Hey everyone, Regina here with starter PPC. I want to go over a question that we get asked a lot, which is, should I expand my business to the U S or should I start by targeting the U S and then add other countries, or should I add, should I target other countries and then add the U S this comes up a lot because, you know, we're working with small businesses, right? Starter PPC, we only work with budgets of 5, 000 or less. oftentimes these are new businesses that are just starting out and they're trying to decide, should I? Go after the market that is this huge country with a large population and a lot of commerce going on, or is it better to kind of start small and grow into the big players later on? I want to just kind of walk through How I think about this and maybe it will help some of you guys who are trying to decide whether to go big or start small. this is the company that it came up, that this question came up with recently. They actually sell hosting, email hosting, domain hosting as well as website edit website design. Actually, they have some services in there as well. right now they're targeting Nigeria South Africa and Kenya. So they actually started with those countries, which is where they're based out of. And they were asking us, is it the right time now to expand to the U. S.? the first thing to know when you're expanding to the U. S. is that usually the cost per clicks are going to be higher. And there's actually a way to determine that using the keyword planning tool. if you go over to tools and settings and you go over to the keyword planner up here, you can basically just punch in your website and Google will pull up. The average cost per click and you can based on the keywords used on your site and then you can toggle between countries, click on discover new keywords. That's usually the best when you get to this page, click on the tab called start with a website, and then you can just punch the website in right here. Click use the entire site or if you have different services and you're just trying to look at One of your various services you can punch in a specific page like a services page on your site And it'll just read the keywords from that page in this case I'm just gonna use the entire site because I just want to get a general overview for this business as a whole, how much is the cost per click going to be on average. So you can see here that it's defaulting to South Africa because the, because the domain is actually a South African domain, but you can toggle between countries by just changing it right there. So before I move away from South Africa, let's see what it thinks. So we've got top of page bid estimate, low range and top of page bid estimate high range, Because the cost per click is going to be. A range. So, and these are rough, rough estimates. I wish that Google averaged these for us. If you want to get an average, what you can do, and look, there's 2, 000 pages of keywords in this case, is you can download the keyword ideas into a spreadsheet, and then you can create a row at the bottom that will average them for us. since I don't want to do that right this moment, we're just going to kind of glance through. 24, okay, all the way up to, wow, 200, 230, 153. this is a crazy wide range. Some industries are just like that. Hosting tends to be a very competitive industry. And then you can obviously swap out the country for the United States. Make sure you remove the old country if you want to. See only data from this one country, of course. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So instead of 24, 27 on the low range, we're now getting 140, 174, 180 on the low range for the United States. These are very expensive cost per clicks in this industry. You guys, this is highly unusual, very expensive industry. And it makes sense, right? Because you're selling hosting, you're selling. Oftentimes monthly website hosting, monthly email hosting, and it's a recurring subscription revenue that you're going to get. that's why in this industry you can afford to pay a lot for a lead. That's why cost per clicks are very high. And then the high range in the U. S. is now 560, 600 544. So you get the idea. Keep that in mind, right? Different countries are going to have different average cost per click. Now, even though you know this to be true, it doesn't necessarily mean the United States isn't going to work for you. Right? you could target the United States and find out that, oh, actually the conversion rate in the United States is actually Higher than it is in this country, for whatever reason the opposite could be true, right? In the United States, there tends to be a lot of competition, especially in this industry. So you could find that you target it. Not only are you paying more per click, but you're now getting a lower conversion rate. unfortunately, a lot of this is guesswork and you won't know the answer for sure about whether it's profitable for you before you try it. what I usually default to is this This knowledge that I've learned over the decade that I've been in the marketing world, which is when you're a very small business and you're just starting out, you're going to have more luck targeting a very well defined. Niche group people and then expanding right to a wider group of people. I apply that same knowledge to the country targeting in Google Ads. If you're targeting a smaller country with Less competition, and then expanding into the more competitive space, that's probably the smart way to go, because by the time you expand into the bigger space where you now have a more competitive market, a wider market of people you have to appeal to, et cetera. You probably will be a little bit farther along in your business. You'll probably have more of your ducks in a row by then. And what I mean by ducks in a row is, I mean, by then you'll have a website that has been tested and honed in on the best things that are working. Right. You'll have that conversion rate optimization that has happened on your website. Maybe you need to get some email automation in place. maybe you need to take some hire some help to help with some questions via the support ticket bubble, the bubble on the website, the chat bubble maybe you need to hire someone to help answer the phones because you're not answering them fast enough, all these things that are very. Slow for small businesses to, tighten up and get going. Those things are more forgiving in a country that has less competition than in a country that will be expecting you to hit the ground running. whenever a client comes to me and says, should I expand to the US? I come right back to them and say, well. That depends is what you're doing working or is your business kind of hemorrhaging money because if what you're doing is working or if it's even close to working, I would say stay focused on what you're doing every time you start something new. It's going to be an investment, an upfront investment. It's almost never going to be like. Aha, now I'm rich, right? It's usually like, okay, we're going to do 90 days where we don't expect a profit. In fact, for 90 days, we were fine with losing money because the algorithm needs to learn this new location. We've now had to add some budget for this new location. Cause we didn't want to turn off our old location because we don't want to lose all that data, right? All that conversion data that we've been gathering. Otherwise we're just throwing money out the window. If you turn off those campaigns. that's usually what I say back to them. Like if your business is hemorrhaging money and you're like, okay, I can afford to do another big test before I, give up on this whole idea. Then give it a try. If what you're doing right now is working, why change it? Why change what works, right? Just try to grow and max out. The market in where you are simultaneously put all your ducks in a row in your sales funnel. So you can prepare to enter a bigger market someday and expand. That's my advice to you guys. If you have any questions or comments, you can head on over to starter ppc. com and there's a little chat bubble. You can ask us anything that you're wondering. We work with businesses that have budgets of 5, 000 or less. E-comm e-commerce lead generation businesses, it doesn't matter to us. We we are basically a sister company of starter P p C, so sorry, we're sister Company of Solutions eight. we have the resources of a bigger company, the strategy from a team of people that work with bigger budgets to basically apply to what we do at Startup P P C. And we would love to work with you.