This is the 3rd 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.

For the last installment of this series on budgeting, we’ll be covering the Daily Budget Goal option in budget setting, looking at the same questions we asked in the introduction post. The Daily Budget Goal is basically setting a monthly maximum budget and then telling adCenter what you’d ideally like each day to attain. This can be beneficial for certain goals, which I’ll elaborate on below. Keep in mind that if you set your daily target for lower than your monthly maximum budget you will not receive any error in adCenter; this is important because you could be limiting your budgets. If you have a $1000 monthly budget, but only $25/day daily target, you’re essentially only using 75% of your budget each month, whereas setting your budget to $34/day would get you closer to the $1000 monthly target.

 

Fitting Your Business Goals

Results Driven: With this setting you have a specific target you’d like to attain each day. As a best practice you should always be pulling budget reports to see how you’re landing against this goal. If you are going into budget pause, this could be a good move to rethink the other budget types or assign a higher budget for these particular campaigns  

Branding: For branding campaigns with limited budgets this is a way to optimize to a daily amount. Be sure to pull budget reporting to make sure you are live at the best times for your brand. 

  • 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.
    • 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.  For example, if you are only able to ship to certain states, or appeal to a certain demographic more often than others.
    • Remember: Be mindful not to over-target your potential consumers with branding campaigns; you’d be surprised how many times your perceived and actual demographics vary.  Pull data to make sure this is correct.

Lead Generation: If you are looking to spend a specific amount per day on lead generation for your business make sure that you’re revisiting your results regularly and analyzing the traffic you’re receiving to effectively use your budget. 

  • Optimization Suggestions:
    • Run a budget report to see if more movement of budget is necessary to meet your lead goals. This reporting will tell you when you’re being paused so you can optimize from there.
    • 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 (Use Demographic Targeting - Is it right for you? by Rob to help).

I hope that you’ve found a lot of value in this series. Please be sure to read through the others if you're just catching this for the first time. We’ve examined Spend Until Depleted and Divide Across Month, as well as looking at some questions to ask yourself before setting your budgets up. Good luck!

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