One of the most important aspects of a new Google Ads campaign is the budget. What we recommend is always starting with a small budget to limit the risk of wasted ad spend when you’re first launching a campaign. Then you can increase your budget once you find what works.
Sometimes you may have several different campaigns that focus on different product or service offerings. In this situation, you have two options when it comes to the budget: create a shared budget that all campaigns pull from, or assign a dedicated budget to each campaign that. In this article, I’ll cover the pros and cons of using a shared budget so you can make an informed decision when your next campaign launch comes around.
The Pros of Using a Shared Budget
Save Time. Using a shared budget across multiple campaigns will save you time in the long run. It gives more control to Google in how they allocate your budget to garner the most traffic possible from your campaigns. This allows you to focus on other account tasks without needing to adjust budgets to ensure it’s fully spent by the end of the month.
Prioritize. Also, using shared budgets allows you to segment the campaigns into different groups based on budget and performance. For example, you can have 3 separate shared budgets: one for high performance campaigns, one for medium performance campaigns, and one for low performance campaigns. This way, you can allocate the largest portion of your budget to a group of campaigns that receive the best results.
The Cons of Using a Shared Budget
Loss of Control. The largest negative aspect of using a shared budget for your campaigns is the lack of control over individual campaign spending. Let’s say you have one shared budget covering 5 different campaigns. If one campaign receives a large number of clicks compared to the other campaigns within the shared budget, then that large click volume campaign will dominate the budget and leave very little for the other campaigns. If left unchecked, this could severely hinder your performance across different product and service offerings.
Delivery Settings. Another drawback of using a shared budget is not being able to control the delivery settings at the individual campaign level since this is controlled in the budget settings. If you have one campaign that would benefit from an accelerated delivery to ensure you get as many clicks as possible during peak hours, you would not be able to apply that change to one campaign, as that change would apply to all campaigns using the shared budget.
Conclusion
Every account is a different situation that requires different budget settings. If you have a larger budget, I recommend setting individual budgets for your campaigns and adjust from there until you notice the spending patterns and results of each campaign. For smaller budgets, using a shared budget can leave the budget allocation tasks to Google and allow you to focus on the maintenance tasks that will provide the best return for the tight budget.
September 6, 2018