First off, I heart Google Adwords – big time. After all, it’s this cash cow that pays for the Google party. However, while working with a new client recently, we found their super-handy tools a bit lacking when it came to a simple and common question: “How much should I budget for Adwords?” So we did a little mathematical experiment with some surprising results.
The client had already run an Adwords campaign, but the former Adwords manager refused to hand over the reports. I have no idea why, but he was willing to send over their keyword list.
We were putting a proposal together when someone on the team said we should probably estimate how much they should budget for their new Pay-Per-Click campaign. I sent an email to ask how much they’ve spent before and while we waited we asked Google (using their Traffic Estimator and Keyword Tool).
Take that Adwords estimate with a Google-sized grain of salt.
So, sight-unseen Google’s tools estimated they should spend between $176.78 and $216.06 per month at a maximum cost per click bid of $8. Sounds awesome, right?!
We ran our numbers and came up with about $2,068 per month.
About the time we were finishing our arithmetic, the client responded to the email: $2K to $2.5K per month is what they’ve been spending. That means Google was off — way off.
You see, Google estimates this stuff at a minimum (a very optimistic minimum) by taking Monthly Impressions TIMES Click-through Rate TIMES Estimated Cost-Per-Click.
In our experience their “Monthly Impressions” metric is a little off and about 1 in 20 clicks from a search result are on an ad. So we use: Local Monthly Searches DIVIDED by 20 TIMES Click-through Rate TIMES Estimated Cost-Per-Click. Our calculation tends to yield a conservative maximum.
Well, there you have it. Adwords is great, but when you’re estimating your next Adwords budget, take that couple-hundred dollars a month number with a Google-size grain of salt.