Shared Budget Options On Google AdWords, Beneficial Or Hindrance?

Those who are a PPC addict like me, have noticed that Google AdWords have just recently introduced a ‘Shared Budget’ option. This feature allows selected campaigns to share one  budget. So now instead of having individual campaigns with their own maximum budget the selected campaigns can have one big total maximum budget. So what does this mean for your business? Here are some of  the advantages and disadvantages of this option to make you think.

Advantages

• If a campaign perform better than expected you will perform better overall. Most of the overall budget will be diverted to that successful campaign with high clickthroughs, conversions and ROI.

• There is now no need to adjust your budget throughout the day. When some campaigns are performing well in terms of clickthroughs and the others are under performing on a particular day there is no need to reallocate budgets to the successful campaign anymore.

• If your goal is to build brand awareness through people visiting your website rather than making conversions, than shared budget is the option for you. Shared budget allocates your money to several different campaigns  so the likelihood of Google spending all your budget and consequently giving you high number of website visits will increase, since in any given day it will be likely that at least one of your campaigns will be performing well.

 
Disadvantages

• It helps Google squeeze every last penny of your budget. Fast click campaigns will drain your daily budget, which means it may stop any possible conversions from other more quality campaigns throughout the day. Also since your budget are diverted to several campaigns Google’s leverage over your daily spend is stronger. So you would most likely meet your daily budget  regardless of your conversion numbers or ROI.

So who should use Google AdWords Shared Budget option?

This really depends on the goals of your campaign and how your campaigns are performing. If you are purely building brand awareness or don’t care about how budgets are distributed to your campaigns then I recommend you to use this option. If your campaigns performs unpredictably daily in terms of clicks and conversions then you should also use this option to  try and maximize your daily clicks and conversion numbers. If your campaign reaches maximum budget fast throughout the day you may want to keep it out of the shared budget option so that it does not drain the total shared budget and stop other campaigns from gaining clicks and conversions. This may also indicate that you need to adjust your keywords such as its match type and place more negative keyword in your campaign. Once you optimized your campaigns and your campaign is at a reasonable money consumption speed then it may be worthwhile for you to group the campaigns into a shared budget setting to test this option out.

How to share budget on Google AdWords?

Go to the ‘Campaign’ tab> Go to the left and click on ‘Shared Library’ and the ‘Budgets’> Click on ‘+New Budget’ button> Name your shared budget> Select the campaigns you want to share your budget>And type in the total budget you want to use on these selected campaigns.

WARNINGS- Once you start the shared budget option, you will start from £0 so Google will try and use up all the budget you stated in the time you have left of the day. Try doing it right after 0:00 time so that you won’t go over your daily budget. Also make sure all your campaign delivery method settings are the same, if one is set on ‘accelerated delivery method’, this campaign could use up all your budget and leave no money for the other campaigns.

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What are your thoughts on Google Adwords new shared budget option? Leave your comments below

Want more tips and advise on AdWords read:

The secrets of increasing your conversions on Google AdWords

How to increase your conversions without increasing your budget

All your need to know to write an effective ad copy in AdWords

21 Ad writing policy on Google Adwords-that-you-may-not-have-know

AdWords keyword match types

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