conversions, cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or return on ad spend (ROAS)? By defining your goals and KPIs, you'll be able to set realistic and relevant targets for your budget and optimize your campaign accordingly.

2 Choose the right bidding strategy

Depending on your goals and KPIs, you can choose between different bidding strategies for your search ads. Some of the most common ones are manual CPC, enhanced CPC, target CPA, target ROAS, and maximize clicks. Each one has its own advantages and disadvantages, and you need to understand how they work and how they affect your budget. For example, manual CPC gives you more control over your bids, but it also requires more time and effort to monitor and adjust them. Enhanced CPC allows Google to automatically adjust your bids based on the likelihood of conversion, but it can also increase your costs if the conversions don't materialize. Target CPA and target ROAS let you set a desired cost or return for each conversion, but they can also limit your traffic volume if your targets are too low or too high. Maximize clicks aims to get you as many clicks as possible within your budget, but it can also lower your quality score and conversion rate if the clicks are not relevant or qualified.

3 Track and optimize your budget performance

Once you've launched your search ad campaign, you need to keep an eye on how your budget is performing and how it's affecting your KPIs. You can use tools like Google Ads' budget planner, performance planner, and recommendations to get insights and suggestions on how to improve your budget efficiency and effectiveness. You can also use reports like the search terms report, the auction insights report, and the campaign performance report to analyze your keywords, competitors, and results. Based on the data and feedback you get, you can make adjustments to your bids, keywords, ad groups, ad copy, landing pages, and other elements of your campaign to optimize your budget allocation and ROI.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?