Optimize Budgets - Single Account - User Guide

How to use the single-account budget optimization tool

Geetanjali Tyagi avatar
Written by Geetanjali Tyagi
Updated over a week ago

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What is it?

The Optimize Budgets - Single Account tool lets you optimize budgets for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads by allocating more budget to campaigns that are driving more leads/sales or achieving a target. You can access the tool here.

If you're looking to manage budgets across multiple ad platforms (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, Amazon) together, then look at the Optimize Budgets - Multi Account Portfolio tool.

What does it do?

The tool analyzes the spending on campaigns and shared budgets in your accounts. It helps you rearrange your target budget based on the spending capability of individual and shared budgets. This tool suggests balancing budgets by taking a part of the budget amount which won't end up being spent. This amount can be easily allotted to the ones which are losing search impression share and have the potential to perform well during the remainder of the selected date range.

Why should you use it?

This tool makes it easy to:

  1. Reallocate budget to campaigns that are performing well.

  2. Adjust campaign or shared budgets to meet a certain target budget for the month.

  3. Allocate budget considering the spending potential of the campaign based on impression share.

How does it work?

Date Ranges

On the left side filter, you can select which budgets and date ranges to use.

The date ranges include the option of "This Budget Cycle" which considers a custom cycle date, in case your monthly budgets don’t start on the first of each month. The Budget Cycle date is defined on the Pro Dashboard along with the monthly target budget amount. The Optimize Budgets - Single Account tool displays this information in the Simulation Budget field and This Budget Cycle date range

Define Scope & Simulation Budget 

On the left-side picker, select the budgets and date range to be taken into consideration, then enter the Simulation budget which you'd like to spend for your account/selected budgets and click on update.

You will find the following fields at the top of the page:

  • Simulation Budget. The budget that has to be spent by the end of the selected date range. If you’ve defined a Monthly Budget on the Pro Dashboard, you’ll see this information in the Simulation Budget field by default. Updating the simulation budget doesn't change your budgets in Google Ads, and won't affect the system-generated suggestions.

  • Projected spend till the end of the selected date range. The amount of money that will be spent by the last date of the date range.*

  • Actual spend till now. The amount of money that has already been spent by the day of analysis.*

  • Required daily spend to hit the target. How much the campaigns should spend every day for the rest of the date range to meet the target budget. If you have an additional budget available to meet your target, you can go on to the next step.

*Unless you’ve selected ‘Show paused’ on the left-hand budget picker, only spend from active budgets is considered. To include all campaigns with performance data during the selected time period, please check the ‘Show Paused box’

Analyze Suggestions

To generate suggestions, the tool tries different daily budgets and, based on the historical spending and other performance metrics, the tool shows a potential daily spend for each of the budgets. If the potential daily spend is greater than your current daily budget, it'll be highlighted in yellow.

  • Daily Budget - Current daily budget for the entity

  • Edit Daily Budget - Option to set a new daily budget

  • Projected Spend - The amount that a budget will end up spending by the end of the selected date range.

  • Recent IS Lost (Budget) - Average impression share lost due to budget restrictions in the last 7 days.

  • Avg. daily spend - Average daily spend during the selected date range

  • Potential daily spend - Based on historical performance, the maximum amount the budget has potential to spend per day

Budget Simulator 

Hovering over a row activates the blue Budget Simulator icon next to the Edit Daily Budget Field. This simulation calculates and suggests multiple options for setting New Daily Budget and shows how much money can be spent over the period of the selected date range.

The tabulated information in Budget Simulator is calculated for the selected date range by using the impression share lost due to budget in the last 7 days and any expected seasonal surges.

There are two columns in the Budget Simulator:

  • Daily Budget - A table of options for the New Daily budget that the selected shared/individual budget is capable of exhausting.

  • Projected Spend - The amount of money the campaign(s) can spend if you select its corresponding suggested Daily budget.

Get Optimization Suggestions 

In addition to tweaking the daily budgets manually, you can also get performance and goal based optimization suggestions from Optmyzr. After selecting the blue Get Optimization Suggestion button, you'll see suggestions for budget optimization on each tab depending on the target you want to achieve: Optimize clicks, Optimize Conversions, or Optimize Conversion Value.

Note: If the system detects conversion value being used in the account, the Optimize Conversion Value strategy is selected by default. If no conversion value is detected, then the tool will try to optimize conversions and, finally, clicks.

The top row is the current projection by the end of the selected time period if no changes are made. Each following row represents a different reallocation scenario and each line of suggestions carries different aggressiveness levels. Next to every figure, you'll see the percentage of increase/decrease the metric would undergo, should you apply the reallocation suggestions as such. The system won’t suggest decreases greater than 30% to the current daily budget.

Select the row that suits you better and scroll down to see the details. You will also see that the Required Daily Spend to Hit the Target and Projected Spend values at the top of the page have changed. Now you can keep tweaking the Edit Daily Budget column to see how each change affects the spend projection.

To generate suggestions, impression share lost due to budget is analyzed. If there are campaigns that are losing impression share (due to budget constraints), the tool tries different daily budgets and, based on the historical spending; it calculates a potential daily spend. Only if it detects that there is impression share lost due to budget, the system recommends increasing the daily budget.

Based on historical performance patterns, the system identifies those budgets that have a good chance of getting more clicks, conversions, or conversion value (depending on the selected target). It doesn’t only look for cheaper clicks and conversions or higher conversion value but also takes into account patterns, e.g. if the campaign(s) associated with the budget tends to perform well at the beginning or at the end of the selected period.

After you select a row, the system will reallocate budgets based on the selected goal.

The system considers the maximum limit for each budget’s saturation point. The saturation point is the maximum budget amount that will get more impressions.

Once you're done reviewing the suggestions, choose which budgets you want to apply the changes for, if not all, and press Apply Changes.

Recommendations

  • We recommend using individual budgets for every campaign because using the most granular settings produces the optimal results.

  • The tools work with shared budgets, a mix of shared budgets, and individual campaign budgets.

  • We strongly recommend not using this tool together with the Reach Target Monthly Budget script or other daily budget optimizations at the same time, as they will override the changes made by each other.

Supported campaign types

Most campaign types are supported as long as they run on a daily budget. For instance, video campaigns using a total budget are not supported at all. Performance Max campaign budgets can be edited but because Google Ads doesn’t share impression share data for these campaign types, they won’t be included in the reallocation suggestions.

Demo Video

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