They also will help you keep your products/services organized by margins and serviceability, which will help mitigate conflicting goals that hurt budget efficiency.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge that testing budgets, while lower than normal budgets, still need to meet certain thresholds.
If your budget can’t fit at least 10 clicks in the day, it is likely setting itself up for failure because a 10% conversion rate is really good for non-branded search, and budgeting for fewer than 10 clicks in your day is banking on a better than 10% conversion rate.
How To Scale Campaigns Without Tanking Them
Once a campaign has proven itself, you might be tasked with finding a way to scale it. More money all at once is rarely the answer.
While there are instances where campaigns are performing great and the only thing “wrong” is impression share lost to budget, in most cases, big budget increases will result in increased CPCs and flat conversion lift.
This is because the budget added to high impression share campaigns will just allow the bids to be more aggressive.
If your campaigns have impression share lost to budget (at least 15%), it can make sense to add 5-10% increases every other week till you hit impression share lost due to budget of 5%.
You just need to be careful about learning periods if you’re using smart bidding.
Learning periods take five days to clear, and there is a correlation between their chaos and how young the account is. Essentially, the newer the account, the more conservative you need to be.
Optmyzr data on PMax data when other campaigns are present or not. (Image from author, November 2024)
For campaigns with a more complete impression share, scale means looking at creating more demand or expanding into services/markets that didn’t make the budget cut before.
This could mean layering in Performance Max if you’re unsure how to build video and display campaigns. It could also mean new search or demand-gen campaigns. The core success measures you’re looking for are:
Does your original search campaign start to lose impression share due to budget (i.e., there are more people searching now)?
Are there new types of customers coming in (ways of searching, asking if your company can address them, etc.)?
Are your original campaigns maintaining CPCs/CPAs while starting to pull in increases in leads?
How To Preserve Lower Priority Campaigns
It’s inevitable that business priorities will fluctuate, and campaigns might need to relinquish budget.
However, there are some really important mechanics to keep in mind when deciding what to do with a low-performing/priority campaign.
If there is a chance you will ever want to run with it again (i.e., you’re testing something that requires you to take its budget), lower the budget to a non-spending amount.
This is because pausing campaigns for longer than one to two days can result in risks to their ability to perform again.
While higher-spending campaigns have an easier time mitigating this risk due to the volume of data they accumulate, there’s still a risk they will take one to three months to recover.
By lowering the budget to a non-spending amount and excluding the data from that campaign in the bidding settings, you’ll be able to mitigate the risk.
Image from author, November 2024
If you’re a seasonal business, you can use the seasonality options to help ad platforms understand why you spike your spends to help them prepare for the big uptick.
Final Takeaways
Budgeting is more than just coming up with a number you want to spend per month.
Marketers need to balance the mechanics with business goals to succeed. This means factoring in ad platform algorithms, as well as inputting brand data.
If you know that you need results quickly, be pragmatic about which channels you invest your budget.
On the flip side, if conversion efficacy is the issue, you may need to opt for the slower budget ramp.
However you approach your budgeting, know that there are always ways to safeguard it and direct it through targets and exclusions.
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Featured Image: BongkarnGraphic/Shutterstock