Module 8 - Don't let the spend run away

How do you stop the budget getting away from you?

Set your budgets at campaign level from the start. When you get into YouTube ads there is the opportunity to spend any amount of budget, and that has always been true with Google. It is very easy to let budget get away from you.

So I strongly suggest you set your budgets at a campaign level. When you start, it will say daily or lifetime budget. If you are really worried about keeping budget under control, you can do a lifetime budget for that particular campaign.

Why are daily budgets the risky option?

Because Google saves up what it does not spend. If you set a daily budget of, for example, 50 pounds, Google can sit there for several days and do very little while it is learning and it is not spending. So you think, okay, that is fine.

You might have had it in your mind that you had a campaign budget of a thousand pounds or a thousand dollars. That campaign runs for two weeks and it has spent, let us say, 200 bucks, so at that point it has only really spent 15 a day. What Google is actually doing is saving your budget up, and at any point it can go and spend the rest of the budget it has accumulated.

So be careful and keep an eye on what you want to spend. Personally I like to go in on a daily basis anyway. I pretty much live in the Google Ads interface. But you can set up alerts, so you can set it to tell you when you have hit certain budgets, and you can download reports on a daily basis and have them emailed to you.

It is not difficult, but just be mindful that Google will save budget as it goes along, especially if you are running multiple campaigns. In that scenario it might be better to set a campaign budget and run your ad sets below that, so that within those ad sets they are dependent on the total campaign budget. Then you know you are under control and you are not going to spend more than you want to.

What does maximise conversions really mean?

It means please spend all my budget. Be careful of the maximise conversions option within Google Ads, because that will get your budget away from you. It will spend all of it.

The term is a little bit misleading, I think. In reality, in Google's eyes, maximise conversions means please spend all my budget and test using this budget. It does not matter about maximising your conversions. It maximises your spend. It will get you to a goal quicker, because it will spend and spend to find where those conversions live. But in your test phase it is not maximising the conversions, it is spending the budget to find where the conversions are.

How should you set your expectations?

Work backwards from your goals and your KPIs, and write them down. If you have got a budget of a thousand dollars a month and you need to get sales at 20, or enquiries at 20, you are looking for 50 conversions. Set those as your expectations at the outset, make some notes and write it down.

This is where a lot of people go wrong with their budget. They do not write down their expectations and targets at the outset, work against those, and see where they had success and failure. If you can learn where you have succeeded and where it has not been as good as you expected, that is where you will do better in the future.

How often should you look at the account?

Daily is plenty. You do not need to go on an hourly basis. I have seen people getting absolutely obsessed with their Google Ads account, trying to see, is it happening, have I got a conversion, switching things on and switching them off.

That is one of the things that will damage your campaigns, and we have talked about it in other parts of the course. It will damage your campaign if you go in and manipulate the budget all the time.

Can you really advertise on any budget?

Yes. Google says you can advertise on any budget and you absolutely can. I have got clients with campaigns running on two or three dollars a day, and conversely clients running on tens of thousands a day. You can run on any budget and you can scale.

I would encourage you to start on a small budget and let it learn, because we need Google to learn. You need the AI on your side. You need it to be able to run your budget properly and give you those conversions. But equally we want to be in control.

There is a famous line in the deepest, darkest places within the Google support forum, and it still says it to this day, that you should remember you are more intelligent than Google is. The day that changes, then we can switch 100 per cent to a target cost per acquisition model. But remember, it is you that is in control. You are in control of your budget, so just be careful.