Determining the best budget for your digital advertising campaign can be challenging. There are several considerations to consider, some of which are completely beyond your control:

  • Industry
  • Competition
  • Goals
  • Allocated advertising budget
  • Philosophy regarding digital marketing

With all these factors, launching a successful AdWords campaign can often seem daunting.

Finding the Ideal Budget

Unfortunately, there is no magic number when it comes to how much you should spend per month on advertising. Factors vary significantly across various industries to ever come up with a universal monthly budget that will result in maximum return on investment (ROI). Sure, it would be great if we could say, “If you spend exactly $25,620 per month on paid search advertising, you will achieve all of your business goals.” It is just not that simple.

Instead, it’s important to come up with the right advertising budget for your particular situation. This requires knowing your goals and doing a fair amount of research. It also requires some risk and a little bit of trust. Going into a new campaign, there’s no way to know for sure how profitable it will be. This leaves many businesses afraid to open the wallets to understand the campaigns potential.

One Common Scenario:

Company A wants to start an AdWords campaign. They have no idea how much they should spend, but someone who controls the finances sets aside a certain amount of money based on no research whatsoever. They come up with a $3,000 monthly budget. The company then hires a marketing management company to manage the AdWords account and asks for a strategy. After doing extensive keyword research, the AdWords marketing manager determines it will take about $10,000 a month in ad spend to be competitive in the industry—and see the biggest positive return. Company A says to proceed with the $3,000 a month plan. This leaves the AdWords marketing manager in a bind. The dreaded “limited by budget” label pops up in the account, and the budget runs out in the first week of the month.

These companies often go into AdWords with a “prove-it-works” attitude. If you can prove it works, they might spend more money. But when you severely underspend in digital marketing, it’s difficult to accomplish much. It’s hard to optimize the campaign because you can never run long enough to see when and where you should be spending. You can’t maximize your return (ROI) because there simply isn’t enough data to do so. Even the greatest AdWords “guru” won’t be able to do much with this account. You might be able to squeak out a positive return on investment, but you certainly won’t be making the most out of the opportunity. You could be making a lot more money simply be spending more.

Spend More, Make More?

In an ideal world, we would all have unlimited budgets. If you ask Google, the best budget strategy is to spend as much money as possible. It may seem counterintuitive to some business owners, but it makes sense. If you invest more money, you should make more—assuming, of course, that your campaign is being managed regularly by someone who knows what he/she is doing.

Depending on your industry, your monthly spend may have to be quite a bit in order to reach your potential. While this can scare off many businesses from running digital advertising campaigns at all, it’s important to understand that it will pay off.

In the old days of advertising, companies had no problem spending thousands of dollars on print ads that had no discernible return. How many business owners must have had a conversation like this?

“Hey, how’d that magazine ad work for you?”

“Fantastic. Business has been great.”

“Did you get more customers?”

“Beats me.”

“Did any of your customers say they saw the ad?”

“Yeah, one guy who’s been doing business with us for years said it looked really nice.”

“So how do you know it paid off?”

“Because we’re still in business.”


The magic of digital advertising is how easy it is to prove the value. Still, many business owners are terrified to raise their budgets. Here’s another common situation:

Business C, an e-commerce company, has a $20,000 per month AdWords budget. Their goal is a 400% return on ad spend return on ad spend (ROAS). For the past three months, they’ve exceeded the 400% return on ad spend (ROAS), but they’ve also run out of budget well before the end of the month. The company running their AdWords account suggests raising their monthly budget so they can get all the way through the month. Business C responds that they have a hard cap on $20,000 per month.

Business C is doing it wrong. They are losing out on a sizable chunk of revenue here. Investing more money in their digital advertising will clearly result in more measurable profit. But rather than choose to be more profitable, they decide to stick to some hard-and-fast monthly budget that isn’t based on what’s best for the company.

So how much should you be spending on AdWords?

Ideally, you should spend as much as it takes to maximize your return of investment (ROI). Of course, in order to do this, you need to know the value of each sale and the value of each customer.

This isn’t to say that you can keep spending more and spending more on some infinite scale. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you’ve maxed out all your opportunities. You’ll know you’ve hit this point when spending more money starts to result in a decrease in return on ad spend (ROAS). But as long as it’s still profitable, there really is no reason to limit your budget.

Does AdWords Really Work?

Many businesses claim AdWords and other paid search advertising opportunities don’t work at all. These are typically businesses that attempted to manage their own accounts (or got swindled by some hack or fly-by-night “agency”). They may begin their AdWords campaign with lofty expectations and end up feeling like they just threw money away. In reality, they just have no concept of what they should be doing. They blame AdWords for their own deficiencies.

Digital advertising is not simply a build-it-and-they’ll-come strategy, nor is it a set-it-and-forget-it tool. You can only have a profitable return if you put time and effort into it. If you do it the right way, digital advertising can be an immensely profitable channel for your business. If you do it the wrong way, you’ll burn through money faster than you imagined possible.

Regardless of your budget, you can see a positive return on AdWords or any other digital advertising channel. To get the most out of digital advertising, you’ll need to have someone competent managing your account—and you’ll need to trust that person. More importantly, you’ll need to trust the data.