Need help setting out budgets for google ads, my company wants to run keyword-based ads and we have never done this before. I've looked through the google documentation and I roughly know basic concepts (short tailed, long tailed keywords etc.) but I also know that google SEM is exorbitantly expensive and I'm worried about what I can do to reduce costs or make it economical.
There is quite a learning curve for your request. It's really beyond the scope of a paragraph... But I would suggest that you start out with a very small daily budget, so you can practice. Otherwise, you could lose thousands of dollars before developing your skills. The basic concept, is that you want to keep a high CTR, recently renamed interaction rate. Google says a 1% interaction rate is good, though I like mine much higher. I prefer to bid high enough to place in the ads at the top of the page. This helps your CTR. With a high CTR, Google may choose your ad over a higher bidder that has a lower CTR. At the same time, when a keyword underperforms and drops well below the 1%, you want to pause it. This obviously harms your CTR and eventually leads to a higher cost per click. You also want to monitor search terms. Google will send your ads all over the place, so you have to make sure all of the search terms used to find your ad are relevant. When finding terms that aren't related to your offerings, you must add them as a negative keyword, to effectively block that phrase from being used. That's just a few things to get you started. You never stop learning with Google Ads.