Just this past week Google announced a very big change in how they do budgets for your AdWords account. Introducing Shared Budgets for Google AdWords campaigns. You can read the full release on the Google blog.
Although this sounds great, I have already had experience with Shared Budgets already last week and want to let you know to be careful and choose carefully what you share.
With a Shared Budget, this is how it is supposed to work. You select which Campaigns (not ad groups) you want to share budgets between. If you have one campaign that does not spend its daily budget on a regular basis and one which does, you can choose to share budgets. Google says this:
“Using shared budgets allows automatic adjustments across campaigns, so you don’t have to constantly monitor and change individual campaign budgets throughout the day.”
It sounds good, that money not spent on the one weaker campaign, would flow over to fund the stronger campaign when needed. BUT, this is the reality of what I have already seen this last week on set up.
I set up Shared Budgets, what happened by noon one day is that the entire account budget was spent by a “hog” of a campaign effectively shutting down exposure for the full account. No metering out there, or leftovers given to the strong program, the stronger program overrode all settings of the weaker programs and took every single cent all $166.66 dollars, all of them!
The lesson learned is to be very careful what you share with AdWords Shared Budgets. Watch carefully after you set up the share both several times during the day and for statistical data. Make sure you are not funding a hog at the expense of the rest of the campaigns in your account.
By using Shared Budgets, you are effectively putting all shared campaigns in one campaign and the strong campaign now acting as an ad group in a single campaign will take the most cash at the expense of the others.
I think the idea is great, the but actual execution can create havoc with an account’s funding structure. Use Shared Budgets carefully and watchfully.