The very first step of planning an advertising campaign on Google Ads is budgeting. It’s essential to evaluate the amount of traffic, estimate the approximate cost per click, and determine the level of competition that exists in your niche. Once your advertising budget is planned, the next crucial stage is competent management. Let’s find out how to plan expenses without wasting all your marketing budget at once.
Google Ads Budgeting Techniques
- Daily spending limit. This will restrict your daily expenses by avoiding cost overrun. The system suggests suitable limits in accordance with your campaign settings. You can either opt for those suggestions or calculate the limits yourself, using the following formula: the whole campaign budget divided by 30.4 (average number of days per month).
Daily budget can be easily optimized. If you run several campaigns simultaneously, you can compare them, scale the most effective ones and turn off those that suck your budget dry.
There are, however, some peculiarities. Sometimes costs may exceed your daily budget due to higher search traffic. That is, on some days you may spend less than what you have budgeted and more on other days. Yet, all in all, your expenses will not go over the limit you have set.
- Average daily budget. It is a useful feature that lets you combine multiple ad campaigns with a common purpose within one overall budget. Google recommends using this feature along with portfolio bidding strategies so that campaigns with the same goals could use the budget more efficiently.
The main benefit of shared budgets is the ability to control your expenses without setting separate limits for each campaign.
On the other hand, you always have to stay alert, otherwise you risk losing control over the effectiveness and efficiency of your ads. If you launched too many campaigns, you may easily overlook the moment when one ad used up all the budget and others didn't even get a single impression. You can also find yourself in a situation where an effective campaign with lower costs is replaced by a bigger one with higher expenses. Shared budget strategy works best for multiple ad campaigns with the same goal, for instance, sales, app installs and so on.
- Campaign total budget. This feature allows you to spend the budget evenly throughout your campaign. It’s well-suited for short-term advertising, for example, during the holiday season or for event-driven betting.
If you set up a total budget for your campaign, you won’t have to adjust daily spending limits every time. But you still can make changes and optimize your expenses in case some of your ads perform poorly.
On the downside, this option is only available for video campaigns with a specific start and end date; moreover, it's impossible to prolong advertising beyond a set period of time.
- Automated rules show ads according to a certain schedule and can adjust bids by time of day, seasonal factors and other dynamic conditions. You need to analyze and single out your recurring marketing routines and create automated rules based on them, thus freeing up time for less monotonous activities.
These rules can be applied in the following cases:
Event-oriented campaigns. Let’s say you prepared an ad for Women's Day and set up a rule to run it from March 7 to the evening of March 8. To do so, you need to create the campaign, specify the start and end date and save the rule. Google will schedule it to appear in a timely manner.
Regular campaign launches and stops. For instance, you are planning to run an ad for a shipping discount or free shipping during the weekend. In that case, you need to set up the following rule for the campaign: launch the ad on Saturday morning (or Friday night) and stop on Sunday evening.
You can also pause the campaigns with expensive keywords or low CTR and thus discontinue budget wasting with the help of automated rules.
Conclusion
Budget management is essential for timely campaign optimization. Google Ads features offer us endless opportunities for efficient ad performance and automation.
All we have to do is set up appropriate spending limits and automated rules, and Google will spend the budget adequately according to the specified parameters.
So use these features to the fullest and get the most out of your campaigns!
