The ever-fluctuating costs of digital marketing have always kept advertisers on a roller coaster of emotions. Each year introduces new businesses, new competitors and brand-new markets. Budget reports now come with a complimentary shot of tequila.
These fluctuations make it almost impossible to predict your costs to run a successful Google Ads campaign. Even so, create your budget using manual bids to gain control of how much you spend. That way, the only fluctuation that occurs is traffic quality and volume.
Even better, you can use more than one channel to decide how much you pay to showcase your product! The Google Search Network and the Google Display Network have way different pricing structures, so you don’t have to spend your whole budget beating away at one part of the buying funnel like a dead horse. We’ll dive deeper into later in this post.
Thankfully, my own experiences allow me to accurately predict how much I’d be paying for a campaign in Google Ads, and it all comes from my manual bid structure.
The cost to advertise on Google can range anywhere from $20 per click all the way to as low as $.05 per click, assuming you’re looking for a decent amount of traffic to your website.
I know, I’m sorry businessowners reading this who are now in the fetal position. The range of bids are extremely varied, depending on the audience targeting and the channel used.
That said, I can still predict your costs. Let me show you how.
Google Ads Cost: Search vs. Display
Let’s say you’re an e-commerce company, and you’re advertising on Search, or the Google Search Network (bottom-of-funnel), to sell high-quality car parts on your website. You can expect a higher cost-per-click because you’ll need to target in “sniper configuration” to compete for that extremely valuable online action. Outsmarting your competition in high-stakes markets takes capitalizing on targeting efforts your competitors overlook.
Your competitors, who are also selling items for a profit of $1,000 or more, have likely set the cost-per-click ridiculously high ($50 or so), since they’ll still gain a ton of profit from their advertising efforts.
At Stolen Ground, my SEM cost-per-click can be as high as $90. Remember, my very high-quality search engine marketing campaign is competing with other very good advertisers who deal with high lifetime customer values.
If you don’t ante up, your VIP viewers will never see your ad. “Joe’s High-Quality Car Parts & Steakhouse” will have paid more to get in front of them, and you’ll be stuck with the person who just searched “cheap car parts for my ’98 Ford Escape.”
In this case, the cost of a google ad might be somewhere around $45-$55, depending on how good your Google Ads Manager is at optimizing your campaign.
If you’re a blog writer, like me, however, you might choose an online action like “signing up for a newsletter.”
That action is so small and top-of-funnel that I may be interested in the Google Display Network, or GDN (top-of-funnel). The GDN is a vast sea of over 2 million websites on which you can advertise. Here, I blast my quality image ad out to other websites at a low cost, and target in a less granular way since my audience is broad.
In this case, the cost of a google ad might be as low as $0.10, since I’m still going to use some audience targeting, but not to the extent where I compete for every click in a financial bloodbath with my competitors.
How Much Do Google Ads Cost Per Month?
If you’re chasing a valuable online action, your targeting is more granular, you’ll probably want to use Search and you’ll be charged upwards of $5 per click on your Google Ads advertisement.
If you’re chasing an invaluable online action, you can target a more broad audience, you’ll likely consider GDN and you’ll generally be charged less than $2 per click.
In general, expect to spend a monthly budget of 20x your expected cost per click in Google Ads. According to valveandmeter.com’s pay-per click stats, the industry benchmark for average conversion rate in 2019 was 3.75%, so a decent Google Ads campaign where your conversion rate is 5% should always see at least a single conversion per month for your budget (5% x 20 tries = 100% likelihood of converting).
If you haven’t seen results after two months, you may want to re-evaluate your click-through rate, landing page and targeting efforts. You might need to narrow your audience!
Estimated Google Ads Cost
I know I’ve listed a few scary numbers in this post, but most industries stay pretty tame. In my experience, costs-per-click range from $5-$10 on Search, and below $1 on Display.
If I’m at the wheel, Google Ad budgets in 2021 stay somewhere around $1,000-$5,000 per city (for accurate results) and need to be built with respect to online goals (brand awareness or sales/leads).
As your business grows, your budget will evolve. Work with your Google Ads Manager to optimize budget across channels and watch the costs plummet and the results spike!
Resources:
https://adespresso.com/blog/how-much-does-google-adwords-cost/
https://moz.com/blog/outsmarting-your-competition-in-highstakes-ppc-markets
