Have there been days you experienced a sudden spike in impressions? Here are a couple easy ways you can protect your budget from exceeding prematurely.
1- Use Budget per Day Option:
With this new budgeting option, you can control your campaign costs by stopping ad exposure if you set a maximum daily budget limit. You can use this option when you plan on adjusting your budget frequently to take advantage of changing market conditions, such as a holiday season or special promotions.
What happens when you reach your budget daily limit?
If you reach your budget daily limit before the end of the day, all your ad groups in the campaign are paused (Budget Paused status) and ads associated with the ad groups in the campaign are no longer displayed. Your campaign will resume at the start of the next day, as long as you haven't yet reached your monthly budget limit.
Here are the steps for setting your daily budget:
- Go to the Pricing page (new campaign) or Keywords tab (existing campaign).
- In the drop-down list next to the Campaign budget box, select per day.
- In the Campaign budget box, type your daily target amount.
- In the Maximum monthly budget box, type the maximum amount you want to spend each month.
Please note that in some cases, your daily budget target may be exceeded by a small amount, but your maximum monthly budget will not be exceeded.
2- Set Negative Keywords: To avoid getting unrelated leads which could have an impact on your daily budget, I recommend adding negative keywords. Someone advertising for a window washing company might want to add negative keywords for window treatments, window replacement, etc. To identify the keywords which have generated the most leads, you’ll need to run a Keyword Performance Report which can be found in the Reports Tab within adCenter. You can then use the Keyword Research Tool, which can be found on the Research Tab within adCenter, to identify some possible negative terms that appear when searching on these keywords. The resulting keyword recommendations are created from searches on Live Search & MSN over the previous month.
3- Apply Selective Bid Management: This solution requires keeping a constant eye on your bids and making frequent adjustments when necessary. For example, if you're seeing a spike in impressions, it's possible that one or more of your search terms were listed in the "A-List Searches" box on the MSN home page (screenshot below), which may generate an unexpected flood in impressions. You can simply review the MSN home page and lower your bids for any search terms that appear both in the "A-List Searches" box and in your list of keywords.
