Paid Search Budgeting Tips: Avoiding Budget Horror Stories
Whether you use Bing Ads or Google AdWords, these suggestions can help you avoid common grievances that can arise while planning and managing budgets for paid search efforts.
Whether you use Bing Ads or Google AdWords, these suggestions can help you avoid common grievances that can arise while planning and managing budgets for paid search efforts.
Lately I’ve been hearing some horror stories related to PPC budget management. While spending under budget can sacrifice some opportunities, severe overages can be devastating to the advertiser.
To set a proper budget strategy, first let’s examine how AdWords and Bing Ads budgets work.
This sets a total maximum dollar amount for all keywords for the amount the advertiser wants to spend. In AdWords, this is the average per day. The “average” means that on days where there is more search volume, Google can over deliver and incur costs of up to +20 percent of the budget cap. There is an option to set a monthly budget in AdWords. To do this, you can either pre-pay each month from a credit card or get a monthly invoice.
For Bing Ads, caps can be set daily or monthly. In the monthly setting, ads are shown as quickly as appropriate, so the advertiser may run out of money before the end of the month. With both platforms, once the budget has been depleted, the ads will stop running.
AdWords sets a cap for several campaigns grouped together, which is appropriate for campaigns with similar searcher intent and similar volume size. There is not a specific priority among keywords.
Advertisers often want to know how to set up initial budgets. At first, this requires some basic steps:
Assuming the account is effectively running, some advertisers will want to maximize budgets to capture as much opportunity as possible.
Given a lower budget, there are ways a budget can be micro-tuned to make the most of it.
PPC budgeting can be challenging for some advertisers, but approaching budgets with several different tools can help take control.
What are your favorite tips? Tell us in the comments.