This is the 2nd post in the SEM Advanced Series, a continuation of the SEM Intermediate Series and SEM Beginner Series.  These posts are intended for search engine marketing professionals looking for guidance in monitoring and adjusting the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of a PPC campaign.

Today we’ll deep dive into the Divide Budget Across Month budget setting, looking at the same questions we asked in the introduction post SEM Intermediate Series: Understanding Goals and Success in Budgeting.

The Divide Budget Across Month setting is essentially taking your total budget amount and telling adCenter to allocate it across the month to ensure it spreads roughly even. Keep in mind that if your daily amount fluctuates (for example if your daily allotment doesn’t hit the goal, you change your budget amount, etc.) adCenter will recalculate it to achieve that budget.

Fitting Your Business Goals

Results Driven: If you have significant traffic, but a limited budget and want to make sure you’re showing throughout the month without any down time, this may be a good option. Use the optimization techniques below to make sure you're moderating received traffic and getting the most out of your budget.

• Optimization Suggestions:
  • Be sure that you’re running keyword performance reports and optimizing the keywords to your return on investment (ROI) goals. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence can help you devise bids and understand the auction on particular keywords.
  • You can also run a search query report to devise negative keywords to better qualify the traffic you’re receiving. This way, when you do receive clicks, it’s more relevant and enticing to the end user.

Branding: For branding campaigns with limited budgets; this is a simple way to show throughout the month. Additionally, you can also optimize your branding budget by monitoring this campaign closely.

• Optimization Suggestions:
  • Run a budget report to see if more reallocation of budget is necessary; for brand advertisers, this is the most vital campaign to have live at all times. This reporting will tell you when you’re being paused so you can optimize from there.

Lead Generation: If you are generating leads (either as a business owner or a lead firm) it’s important to create a high volume of potential leads at optimal CPA goals. If you are planning on making sure your budget stretches throughout the month, there are several optimization techniques you can use to easily increase that budget’s effectiveness.

• Optimization Suggestions:
  • When do your leads come in? If you have conversion tracking enabled, analyze when you’re getting the most leads. For example, if the weekends are really slow, it might be more beneficial to allocate budget to Mon-Fri traffic instead, or target a certain time frame during the day and exclude another (review Demographic Targeting - Is it right for you? by Rob to help).
    • Keep a careful eye on when your ads are most profitable; you can add additional targeting by geographic location or demographic to qualify and optimize for the leads you have coming in.
    • Run a search query report to devise negative keywords to qualify the traffic you’re receiving.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at Daily Budget Goal; understanding how to effectively use this functionality and create optimization around a goal-oriented budget setting.

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