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. For budget hit campaigns the recommendation isn’t necessarily to increase your budget caps but look at other ways to manage spend levels.
The simplest solution could be to review your bids/bidding strategy on the affected campaigns – lowering your bids or making your bid strategy stricter for example could result in your ads appearing lower down the page / appearing more selectively, but has the benefit of keeping them live for the entire day and at a lower CPC/CPA.
You can also use insights throughout the platform to surface optimizations to implement across budget hit campaigns. For example...
Optimization - Absolute top
Are high CPC keywords bidding excessively for the top position? Lowering bids / reviewing bid strategies or improving Quality Score on low QS keywords appearing in the absolute top position can help reduce CPCs and enable your campaigns to stay for longer (and drive more traffic/conversions at the same spend level).
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.
Conversion - Zero conversion
Can any zero conversion keywords 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 - Add queries - Download n-grams
Are there words or phrases that don’t convert wherever they appear? The n-grams report shows you the combined performance for the words and phrases appearing across your missing queries. Apply filters to find non-converting words/phrases/themes that can be negated to free up budget.
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.
