How much to invest in adwords to test the waters?

[kingoftherodeo]

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Hey all

I have almost finished my retail site and am going to predominantly drive traffic using a PPC campaign. What do you guys generally suggest as a test budget to really see how it can work. I very proficient setting up the adwords accounts but not sure what to use as a budget to see how it goes. Obviously a £50 daily budget isnt going to get me far, was thinking £100 to see how it goes for one day, then go from there?

What is the busiest day of the week to test on? Its mostly mail order catalogues then drilling down to category types, i.e. electricals etc.

[tbp]

I would start with a low budget, just to test the water.

Turn on the accelerated display, and your ad's will still be constantly displayed until your budget is used up. You can then increase your budget if you wish.

If you use normal display with a low budget, google will only show your ad's now and again, to try and spread the ad's display over the course of the day. Accelerated display won't do this, so is an ideal way to test the waters without spending huge amounts of money.

You don't necessarily need a high budget with adwords, and with affiliate ad's where you have a very low margin, you can't usually afford a high budget. As an example, my most campaign has a daily budget of £10, and I don't usually use even 50% of this. However, it still gives very good returns.

Remember that upping your budget is not an instant solution to more sales. I`ve posted the above before, and people have said "why just have a £10 budget, spend more!". However, the campaign is not scaleable. If I set a £20 budget, I wouldn't get a lot more sales because the search levels aren't there. As I don't hit my £10 budget, theres no point upping it to £20, as it won't make any difference. If I was constantly hitting the £10, then I would raise is it.

Adwords is one of the easiest ways to lose money there is! If a campaign goes off track you can quickly spend hundreds of pounds, and found that you've made very little. Best to go in cautiosly with a low budget. If you use that up, and had good results, then increase it. If you don't have the results, look at whats going wrong. Sometimes it's things that you have no control over, and you should just try something else.

[kingoftherodeo]

Thanks for your reply mate.

What are you advertising for only £10 a day?! With the keywords im going to be bidding on that probably wont get more than about 20 clicks. I wouldnt rely so much on PPC if i were to get natural traffic but im a long way off having a fully SEO'd site.

If i were to use terms such as 'home shopping', 'online shopping', 'catalogues' etc then they're going to be expensive and im sure £10 a day isnt going to make a dent. At least i'd have to look at using ad scheduling to maybe get lunchtime traffic?

Thanks