Budget Better with Google AdWords Shared Budgets
Google AdWords announced the development of its new Shared Budgets feature this month, but what are the advantages of the shared budgets feature for all pay per click advertisers who use Google AdWords to market their businesses online?
Imagine that you are running three different kinds of Google AdWords campaigns, which is a fairly common approach to take. Imagine that you have a PPC paid search campaign in place, alongside a mobile network campaign and a display network campaign in order to improve the reputation of your brand online.
When you manage each budget separately, all is well and good until, on one day, the budget that you allocate to one of your campaigns is not used up entirely because you receive fewer clicks on that day. For example, you might have a daily budget of US$200 and you decide to invest US$100 in your main paid search campaign, US$60 in your display network marketing campaign and US$40 in your mobile network campaign.
When the money allocated is spent, there’s no problem. However, when the money is not used because of a lack of traffic and clicks, the pay per click advertiser loses vital opportunities to advertise. Now, with the introduction of Google AdWords Shared Budgets, the concern that you might not use your entire advertising budget on a daily basis will no longer be an issue.
Getting the best out of Google AdWords Shared Budgets
Essentially, this new feature allows you to share the funds from all of your campaigns with each other. With a paid search, display network and mobile network campaign all in place at the same time, the Google AdWords Shared Budgets feature allows Google to automatically use the funds allocated to any one of these campaigns to pay for advertising in the other two campaigns should the funds be available.
Using the scenario highlighted above, if your paid search campaign needs more than US$100 during one day, and your display network campaign only uses US$30, the other US$30 can be automatically assigned to the paid search campaign when using the Google AdWords Shared Budgets feature.
How to Setup the Google AdWords Shared Budgets Feature
Setting up this feature is quick and easy, just like most things are in AdWords thanks to the innovative team at Google. Follow the steps below for instant shared budgets setup:
- Go to your Shared Library.
- Click on “Budgets”.
- Select the “+New Budget” button above the columns in the main interface.
- Name your new budget.
- Select the campaigns to be associated with the budget.
- Enter the amount you want to be shared between budgets.
- Select your usual advertisement delivery options (Standard or Accelerated).
- Save everything.
- Apply the new budget to your selected campaigns using the “Settings” tab located on the AdWords Interface
Teething problems to be on the lookout for
Google is at the top of the pay per click advertising game and therefore there is rarely anything major to worry about when working with new AdWords features. However, it is important to remember that the feature is new and that there might be a number of tweaks needed before everything flows as smoothly as the average pay per click advertiser would like.
In the first instance, be cautious of grouping dissimilar campaigns with one another. You don’t want to fall into the trap of crippling your campaign budgets by grouping high-spending Display campaigns together with your low-spending Branding campaigns.
However, in general, the advantages of this shared budgets feature outweigh all possible fears of campaign failure. The tool deserves a shot and at least one or two months’ worth of campaign testing at the very least. Implement and monitor. If your budget can be put to better use using this feature, then the outcomes from including it as part of your online marketing strategy can only ever be positive.
