Has this ever happened to you?
You’re two weeks into working on a new client account and things are looking great. You’ve cut out the necessary waste and you’ve paved the way to crank those bids up and shoot for the 1.0 position.
But wait—what’s this?
You’re out of budget already? Well, let’s just scale back those bids and sit pretty at the 2.0 spot to make room for the budget to be spent through the entirety of the day. But, now it looks like we’re getting beat out pretty badly by the competition. What can you do?
In this scenario, if you’ve got a set budget that cannot be changed, balance is key. You want to keep those bids high enough to stay competitive while also leaving room in your budget to stay on the SERP through your entire paid ad schedule. In searching for that balance, you may see something like this:
Naturally, the lower our position goes, the less impression share we lose due to a capped budget due to lower CPC’s. But, over the course of testing these lower CPC’s, we find that we are losing impression share due to being outranked by our competitors.
To help you find your balance, there are a few things you can do:
Review Time of Day Performance
Bid higher on your peak hours of the day while setting negative adjustments on the lower performing hours. This will allow for more budget to be re-allocated from those lower performing hours into the higher performing ones where you can make the push to bid for rank.
Turn Off Search Partners
Don’t let search partners throw off your balance if they are not performing well. In the example below, they may not account for a very large piece of the pie, but it could using money that could be better spent elsewhere, particularly during your peak hours on Google Search.
Review Your Quality Scores
Low Quality Scores can ruin your balance.
This can lead both higher CPC’s (causing you to cap your budget even faster) and a poor ad rank. Make sure your keywords are present in your ad copy and, if your Quality Scores are low due to landing page experience, communicate this with the client/their developers to come up with a solution as fast as possible.
Focus on the above three areas and you will be well on your way to finding that happy impression share balance between budget and rank!
