By Ted Parry
10 October 2022 
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on ‘How much should my brand on Google ads’. This tackled the question a lot of startups ask when it comes to getting started with Google ads. Too little budget and you don’t have enough data to learn, too much budget and inevitably you end up wasting more than you should for the sake of learning.
This week I want to answer the flipside of this question, How much ‘CAN’ you spend. This post will be split into two sections as answering this question for startups is very different to an established brand.
Google Keyword Planner
The first port of call is generally reviewing which keywords Google associates with your site already. Even if you’re just started, you’ll undoubtedly have content that Google can use to refer to in terms of relevance.
The best tool for this is Google keyword planner. By inputting your domain name in, Google will spit back what it feels is most relevant to your site already.
From there you can take a few of the core keywords, and do a search to see what else Google associates with those terms. Ideally, you want to download this data, and put the core categories into tabs. This will give you an insight into what the current average cost per click is, and the estimated click volume. Just from the data above, there are around 150,000 UK searches a month.
Competitor Research
One core way to assess the market is to review how much your competitors are spending. If your brand is spending £3k per month, but your competitors are spending £30k+ then that’s a very quick and clear indicator you have a large potential to spend more in the market.
By going to SEMRush or SPYFU you’ll be able to see exactly which types of keywords are driving this. Are those keywords relevant to your brand, and you’re not bidding on them? Time to do a review and see if you can capture part of the search market.
Impression Share Analysis
If you’re currently running Google PPC ads, and your campaigns are profitable, then one of the quickest ways to scale is by simply upping budgets. However, Google offers tools that enable you to see how much you’re losing due to underbidding (Impression share lost due to rank), and also budget (impression share lost due to budget), as can be seen in the screenshot below:
Below is a formula with an example you can use to assess how much more you can currently spend.
If your Google ads account is profitable, the easiest solution is always going to be simply increase the budget.
However, it’s often more nuanced than that, what if your budgets are fine, but you’re losing 60% of your budget due to rank. If you’re running automated bidding strategies (which you should be if your account has a decent amount of spend/data) then it’s highly likely your bid strategies are too aggressive. For example, if your current campaign is working on a 2.5x ROAs, but your target is a 4x ROAS, it simply means Google doesn’t have the confidence to increase bids further as it won’t be able to achieve that target.
The above are some ways you can quickly assess the addressable paid search market for your brand. If you are interested in a strategy document that encompasses keyword research, competitor research, and ad copy insight ... get in touch.
Book a call direct via the Amore Digital Calendly.
