AdWords Introduces Ability To Share Budgets Across Campaigns

Sep 17, 2012 at 5:21pm ET by Pamela Parker

Google’s AdWords has released a new feature that will let an advertiser share daily budgets between multiple campaigns in a single account. The idea is that a marketer may have a set daily budget to spend across multiple product lines, or channels, and this feature lets them dynamically reallocate that budget if one campaign falls short on volume, for example.

The shared budgets feature lives in the “Shared library” section under Budgets. There’s a fairly elaborate graphic that explains how to use the feature.

If you switch to using a shared budget in the middle of the day, the new budget number will apply from the time you create it, as if $0 had previously been spent that day.

While some users responded positively to the new feature, others weren’t as enthusiastic. Marketers like Matthew Umbro, director of paid search at Exclusive Concepts, is concerned that, when the feature is used, one campaign will monopolize the others. ”For example, Campaign A might contain more competitive keywords than Campaign B. Due to the high search volume of Campaign A’s keywords, the keywords in Campaign B won’t get the impression share necessary to gather enough data. Campaign A is not only using all of its own budget, but Campaign B’s as well,” he said. ”Though a nice idea, I’m not sure how Google will regulate the impression share by campaign when advertisers utilize shared budgets.”

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Top News

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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Juan Manuel Lopez

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having a budget at all? The bottom line is that you do not want to spend more money than you have on a certain campaign… I guess it all depends on how big is the brand… this might be good news for the big players.

Companies with few campaigns and small budgets might not even feel the effect. Looking forward to hear from others.
TheRdungeon

Does anyone know why they don’t do lifetime budgets like Facebook? Would help me so much
http://twitter.com/jamesdadd jamesdadd

The feature is there for those that wish to use it. My gut feeling is, before I look further into this, is that this may allow a small company to optimise their campaigns on a daily basis. If one campaign, as the article states, is falling short for whatever reason, then the budget can easily be transferred over to one that may deliver that shortfall.
jonno

I am still waiting for the set monthly/ weekly budget per campaign, to feed from a top level budget in billing. That’s the dream! ; ) Running multiple campaigns, where clients have a specific budget per campaign, but not spending enough to warrant creating new accounts is my current predicament ; (
Paul Keep

I think this will allow most companies to get even more targeted and long tail with less worry about search demand. Also for those smaller companies that may have certain products with smaller demand, they can more effectively target those even if the search volume isn’t always there. In the end, I think budgets big and small will benefit. Budgeting per campaign is always important but it will be less risky with this new feature.
Lisa Taylor

I agree! We need to be able to set monthly budgets per campaign when multiple campaigns are all under one account ‘budget’ – I find that the daily budget is too restrictive and prevents campaigns from spending the entire monthly budget because it shuts off daily, but you can’t set a monthly campaign budget and raise the daily budget if you have several campaigns under one account/overall budget/MDO.
Wendy

Either way- Google remains the one who sings the song that we r all forced to listen.