Speaker 1: Budget management is certainly not one of the sexier topics in PPC. It's not a new super secret strategy that nobody else has yet to help you beat your competition, it's not a new beta, but it is a really important part of success. Obviously overspending can be a big problem. Spending money you don't have, I feel like that's a pretty clear issue, but underspending can also be an issue. If you have an entire business strategy tied into certain expectations of performance, whether it's revenue, sales, coming from advertising, and you underspend on that, that can have a big ripple effect in your business. So today what I want to talk about are a few strategies to help you be a good steward of your PPC budgets and make sure that you're hitting all of those metrics that your business needs you to hit. This video is brought to you by Shape, an all-in-one PPC budgeting solution designed for you to control, organize, and collaborate on PPC ad spend at scale. Ready to start saving some time? Check out the link below to learn all about Shape. I want to take it all the way back to the basics for a minute, because some of you might just be getting started and trying to determine what your initial budget should be, and others might be somebody who's been doing this for a while, but you want to take a step back and make sure you're being a good steward of your budgets. So this is a question I get all the time, what should my budget be? To be quite honest, I don't know. There are too many different factors that go into each business to make it such an individualized case, but I can't tell you what your budget should be. But there are some things that I tend to talk through with clients more often than not, to make sure that we're getting the budget right sized for our business goals. So let's talk through those. The first is what can you afford? Think about how your business is running. Look at your financials. What revenues do you have coming in? What expenses do you have going out? What's earmarked for different things? Do you have an extra $10,000 a month coming in? Do you have an extra $100 a month coming in that you can earmark for advertising spend? It doesn't necessarily matter what that amount is, and I'm not saying it should be a certain percentage of anything. I'm not saying that it should be a certain dollar amount, but it needs to be realistic for your business. What can you actually afford? Don't put yourself underwater just to try and test out advertising. Think about what you can actually afford and be realistic about it. Which leads us into the next piece. Make sure that your budget is based in reality. What are you expecting to do? Are you going to advertise on Google and Microsoft and Facebook and LinkedIn, but you only have $5 a day? That's not very realistic. You can't advertise on all of those channels with such a small budget a day. If you only have $5 a day, that's fine, but pick one platform and make sure that your strategy leans into it so you get the most out of that $5 a day. Make sure that your budget is based in reality for what you want your business to achieve through online advertising. Lastly, spend enough to see results. This is something that sounds like I'm trying to get you to spend more than you can, but it's one of the things that I see stop a lot of people who are getting started in online advertising. They don't see immediate results for the exact metrics that they thought they were going to get, so they turn everything off. One example of this could be a B2B company. They're trying to generate leads, they spend $10,000 in a month, and they're discouraged they didn't make a sale. But if we stop and think about it, typically that company would have a six-month long sales cycle and the contract size that they get out of a sale is $100,000. There's no surprise that we didn't make a sale in the first month because it almost always takes six months for those people to close. And when they do close, they end up at a 10 to 1 return on ad spend if we got that lead in the first month. Think about what the realistic results of your campaigns are going to be and make sure again that your budget is right sized based on those results of how your business operates. Don't sell yourself short just because you weren't willing to wait and make sure that one of those leads were going to come through. Okay, now let's start getting into the actual practices of what you can do. The first is forecasting. This is something that honestly can be a little bit of a pain, but it's really important to make sure that you know what to expect when you go into any given ad channel and you're starting a new strategy and you want to know what's going to happen. This goes back to that based in reality piece. You've got to make sure that your budget is accommodating of whatever market you're in, what the expected metrics are going to be, and forecasting can really help you start to think through and plan that out and get an idea of what performance is going to look like. The Google keyword planner or Microsoft keyword planner can really help you understand what the performance of your individual keywords could look like. It will give you some example click-through rates, some average cost per click, some potential search impressions, the actual volume. This basically gives you an idea of what your performance could look like for individual keywords based on a given month. You can even change out what forecasted range you want it to tell you for. So like for this, it defaulted to next month, so this is for February of 2020, but you could also tell it to show you what it would look like for February of 2020 through the end of January 2021. It'll give you about a year out in advance and tell you what performance is going to look like based on past metrics. So these are a bit of an educated guess as to what Google thinks performance is going to look like. Take a look at this, see what your estimated volume is going to look like. With display campaigns, there's not a dedicated tool for these anymore. They took away the display planner, but if you go in and set up a display campaign, when you start to add targeting, like I've added three topics here, you can see off on the right that it does give you an impressions count that is basically an estimate of the number of impressions you'll see per week. If you're already running display campaigns, you'll probably have a good estimate of what your click-through rates are and what your cost per click will be. If not, you can go out and get a benchmark report from some of the other companies in the space. Just type in your industry and benchmark PPC report, and there might have something come up and kind of tell you what performance looks like there. So you can start to estimate what you're going to see coming from these display campaigns, all keyed off of that impression metric and some estimated cost per click and click-through rate numbers. Even Facebook and LinkedIn have some metrics that can help you start to forecast and understand what performance can look like. So these are just some very basic placeholder audiences here. Facebook is the image on the left. It gives you some reach numbers and estimated conversions based off of the performance that it's seen from your account on that conversion action. So it really kind of helps you understand where things are here. LinkedIn gives quite a bit more metrics. I actually like this one quite a bit better. It doesn't end up giving you a conversions number, but it does tell you about what you would expect for impressions, spend, click-through rate, about how many clicks you'd get, all this good stuff. So utilize all of these to start to understand and forecast what your potential performance could look like to help you determine if your budget needs to be a little bit higher, a little bit lower, or if you had the initial estimate kind of right where it needed to be. After you've done your forecasting and you're ready to set up your campaigns, make sure that your budget settings are in line with what your goals are going to be. There are a number of nuances between different platforms and make sure that you know everything going into the different budget settings. I'm going to go through a couple examples here, but depending on the platforms you're in and what budget options are available, make sure you're researching all of them. The first that I'm going to talk about is the Facebook budget settings. There are two different settings for Facebook budgets. One is daily budget and one is lifetime budget. Daily budget is exactly what it sounds like. Facebook is going to try and spend your daily budget the same every single day. This is great if you want to make sure that you are staying consistent in your spend and you're able to control your spend a little bit more specifically. I personally love daily budgets. I use them almost all the time, but they do have some limitations. That's where lifetime budget comes in. Lifetime budget allows you to set a budget for the entire run of your campaign. Let's say you want to run it for a month. You can tell it, I only want to spend $2,000 this month and it will adjust your budget each day based on the performance that it's seeing only to spend that $2,000 by the end of the month. The other thing lifetime budgets give you is the ability to schedule when your ads are running directly on Facebook. Daily budgets don't do this. You can only schedule your campaigns on Facebook with a lifetime budget. But lifetime budgets aren't right for everybody. Maybe you don't need to schedule your campaigns and maybe you prefer having the more consistent spend and being able to optimize manually based on performance trends like I do. So there are pros and cons to each of the different budget types. Make sure that you're using the one that's right for you and your goals. Okay, hopping into Google. One budget setting to keep an eye on is average daily budget. A lot of new advertisers get a little bit duped with this because average daily budget you would think would be like Facebook where it only spends up to that amount of money. But on Google they can spend up to two times your campaigns average daily budget because they're trying to take effectively a month's worth of data into account and they're making adjustments to your daily budget to try and take advantage of good performing days and cut budget on low performing days. If you have an average daily budget set at $10 but you go in and see that you spent $20 yesterday, that is fully sanctioned with Google's rules here and they want to make sure that they're taking good advantage of the performance that you're seeing in your campaign. Again, this is just a good example of knowing what the budget settings are, how they impact your campaigns, and making sure that they're set up in the way that you need them to to hit your business goals. Next is to set up projection sheets. We have a video that talks about this so I'm not gonna go too in-depth on these but I do want to bring it up and talk about how projection sheets can really help you make sure that you're staying on top of what performance looks like. This is just an average look at what a projection sheet would look like for me. It gives me a look at what the past seven days has been, what month to date is, and then what I'm projected for at the end of the month. This is something you should do to make sure that you are on pace for what you want your budget to be. Obviously this month projected at just shy of $52,000 is a lot less than last month when we were projected at $96,000. That's very specific to this business as to why we're doing that and because we had to cut down quite a bit, we actually had to cut down to about $50,000, I now know that to get to our $50,000 goal I actually need to cut a little bit more from our campaigns and make sure that I get us all the way down there because I understand where we're projected for at the end of the month rather than just looking at the month-to-date spend and saying well we're just shy of $44,000 so we're not over 50k yet but we might get there by the end of the month. This gives you an educated look of where you expect to get moving forward. Next is to be flexible. Once you have your campaigns set up and you're seeing performance, you might start to notice that one campaign or one channel is performing quite a bit better than the other. We did the forecasting, we've got all of our budget settings in place and we made determinations about what budget goes to which efforts but to be a good steward of your budget is to be flexible. Make sure that you are adjusting where your spend is going based on what performs well. In this previous look, everything looks pretty even. We're projected for about a $126,000 cost per lead at the end of the month. Google and Bing individually both are projected right around that $126 mark but if you look at the past seven days, Google's cost per lead is $134,000 whereas Bing's is just shy of $105,000. So if I want to finish out the month strong, I might want to take budget away from some of the Google campaigns, shift them into Bing and take advantage of that lower cost per lead over the past seven days and close out the month strong. The last tip we have for improving your budgeting is to start leveraging some software. Use smart tools that can take a little bit of the work off of your hands and get you back into tasks that honestly automation can't take care of. As we mentioned earlier, this video is sponsored by Shape, an all-in-one PPC budgeting solution. Shape is a great platform to help you save some time on PPC budget management whether you're an individual user, a company, or an agency so you can get back to the work that can't be automated. The platform integrates directly with the eight ad networks you see on screen to allow you to track campaigns together against a budget target across all of those networks. So you don't have to set up individual budget targets for each channel. You can if you want to, but let's say you just have one overall budget you need to hit for all of your channels, you can do that with Shape. The dashboard lets you track and optimize campaign performance and spend across hundreds of clients directly in the dashboard. In this one view, you can easily check on all of your accounts without having to bounce between the individual platforms, using different logins, all that good stuff. You can also receive alerts when spending near certain thresholds. If you're getting close to your monthly budget, Shape will let you know. These alerts are found in the platform, but they can also be sent to your inbox so you can be alerted no matter where you are. Client and budget level views help you spot trends and optimize campaigns directly from the Shape platform to course-correct on pacing issues. You don't have to go back into the platforms themselves to make adjustments. Additionally, you can easily collaborate with your team members by using Shape's notes feature to call out performance trends you're seeing or even tag team members for them to take action as you can see here on the right. Shape also has a number of intelligent automation features to help you save even more time. Autopilot, which you can see here, eliminates over delivery and overspend automatically by changing campaign statuses either on a daily or monthly basis to keep spend on track and help you hit your budget targets on time. But they have another option too, cruise control, which automatically adjusts campaign daily budgets up or down depending on how campaigns are pacing against their budget target. Lastly, smart sync automatically adds new campaigns you create to the platform so you don't have to worry about manually adding them later on. One of the last things we want to worry about is making sure that new campaigns have been added to all the different platforms that we might use to manage it to make sure that we keep track. Shape will automatically pick those up and pull them into the platform so you can start using them for budget management as well. If all that sounds good to you, and honestly I don't know why it wouldn't, Shape has many different options but they also have a free tier so anyone can sign up and try all these features out indefinitely for one client and up to 20 budgets. What do you have to lose? Use the link on the screen or in the show notes to head on over to the Shape website and get started today. And that's it. There are a lot of ways to make sure that you are being a good steward of your budget. Thanks again to our friends at Shape for sponsoring this video and hopefully now you have a better understanding of what you can do either by yourself or with a little bit of help from our friends at Shape to manage your budgets better. Thanks for watching our video. If you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below. We

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