Are Your Google Ads Campaigns Limited By Budget? Try These Simple Tips

Are Your Google Ads Campaigns Limited By Budget? Try These Simple Tips

If your Google Ads campaign is labeled with a status of “Limited by Budget” and you’re not sure about how to proceed, the following simple tips should give you a few places to start.

Keyword Bids

In many cases, the first step to addressing your “Limited by Budget” status is to lower your keyword bids. If you are able to show your ads in a lower position for lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs), your daily budget will last longer. Being in a higher average position is not necessarily better, and when you have a limited daily budget, it is unlikely that targeting top positions is the optimal strategy. If your ads are relevant to the users you are targeting, it won’t hurt you to save budget by appearing in a slightly lower position, as long as performance doesn’t drop. You should also identify any high cost, low performance keywords that you can pause. Focus on the keywords that are working at a cost that is reasonable to you, and don’t be afraid to let go of those that are above your target CPC with limited results.

Ad Scheduling: Hour of day

Use the “Segment” feature or head on over to the “Dimensions” tab in your AdWords account and set your “View” to “Time” and then select “Hour of day” in the drop-down menu. Choose an appropriate time-frame (preferably a larger sample size) and take a look at the engagement with your ads throughout different hours of the day. Start by sorting by cost to determine the hours of the day when you spend most of your budget. Then, compare how those hours of the day perform relative to your goals. If you are tracking conversions, compare the most expensive hours of the day to the hours of the day with the highest conversion rates. This exercise could tell you a lot about when your budget is being spent, and whether or not those times are effective. By determining your least effective time-frames, you can apply bid adjustments so that you pay less for clicks during those hours. On the other hand, you can stop showing your ads entirely during ineffective hours, leaving more of your budget for when you see the best results.

Ad Scheduling: Day of week

To be as efficient as possible with your budget, consider only running your ads on days of the week that are proven effective. Change your “View” to “Day of the Week” and analyze your ad activity throughout the days of the week. If you find days with high cost and low results, consider implementing bid adjustments to decrease spend on those days. This will leave more budget for the days that are effective. If you find that your ads don’t perform well on the weekends, consider pausing them, freeing up two full days of budget that you can put toward week days. These changes are simple, yet often overlooked. Keep in mind that every business is unique; therefore, the optimal ad schedule will vary for each.

Location Targeting

Be sure that you are not spending budget serving ads to users that are located in areas irrelevant to your business. Review your location targeting to ensure you are only targeting the areas that make sense for your business. On the “Dimensions” tab, change your “View” to “User Locations”. This will show you where the users are located who are interacting with your ads. If you have high costs coming from an irrelevant location, consider excluding your ads from showing there in your location targeting settings.

Devices

Take a look at how your ads perform on different devices by selecting “Segment” & “Device”. You want to apply your budget where it is most effective and cut out any wasteful spend, so an analysis of performance across different devices can provide great insight. For example, if you find that your costs are much higher on mobile devices and tablets compared to desktop computers, but most of your success comes from ad activity on desktop computers, you should consider a negative bid adjustment on mobile devices and tablets. Be aware that there is no explicit exclusion of mobile advertising, but you can implement a -100% bid adjustment to exclude your ads from appearing on mobile devices. Make sure you are advertising on each device at a reasonable cost, and consider making bid adjustments if you find otherwise.

Quality Score

If you’re suffering from poor quality scores, this is also going to hurt your budget. If your keywords have poor quality scores, you will have to pay higher CPCs to get your ads to show in the same position as an advertiser with a strong quality score. Make sure your keywords are included in your ad copy, as well as your landing pages, to help ensure a strong quality score. If you can improve quality score, you can lower CPC, which will help you squeeze more results out of your existing budget.

Budget

Finally, the simplest of all tips for addressing your “limited by budget” campaign status is to increase your budget! If you have a positive return on your Google Ads spend, increase your daily budget to see even better performance.

Increasing your limited budget is not an option for many advertisers, so use the tips above to help cut out any wasteful spend. There are various ways to address a campaign that is limited by budget, but using these simple tips should have you headed down the right path.

Learn more about Nowspeed’s pay-per-click advertising services.