PPC Budget Management

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Managing your advertising budget

Budget management determines what you are willing to spend. This is what a particular campaign or, indeed, a particular group of campaigns within an account will spend in a day multiplied over 30 days to see the aggregate spend for the month itself. When you are assigned a marketing budget, you have to know what percentage of the marketing budget you want to give to different campaigns.

And the way you understand that is based on what that campaign does. So, is it a campaign that converts quite readily, like a brand search campaign? Perhaps it’s a high-volume generic campaign? Or is it a long-tail keyword campaign? What exactly is it? Understanding how to allocate your budget is essential to knowing what the best way is to optimize your daily spend.

 So how do you determine how you can allocate your budget? First, consider how you structure your campaigns by how many conversions they drive. Also, take into account priority market locations and themes. Bear in mind, from time to time, you will hit budget ceilings and your campaigns will be ‘limited by budget’, which means that you could spend more. This can be a useful notification, if the metrics are right for the budget limited campaign. Suppose you are getting lots of conversions or a low cost per conversion from that campaign , you might decide to increase the budget to the level Google recommends. However, you don’t have to if you don’t want to – it’s just a recommendation.

Google Ads offers many different ways to spend your advertising budget. This includes the following:

• Daily spend: Google Ads allows you to control exactly how much you want to spend each day on a campaign level, so you’ll never spend more than you’ve budgeted for.
• Times of the day and days of the week: Ad schedules allow you to control when your ad is shown, so you can make sure your budget is spent when it has the biggest impact. Bear in mind that this is only effective for campaigns using manual Automated bid options will already optimize your ad schedule to show your ads at high-impact times according to the focus of your automated bid strategy. Your focus might be to, for example, maximize clicks or maximize conversions.

Managing daily spend

Let’s now deep-dive into managing your daily spend.

Each campaign has a daily spend. By structuring your account correctly, you can manage your daily spend, which, in turn, ultimately translates into your weekly or monthly spend.

Putting keywords and ad groups with similar search volumes into one campaign means that you can set higher budgets for high-volume keywords and lower budgets for low volume keywords.

Remember, all ad groups and keywords in a campaign share the same daily budget. So, if you put low-volume keywords in the same campaign as high-volume keywords, the high-volume keywords will spend all the budget. This then means that lower-volume, long-tail keywords, which might be high value in terms of conversions, might not get shown to searchers (because your high-volume keywords have already used up the budget).

So, remember: keywords that get a lot of traffic will spend a lot of money. You might want to group those keywords that spend a lot of money in campaigns that are high-traffic campaigns. Then consider keywords that spend less money because they have less search volume and less search interest in traffic. They will spend a lot less. So, because you don’t want them sharing the same budget, you can separate them out. That is a good optimization tactic and a very good way to consider your budget management strategy as part of your process.

Budget trackers

As you can imagine, managing an advertising budget can be a daunting task! This is why budget trackers are so useful.

You can use a budget tracker to keep your spend under control. But what exactly is a budget tracker? It is simply a document to measure how much you have spent against your monthly, weekly, or daily budget. By tracking how much you’ve spent in the month to date versus the total budget, you can see if you are spending too much or too little to ensure your spend is on track.