Budgeting

Introduction to budgeting process

The daily budget is the maximum amount of resources we are willing to spend on a single day for a specific campaign, to collect traffic through Google Ads.

Account managers are able to set budgets at any amount, with the only restriction being that the daily budget of a specific campaign must be higher than the maximum CPC set for keywords in the same campaign.

Why is budgeting important?

Spending control

Since resources allocated to marketing investments are scarce and millions of search queries are run every day, it is of vital importance to keep track of the amount spent on a daily basis for search engine marketing. A misallocation of budget resources could result in an unfavorable balance sheet or in an ineffective marketing investment.

Performance optimization

Executing proper clustering is important, due to the fact that budget is allocated on campaign level. Then it is possible to allocate the right amount of resources to different groups of ads effectively. Moreover, each campaign should receive an amount of resources corresponding to its potential traffic.

How does budgeting work in Google Ads?

As mentioned above, the budget in Google Ads is set at campaign level, and not at an Ad Group level. This means several Ad Groups share and compete on a common pool of daily resources.

Overbudgeting

During the course of the day, as the budget for a specific campaign depletes, the ads will appear in the Ad Rank slots with lower frequency. However, Google Ads enables your campaigns to deliver up to 20% more (or less) daily clicks than your daily budget would allow. This feature makes it possible to redistribute part of the resources from low-traffic days to significantly higher traffic days. Nonetheless, the total amount of resources spent for a specific period of time cannot exceed the total budget available for this time period.

Delivery settings

There are two factors determining the speed of budget depletion. First, as you increase the CPC, you are also increasing the speed of budget consumption. Second, the choice of delivery setting influences budget consumption. In Google Ads, there are two settings to choose between:

  • Standard delivery settings
    Ads are delivered evenly throughout the day.
    Pros – ads will appear in all parts of the day.
    Cons – some impressions might be lost during profitable parts of the day.
  • Accelerated delivery settings
    Ads are shown whenever possible, until the budget limit is reached.
    Pros – if the budget limit is not reached, the ad will be shown whenever it is possible
    Cons – if the budget limit is reached before the end of the day, the ad will lose impressions

Other issues

In Google Ads, the account manager can modify the daily budget for a specific campaign up to ten times per day. However, increasing the budget assigned to a specific campaign does not necessarily increase the traffic to the linked website. In fact, a depleted budget restricts the ad from being clicked. Nonetheless, increasing the budget only gives ads the possibility to be clicked, but does not automatically mean that this will happen.

Impressions limited by budget depletion

Insufficient resources or poor restriction in traffic selection might lead to a depletion of the daily budget during the day. Consequently, our campaigns might lose relevant traffic in the remaining hours. In Google Ads, this case is labeled as “impressions limited by budget”.

Google Ads gives you the opportunity to customize the user interface to control for the following important indicators: