Google Ad Costs & Budgets During NZ Lockdown

Things changed fast in New Zealand last week with the whole country going into lockdown within half a day.

You may be worried about your Google ad campaigns and Google spending your ad budget for no reason but rest assured, if you are in a market that had reduced searches, your spend will lower as well if the volume is not there to meet your potential ad spend budget.

Watch the video below, or read the transcript to find out more (of course if you don’t have well built campaigns and you are not one of our partner businesses, then the same may not apply to your campaigns, but some of it will).

This is a transcript below – excuse any typos!

Hi, I just want to record this relatively short Video to talk about Google advertising in New Zealand, during lockdown, and just put your mind at ease a little bit if you’re running campaigns with us. So obviously there’s been big changes in the last week, but rest assured, we are looking at campaigns and reacting accordingly.

If you are here with us this time, last year when we went into a big lockdown you’ll know we’re here to support you as much as possible outside of Google ads. If there are other things we can help you with, give us a shout. I’ll talk about that a bit later on, but I want to talk through how you might not have to worry quite so much about your advertising spend as you think.

So I’m going to switch over to this little diagram here and just see if you are currently worried about your ad spend rest Assured we’re looking at it. And we have seen big differences since, you know, it’s only a week ago where The lockdown was announced. Equally we’ve decided not to react too quickly and send out loads of COVID emails, because hopefully it’s not going to last as long this time. And no doubt you’re being inundated with COVID emails. So if you are had a lot of people looking for your business here and we’re running ads, now I am not an artist, so I’m not going to keep drawing. But if you had all of these pool of people here looking for stuff, and you had your Google search campaigns running here, let’s just say you had a $3,000 a month budget. Some may be significantly higher and some may be a little bit lower that translates into roughly a hundred dollars a day, Approximately that’s about, 3040. I think if Google gets his numbers right on average. So in your search campaigns, which is the ones that people Search you know, and you get the search results and you get the search advert at the top.

What we’re seeing typically since Wednesday is campaign spend reducing up to about 85%. So that’s your spend Reducing. Now that’s not always the case. Some campaigns will have dropped a little bit less than that, but we have seen individual campaigns drop as much as that much Money. So if you’re thinking about Your budget here, and you’re worried about being spent for the sake of it, rest assured it’s not being spent for the sake of it. This is one point where Google is not as evil as it normally is because they will not spend the money. If there is not the volume of people looking for your business. So That’s how it’s going to pan out. So rest assured we’re looking at this. The other caveat is If you’re in the market just now and generally what happens if the advertising market Gets quieter, the costs reduce significantly. So sometimes what we saw last year for people that came on board quickly, let’s just see cost is $1.50 a click. Again, this is a made up number. Every campaign’s different. You might find that that reduces to 75 cents just as an example.

So your budget may actually goes further even if you have The same budget allocated. So you can imagine if you’ve got $3,000 a month allocation, just as an example, even if it was spend a few thousand dollars a month, that might actually just end up being $1,500 a month. And you’re actually getting twice as many clicks, but obviously if the volume drops of people searching, so you go from this and all of these people drop out, you know, then this may end up being seven 50. Again, These are just numbers. It’s just examples. So most people here panic, and they’re worried about this $3,000 a month here, actually just by default sometimes it might drop down to about $750 a month. Again, these are made up numbers, every campaign’s different, but the beauty is the way that we build campaigns. We’d never just have one search campaign. We typically use multiple campaigns for different reasons and we can adjust these and tweak them.

We’ve already made changes this week, change in different room types, for example, and given them, but more of a focus for different types of accommodation.

The one caveat around this will be if you are, if you have some display campaigns and this is where, you know, if you’ve got a website here, those banner ads showed up here and there’s banner showing here. Let’s just say that’s $50 a day that might still end up spending $50 a day because this website content is still around. It’s still On the web but it’s still suitable targeting. The other thing to bear in mind is if you are in tourism, if our lockdown lasted this long here, whether that’s two weeks or a week or, you know, four weeks, then people are generally looking up here in the future. You know, these are eyes, obviously, if you can’t tell the amazing drawing, but you know, if, if your lead time is out here, now I know that lead times are getting much shorter. Now, you know, you still want to be in the market For these people that book it in the future Because that’s when you might, you don’t want to cut your spend now to reduce your revenue further down the track, you know, lockdown has lifted. So hopefully this will be quite short, period of time and not like the last time. But anyway, hopefully this video has put your mind at ease A little bit in terms of your budgets and know that they’re not going to get used For the sake of it. The other thing To bear in mind is we are here to help you.

So if you want to talk through any of this and talk about your circumstances, or even if you’re not a customer and you happen to see this video, give us a call because there are some things that can do quite quickly as we came out of the different levels before, I feel like Jacinda Adern doing this with my hands, but anyway, as you come out at different levels before we did do things on websites, where we put up little banners and stuff to say, listen, we’re only doing deliveries now, or, you know, our opening hours are reduced and it’s really visible, really easy to first to deploy that on websites, using tools that we’ve got without actually having to update your site, if we’re managing your website. So Are, if we’re related and we have the tracking in place. So there’s a lot of different things like that we can do as well. So anyway, it gives us a shout, hopefully this put your mind at ease that Google is not always evil. It has been quite evil a lot in the last 12 months has made a lot of weird changes in Google ads that have not always been beneficial without being on top of all the changes.

So anyway, we’re here for you. Hopefully this video has helped and I hope you are doing okay and we will catch up soon.