Smarter PPC Budgeting with Shared Budgets
Advertisers tired of constantly monitoring their budgets and adjusting for unspent paid search dollars should consider using the Shared Budgets feature in Google AdWords. Shared Budgets automatically adjusts budgets across campaigns to shift unspent funds
Pay-per-click (PPC) involves coordination between around three key factors – placing the right ads in front of the right audience at the right time. In order to match up all three aspects – relevancy, targeting, and timing – oftentimes meant creating separate campaigns that each focused on a specific goal.
While these practices added value to campaigns, a fourth area that sometimes complicated matters was budgeting. Especially when trying to set and achieve very specific goals for ROI, trying to accommodate changes in costs could become tricky.
On Monday, Google announced in their AdWords Blog the introduction of Shared Budgets – a feature that allows advertisers to establish a single daily budget that's shared by multiple campaigns. These changes give advertisers more control over budgeting and should make account management much easier.
To better demonstrate how this budgeting option might play out – consider the following scenario:
Scenario: Say you are a hotel looking to spend your PPC dollars ($100/day) across three campaigns:
- A campaign targeting desktops ($50/day)
- A campaign targeting mobile devices ($30/day)
- A remarketing campaign to reach people who visited your site but didn't book a room ($20/day)
Traditionally, a budget would be manually set for each campaign and typically each campaign would hit its daily budget. However, if on one day the desktop search campaign saw fewer impressions and clicks and only spent $40, resulting in a total daily spend of $90. With Shared Budgets, however, the unspent $10 from the desktop campaign could then be funneled into the mobile or remarketing campaigns.
To create a shared budget, advertisers should click Shared library and then select Budgets. Google will then provide step-by-step instructions to create a new shared budget.
In conclusion – the shared budgets feature should help compensate for fluctuations in paid search traffic by automatically making adjustments across campaigns. This should untimely improve performance and help marketers spend less time constantly monitoring budgets and more time optimizing.
For more PPC strategies and tips, go to Milestone Insights blog.
About Milestone Inc
Milestone drives online discovery and customer acquisition with our digital presence platform and performance marketing services. Over 2,000 companies in Hospitality, Retail, Financial Services and Automotive industries use Milestone to drive online growth. Our customers include global brands in hospitality, banking, retail, automotive, including Marriott, US Bank, One Nevada Credit Union, VMWare, Nissan, Motel6, Preferred Hotels, Sun Outdoors, mid-market companies, and SMBs.
Milestone platform includes Website CMS, Schema Manager, Local listings, Reviews management, FAQ Manager, and Analytics. In addition, Milestone offers Performance Marketing Services - Content, Design, SEO, Paid Marketing, and Analytics to our clients. Annually, over 300 million visitors use websites developed on Milestone CMS, 540M consumers click on content powered by Milestone Schemas, and 3.7B consumers search for businesses powered by Milestone Local. Milestone platform is amongst the highest-rated Martech platforms with awards and recognition from Forrester, G2, Adrian Awards, US Search Awards, Search Engine Land, CMS Wire and many more organizations.
