AdWords now let you have one large shared budget for ‘additional control and flexibility’
Woo – I was pleased when I first heard of this, muttering ‘finally!’
I manage a client with multiple campaigns with budget weighting throughout the month geared towards pay day and historically, better ROI metrics. As they sell clothes, search volume can realistically be pretty tumultuous. Bit of Sun and the dress campaign gets hit, bit of a cold front, jackets.
It’s for accounts like this that this option is great – a daily budget, not hit and missing it with campaign caps or requiring daily amendments.
But should you use this?
Anything which makes PPC ‘easier’ is something that automatically makes me go ‘hmmm’ in a doubtful chin stroking way.
Well an obvious one is that you potentially initially build your campaign structure this way to make sure you weren’t cannibalising the budget but letting all campaigns have a chance to perform, what if you have some search terms which get more volume in the evening? This way your budget could be spent before they get a chance to perform.You don’t want all this spend going to your broad campaign.
You don’t need to apply it to the whole account, so initially test it on a few campaigns. Just be aware your impression share might be impacted on some campaigns which don’t get the opportunity to have as much traffic coming through.
Be clever with it. Group campaigns by match type maybe or group the top converting terms together.
Another question is, what if you have a low traffic campaign which converts really well? We all have one. A campaign with brilliant conversion rates but low traffic due to how specific it is. You always want this campaign to have a high budget cap to encourage visibility. If you place this with your other ‘shared budget’ campaigns this could go badly. Be selective in which ones you choose.
The budget splits the monthly spend by the days in the month – kind of in the name. But what if you have peaks in traffic you would miss out on, or weekend drops? My above example sell a lot of little dresses (black) over Halloween, this option could limit their visibility. Additionally they get a high amount of orders around pay day which this couldn’t account for.
Another point is…well, it’s your job to monitor the campaigns and spend right? Shouldn’t be an easy fix to not go in and amend budgets, additionally; budgets shouldn’t be 100% at campaign cap level but keyword level.
As a warning, if you apply this in the middle of a day, the system won’t consider what the campaigns have already spent. Be warned, you need to consider this to ensure you don’t go over budget and have that horrible, gut wrenching moment of ‘oh…’
Overall, I think it’s a dashing new setting, but of course my cynical side appreciates it makes more money for Google. No longer are you reserving budget for campaigns which might not spend but you’re allowing it to be taken by the campaigns you know will spend. Ka’ching.
As always, test it, see if it works and analyse the results.
