As we move beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you're likely bringing budgets down to normal levels. But did you know there are a couple of ways to do that, one being better than the other?In this video, PPCKirk discusses how to wisely decrease daily spend to maintain as much traffic as possible. No time for the video? No problem! Scan the Audio Transcript below.
Adjusting Campaign Daily Spend in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads - Audio Transcript.
Hey, Kirk Williams here with ZATO. I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about controlling spend.
I've seen a couple of different ways overall that PBC managers control spend, and I think they're both legitimate and they're both part of the puzzle, but I think there's one that's a little bit better than the other.
The two different ways that I typically see PPCers control spend by is(1) using their budgets or(2) using their bids.So either setting daily budgets or controlling things with bids a little more.I tend to fall into the camp of preferring to control my daily spend with a bid adjustments instead of budget adjustments.
So if you strictly stick to lowering or increasing daily budgets in order to decrease spend, let's say, especially we're coming right off the Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday here, the holiday season, and you're probably being told: "start to lower your spend, start to lower daily spend, let's come back down off the mountain peak," right?
Well, it's tempting to just hop in there into the campaign and adjust your daily budgets. We were spending $500 a day on this campaign, now we're going to spend $300 a day. The problem is you're still set at the same bid adjustments, so you're still being as aggressive in the marketplace. So really what you're doing is just capping things earlier in the day for the most part, if it's a limited by budget thing. And so that's where we typically would suggest go after bid adjustments first.
Also keep an eye on daily budgets because that'll especially keep you out of trouble. But I always like to keep my bid adjustments as low as possible to make sure that we're not being too aggressive in the marketplace.
And I think it's worth doing that.I think that someone saying, "Hey, you need a drop spend," and a PPCer just hopping in there quick, shrinking daily budgets down and walking away can actually be a little bit of a lazy move, so that's something.It's not always the case. So just because you see people adjust daily budgets, that's not what it means exactly.
But I would caution you to just be aware of the fact that if your PPC manager is going in and all they're doing is just lowering the daily budget on your campaigns, well that might just be dropping your ads out of the auction at an early stage rather than decreasing your bids, making you less aggressive, but still getting into as many auctions as you possibly can for that same budget.
So just something to be aware of.We see that, especially with shopping ad campaigns, you could lower budgets, you could lower bids. We like to do a little bit of both, but especially we like to begin reducing bids in order to control daily spend.Hope that's been helpful for you.