One of the most common questions people ask is how changing their budget will affect their data. Here are a few ways to get the answers you need.
The first place to look is Impression share lost due to budget, also known as Lost IS (budget). If it’s 0%, then changing your budget won’t increase traffic.
If you see the ‘Limited by budget’ in your Google Ads account, then you can get more details from the search engine:
Click on the graph icon to see a chart showing changes to CPC and cost. Unfortunately, even when bidding by target CPA, you often won’t get a good idea of the conversion changes.
Budget projections give you changes to clicks, cost, and average CPC as you increase your budget. You can’t easily see conversions and other changes using interface data.
Using your Lost Impression (budget) data, you can create your projections in two ways:
Using this type of data projection, you can show your manager or client what will happen if you change your budget. (Assuming no drastic seasonality changes to your search volume, of course).
As you improve your quality scores, get higher CTRs on broad match, and test ads, you’ll naturally spend more each month as you gather more clicks (and hopefully conversions). Trending your actual spend against your daily budget can help you see when you’ll get more clicks. You can then anticipate the need to increase your budget, or pause some of your worst-performing keywords to free up your funds.
For example, this account started in November and didn’t spend its budget. The account manager made some improvements in December and spent most of their monthly budget. In January, they increased their spend, and due to their improvements, exceeded their budget (which Google won’t charge you for).
By watching this trend, the manager knew when to increase budgets to capture the additional demand.
“What will happen if we increase our budget to $x” or “What will happen if we raise our budget by 15%” are common questions you can easily solve using lost impression share by budget.
If you can’t raise your budget, it might be better to pause your worst-performing keywords or move budget to campaigns that are limited by budget but have much lower CPAs or higher ROAs. This means you can make more profit by just manipulating where you spend your budget.
If you can raise your budget, then do a little bit of math for each campaign to ensure you’re increasing your budget where you will get the most additional conversions and revenue.
It’s a good question: what happens if we change our budget? Make sure you give a proper answer by allocating your budgets correctly and projecting exactly what will happen as you manipulate your campaigns to increase profits.
