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What to do when you're hitting budget caps

Using optimisations to manage spend levels (rather than going offline) can help improve delivery in budget limited campaigns


While budget caps are a good safeguard to prevent under-spending, if your campaigns are running out of budget each day it could mean you’re missing out on valuable traffic. Start by reviewing:

  • Bid strategy and targets
  • Campaign performance versus these targets (is it over or under performing?)
  • Pacing - does this campaign need to remain at a similar budget level moving forward?

These signals provide valuable context for deciding whether increasing the budget is likely to improve results.

The simplest solution could be to review your bids/bidding strategy on 'Performing' campaigns – using a stricter target could result in your ads appearing more selectively, with the benefit of keeping them live for the entire day at a stronger CPA or ROAS.

The campaign below is over-delivering and would benefit from a higher ROAS target.

You can also use insights throughout the platform to surface optimizations to implement across budget hit campaigns. For example...

Conversion - Zero conversion

Can any zero conversion keywords, products, or URLs be paused and negated? Use the zero conversion report to find your highest spending keywords which have not delivered a recent conversion (you can use the date range picker in the top right to select the relevant date range). Any which are in budget limited campaigns could be paused and negated to free up spend for keywords with stronger performance.

Optimize - Add queries

Are there poor performing search queries to negate? Check the Add Queries tool for high spending search queries and negate those which have poor performance or are not relevant. This will help free up budget in limited campaigns for queries which are working well.

Optimize - N-Grams

Are there words or phrases that don’t convert wherever they appear? The n-grams analysis shows you the combined performance for the words and phrases appearing across your queries. Apply filters to find non-converting words/phrases/themes that can be negated to free up budget.

Audience - Paused queries

Are poor performing paused keywords leaking back into the account? The paused queries report shows you which paused keywords are leaking back into the account as search queries. Check here for any keywords paused for performance or relevance that could be wasting your limited budget. You can also use the automation to automatically negate these keywords.

 

Optimize - Organic overlap

Are there keywords restricted by budget by when organic could lighten the load? If you've linked Search Console you'll be able to utilize the organic overlap report. Applying the relevant filters (e.g. keywords ranking in #1 organically with no PPC conversions and low PPC competition) can enable you to find keywords to test pulling back / pausing to free up campaign budget for keywords with stronger performance or less SEO visibility.