July 13 2020

It’s not uncommon for clients to offer us additional PPC budget a few weeks before the end of a fiscal quarter. They do their accounting and find they have some unused budget. So they offer it to us — but only if we can use it to get more […]

It’s not uncommon for clients to offer us additional PPC budget a few weeks before the end of a fiscal quarter.

They do their accounting and find they have some unused budget. So they offer it to us — but only if we can use it to get more results.

Unfortunately, PPC doesn’t lend itself well to this kind of short-term strategy.

What Can You Do with a Short-Term Budget Increase?

This happened to us recently with one of our clients.

The client produces high-ticket items in the B2B space, and the number of keywords we can use to advertise these items is very small.

With the client’s current PPC budget, we have a comprehensive mix of campaigns, including branded search, non-branded search, dynamic search ads, remarketing lists for search ads and brand awareness campaigns via the Google Display Network.

In other words, we have a mix of brand awareness and lead generation campaigns, which is awesome.

So what would happen if we were to inject a little bit of extra budget into this account?

Would we see an immediate jump in leads?

Unfortunately, that’s not likely. Getting more leads isn’t as simple as turning a tap on and off.

It’s more akin to landing a plane. You have to plan ahead and lay some groundwork first.

Put Your One-Time Budget Bump into Brand Awareness

However, that doesn’t mean this budget injection is unwelcome. Not at all!

Because we can use this budget bump to drive brand awareness through remarketing lists, increased video ad views and/or gain more visitors via the GDN.

Again, we won’t see the impact of these actions today.

But they will help to solidify our results, even as more competitors come onto the scene.

We discussed this with our client, and fortunately, he understands and is onboard with this strategy.

Successful PPC Requires Longer-Term Thinking

So when you have a little bit of extra budget to put into PPC, don’t expect to see a corresponding jump in performance.

Unfortunately, PPC doesn’t work that way.

Instead, consider putting that budget into brand-building campaigns — and use this as an opportunity to test campaign types you haven’t tried yet — because those activities will pay dividends well into the future.