Field Guide to Digital Event Marketing: AdWords on a Budget

  • By Amy Mrazek | Thursday, September 18th, 2014

So far we’ve covered the Google AdWords basics and how to select the best keywords to help you increase your ticket sales. Now you might be thinking, “That’s great for huge events with big marketing teams, but how am I going to do this with a smaller budget?”

Don’t worry! With even a small investment, you can still achieve great results in Google AdWords.

I’ll walk you through some budget-saving best practices to help make the most of your budget.

Daily budget caps. Each campaign in AdWords is assigned a daily budget. These help you spread out your total budget over a set period of time. It’s important to recognize that AdWords will spend up to 20% over your daily budget to account for clicks that the system determines are quality engagement.

For example, you have $500 and want to run for 10 days, you’d want to set your daily budget at approximately $45 to account for the overage from AdWords.

Geo-targeting. AdWords allows you to target at a country, state, region or postal code level. For smaller budgets, they give you the option to target a specific radius around a chosen area so you can target where most of your attendees come from.

If you have a weekend concert in the city of Pittsburgh, and you predict that people will be interested as far as 40 miles outside of the city, you can target Pittsburgh with a radius of 40 miles. In turn, the system will only show your ads within that region.

Device targeting. The device setting allows you to target desktops, tablets or mobile devices. If your demographic tends to be younger or if you only offer mobile ticket delivery, you may want to consider only showing ads on mobile devices.

Day parting. There are certain times of the day when people are more engaged online than others. AdWords lets you create an ad schedule to show only at the best time of day or days of the week.

If you see in your data that your ticket buyers tend to purchase tickets between Tuesdays and Saturdays from 12 pm to 8 pm, then you can choose to only run your ads at those times, which saves you money and maximizes your investment.

Missed the other posts in the series?

I. Finding New Customers and Helping Them Find You

II. Intro to AdWords and Writing Your First Ad

III. AdWords for Advanced Users

IV. Choosing the Best Keywords for Your Event

V. AdWords on a Budget

VI. Essential AdWords Ad Tips

VII. What Is Event Remarketing?