Slice up Your Advertising Pie

One advertiser’s experience can help you set up your budgets right

One of the reps on our Customer Solutions team recently took a call from a new advertiser, who had run into a roadblock that left him perplexed.

Apparently he awoke one morning at 3:00 a.m., his brain churning with an idea for a campaign for a product he sells on his site. He jumped on the computer to set up the new campaign, picking keywords, writing ads and setting bids. Feeling confident that this new campaign was going to get a ton of clicks, he set a daily spending limit of $50 and went back to bed.

But a few days later, when he checked its results, he discovered that the campaign was getting capped at about $20 in clicks each day. Care to guess what the problem was? (I’ll wait…)

And the answer is: He forgot to check if he had enough room in his account budget for the new campaign.

Too Many Hands in the Pie
This tale makes an important point: One tweak to an account can affect everything else. Think of your account budget as your “money pie”; you have to slice it up just right. Each of your campaigns will take a piece.

So if you add a new campaign, its spend will eat up a portion of the pie, leaving less spend for your existing campaigns. The account budget trumps other spending limits; you can’t spend more than your account limit. This seems like an obvious fact, but as our unwitting advertiser discovered, it can be lost in the excitement of launching a new campaign. To make room for the new campaign, you might have to consider reducing the spend from other campaigns, so that all of your “slices” add up to the total account budget.

If you’re off balance—no matter how high you set the daily spend of your biggest campaign—your other campaigns could be shut off as our system works to keep you from going over your budget. In this case, you’d need to either bake a bigger account pie, or cut your campaigns into smaller slices. Who’s hungry?

Cooking up the Perfect Search Marketing Plan
Before creating a new campaign, think about how much money you have to work with across your entire account. Then set up your campaign budgets to spend their portions of the account budget accordingly. As you tinker around with budgets, if you’re not sure how your changes will play out, make sure you take advantage of the forecasting tools in your account. As you enter different bid amounts, it analyzes statistics to help predict what your average position could potentially be in the search results, and thus, what your potential is for impressions and clicks.

Don’t “Set and Forget”
You should always be monitoring all parts of your account on a regular basis. This is your business and your money, so get in the habit of scanning all of the information on the dashboard.

If you simply “set and forget,” you’re giving up one of the biggest advantages that search marketing has over any other advertising vehicles—the ability to change, re-adjust, tinker and refocus your strategies at any time to reach your target audience. And take a lesson from one of your colleagues: If you decide to make any changes, consider how they will affect the daily spends set for your individual campaigns, and your account as a whole. You’ll sleep much better at night for it!

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

Blueberry pie picture from hfb on Flickr