4 reasons why advertising budgets do not fit into the campaign framework and how to solve this problem

Calculating the pace of a campaign can sometimes be one of the most important tasks that a internet marketer is worth. An overrun of the advertising budget at the end of the campaign means that your client will have to pay extra money, which he may not have and then you will have to cover the entire shortage yourself .

It’s also not very good to end the campaign without spending the whole budget, as this shows that you didn’t fully use all the possibilities.

I recall one case when a client sued one of the marketing agencies for not spending the entire advertising budget , he calculated his income from the campaign, he also calculated the income that he could receive if all the advertising money were used and demanded in court that this marketing firm would compensate him for the difference, since, in his opinion, they did not fulfill the conditions of the contract for the execution of the work, and he did not receive sufficient profit because of this.

Regardless of whether it is overspending or underspending, a bad calculation of the rate of spending is simply unacceptable. This is a mistake that most newbies make, and I’m sure that you’d hardly want this to happen to your customers.

Choosing the right pace of the campaign is quite a difficult task and for this you should take into account many different factors.

I’m surprised why a special tool that could be integrated into the “SEM management platform” has not yet been developed for this purpose ... are there any obstacles to this?

The global crisis made all marketers , including those who work on the Internet, be more resourceful and quick-witted. Our projects in contextual advertising are optimized like never before, sometimes it seems much better, there is less and less space for perfection.

Below I described in detail the main reasons that may affect the pace of your advertising campaign:

Predictable "Ups and Downs"

Search is always unpredictable, so if we can predict something, it is not accurate enough. But still, there are things that happen quite regularly that we can take this into account.

First, as in any other business, there are seasonal changes in the search (the peak of the search on the "snowboards" keyword falls on the winter period and the full decline in the summer). Naturally, over time, any product may become outdated or go out of fashion - remember the cassette player "sony walkman", then we will observe a drop in demand, this will not happen abruptly but gradually.

If you or your competitors have started some big advertising campaign online or offline, then "seasonality" can seriously affect its progress. Fortunately, it is easy to foresee. There are other specific circumstances for each case:

For example, our client from show business, he sells tickets to his concert. From the experience of previous campaigns for such clients, we know that if we schedule the search volume, then the curve three weeks before the start of the concert will rapidly go up and ten days after the concert will go down. Knowing these features, we can always more effectively use our advertising budget.

Unpredictable "Ups and Downs"

The memory of recent events associated with the death of Michael Jackson. According to search words, around the name of the singer, Google received such a huge number of requests that the company initially thought of a hacker attack. Now imagine that you are selling something associated with the name of Michael Jackson and did not set the maximum budget limits on your account in the adsense, within 12 hours your entire monthly budget would simply go away. Or imagine that you have a very limited budget and missed the opportunity to sell something for his real fans.

Another example, but from personal experience. Several years ago I collaborated with the company "Fortune 500", which appeared in one criminal case. During the day, their traffic from the context of the branded keyword increased several times, as it turned out most users searched for " [company name] scandal " and " [company name] criminal case ". We were forced to take retaliatory measures in order to get rid of such poor-quality traffic. Such crazy and unpredictable " ups and downs " when conducting advertising campaigns occur quite often.

Giant campaigns

Hundreds of thousands of keywords, promotion simultaneously under three or more search engines, simultaneously hundreds of projects, thousands of advertising groups ... it's hard to keep track of everything. Especially if promotional campaigns are still going on in parallel, new products are being launched onto the market, and so on. Too many dynamic components, it is sometimes difficult to cope with all this.

Technical problems

One of the most popular questions among SEM newbies regarding AdWords goes something like this: “ Why did my campaign go beyond the budget yesterday? ”.

Well, as everyone knows, the upper limit of the daily advertising budget is as solid as a wet napkin.

Google’s fiscal policy on this is: Your daily budget cannot be exceeded more than 30 times over 30 days . THOSE. For example, if on the first day of the campaign, expenses from your account exceeded the daily limit by $ 20, then on the following days, $ 20 less than your account will be used to compensate for the exceeded limit.

As we can see, even Google cannot remain within the budget framework of an advertising campaign. They have such a huge amount of advertising that it is virtually impossible to calculate everything up to a penny (or up to a cent). As already mentioned, Google will not charge you beyond what is on your advertising account. But this is unlikely to help you, if with one account you run several advertising companies.

Costs

You must consider not only your own income, but also the payment of a third party. For example, for the "SEM management platform" you should take 2-5% of media expenses, you also can not do without other marketing tools, such as: AdGooroo, Compete, SpyFu, etc., which are also not free.

This all needs to be taken into account when calculating your costs . All additional expenses to pay for third parties should be considered separately from your own income. I recall one interesting case when several years ago one of the advertising agencies, having used the advertising budget for six months, noticed that their expenses were not covered, i.e. it turns out that they had been working for half a year through their stupid mistake.

MyOST : and there is such a thing as VAT , it also needs to be taken into account when working by bank transfer. I, for the first time (there was a long time ago), when I registered the site in Yandex.Catalog for a fee , did not take into account this moment, and I took the money from the customer in the right amount (with the contract), as a result I paid VAT from my pocket , do not ask after the customer, justifying their carelessness.

The calculation of advertising costs in each case is individual . Sometimes it is calculated by day, but usually by week.

In most cases, the advertising budget is evenly distributed throughout the campaign lines, in which case it is very easy to track what percentage of the project budget has already been used and how much is left.

At the initial stage of the campaign, you can allow yourself up to 20% to overspend or underspend the budget , but after that you should return to the pre-selected pace as soon as possible, so that at the end of the company everything will be in strict accordance with the original plan.

At the end of the campaign, the level of expenditure is of much greater importance . In my company, I instruct my marketers like this: " Almost the entire budget should be spent until the last week of the campaign, and for the last week just leave what you know exactly what you can spend for 7 days (usually about 30% on average). campaign days) ". Thus, they can rely on the maximums of daily budgets, since it will not be difficult for the system to spend the remainder.

Overruns are usually harder to fix than underspending . If you see that your advertising budget has been overspent and you don’t have enough money until the end of the campaign, then you should immediately optimize your entire campaign, get rid of ineffective ad units, keywords, etc. This minimizes costs.

However, if you have overspending the budget to the end of the campaign, in any case, you will have to “ lose momentum ” for this campaign.

Many times I was forced to return to the client and explain that we, because it was so required by circumstances that unexpectedly arose during the campaign or the budget did not spend the budget because the goals of the campaign were achieved and I did not want to waste his money.

The main thing is to be able to communicate well with the client, so that he would understand why this happened.

Tips if you have missed the budget

• Increase the stakes.
• Increase your budget.
• Use content (and / or place in adwords).
• Use a wide match (Broad Match), that would arrange the "network" wider.
• Wider geotargeting, datatneting, etc.
• Increase the number of keywords. How about some thematic words?
• Raise your CTR on advertising.
• Use other search engines, for example Ask.
• Remove negative words (when it makes sense).
• More general advertising than specialized (but don’t sacrifice quality).

Tips if you have overspending the budget

• Lower rates.
• Lower budget.
• Leave Content Networks (usually have a lower return on investment than search).
• Do not use Broad Match.
• More targeting. By geo-, temporal segments, stop using other types of targeting.
• Use more negative terms to filter traffic.

In this article, the author shares his subjective reasoning, and it displays his personal point of view.