Media plan for paid search advertising for small and medium-sized businesses: how to link it to the real world?
How you should not draw up a media plan — an anticase
Here are the results:

Now imagine that you paid for the Serpstat account and the hours to collect the semantic kernel, and then unconditionally trusted the Keyword Planner to plan your advertising campaign.
How to draw up a target media plan
How does it work?

How to define the maximum allowed CPA value?
In other words, the maximum allowed CPA should be lower than the average check multiplied by a margin. That is if the average check is $4, and we earn $0.8 from each transaction, then the CPA should not exceed $0.79.
It happens that an online store sells different types of goods, and each product category has its own margin. In this case, you need to draw up a target media plan for each category separately.
Remember the sequence of actions:
The average conversion rate: where to get the cost-per-click data (CPC)
An important note: if you take data from an old account, be sure to exclude statistics on brand queries as it distorts the real picture.

Why is it important? The purpose of paid search advertising is to acquire a disloyal audience; loyal users will come to your website themselves.
If there is no historical data, see the cost per click and the conversion rate figures in other sources. For example, if you work with an agency, specialists can look for the necessary figures in projects of similar subjects and with the same geographic targeting.
These data will also be fairly accurate, although not the same as your historical data. In Netpeak, you can break the data down by topic, region, type of platform. We regularly publish studies on the cost per click based on a sample of such projects on our blog.
Where to calculate a media plan?

Let's say we have an online store with an average order value of $300 and a margin rate of 28%. At the first stage, you need to calculate the target CPA, for this we use the average store's check parameters (take it as a constant if there are no instruments to influence the special offers in the store, and so on).
The conversion rate depends on the customer's unique selling proposition (how beneficial it is to the target audience), website usability and the level of optimization of advertising campaigns.
Cost-per-click is the responsibility domain of paid search advertising specialists. The better we work on our campaigns, the lower the cost per click we get; the better we optimize the campaigns, the higher the quality score, the more clicks at a given price we can get without paying too much.
Our goal is to determine how much we can change the cost-per-click and conversion rates so that the advertising campaign pays off. Moreover, the CPC and conversion rates from the media plan sheet are ready-made KPIs of the paid search advertising specialist.
A lot of things surely depend on the website owner. In one of the projects of the Netpeak agency (I can't disclose the name due to the NDA), the conversion rate increased by 30% after the website loading speed was optimized.
Let's repeat what we discussed earlier. A PPC specialist can:
Analytics of the advertising campaign results in a media plan

Media plan for services

With that client, we have configured the end-to-end analytics, listened to all the calls and found out that only 6% of all leads converted to sales. That is, even an increase in the conversion rate will not significantly affect profits since the work of programmers will cost a lot of money.
According to the table, it is clear that if the business owner does not work on their proposal, if managers do not convert leads better, the project will never reach the payback level. A bottleneck may not be in paid search advertising at all.
If you are generating leads, consider implementing end-to-end analytics so that you understand at what step you might have issues.
Conclusion
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