5 Settings To Avoid Overspending & Underspending Your PPC Budget

As a digital marketer who has spent years executing and managing campaigns, one of the key things I need to do is budget management. If a campaign overspends or underspends, we need to explain to the client why this happened and also figure out what to do with this overspend or underspend.

While you’re running your campaign, there are ways to reduce this overspend or underspend amount and limit the problem before it escalates beyond control. Here are 5 things you should check.

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1. Budget Settings

The first thing you need to do is check whether the budget setting is correct. Is the budget amount correct?

This is especially so if your Google, Facebook or LinkedIn ad account is using another currency (instead of your local currency). You might use a fixed exchange rate every year or a floating exchange rate that changes every day. Whichever you choose, just ensure that the rate is right and the budget amount is correct on the ad platform after converting the currency.

Also, check whether it’s daily or lifetime budget and whether the setting is correct.

Lifetime setting is almost like set and forget. You just set the budget amount once and you can forget about it until the campaign ends. But of course, you might need to adjust the lifetime budget amount if you decide to top up more budget or take some budget from this campaign and shift to another campaign.

Daily budget, on the other hand, will probably require more check-ins and frequent adjustments. If your campaign overspends or underspends in the previous days, you might need to adjust the daily budget amount accordingly.

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2. End Date Settings

Next, check if the end date is correct. If you haven’t set an end date, quickly set it now. Also, take note of your ad account timezone and ensure that the time is correct. This is especially important for events with specific end date and time.

Do take note that LinkedIn Ads use Universal Time (UTC). Ad reports follow this time zone. LinkedIn campaigns with an end date will end at 11:59 p.m. UTC on the selected date.

Remember to adjust the end date if you’re extending the campaign period or ending the campaign earlier.

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3. Delivery Settings

Did you choose normal or accelerated delivery?

LinkedIn, for instance, allows you to set accelerated delivery by setting the same daily budget amount as the lifetime budget amount. So a campaign with $2,000 lifetime budget will have $2,000 daily budget. LinkedIn will then try to accelerate delivery and exhaust budget as soon as possible. Accelerated delivery will thus make it seem like your campaign overspent because you’ll completely exhaust budget in a few days. But this is actually normal and expected because you chose to do so.

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4. Targeting

If you’re underspending, broaden your targeting.

• Google Search: add more keywords
• Google Display, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn: add more interests, widen your demographic targeting
• Facebook: enable Advantage+ placements or manually add more placements
• Upload customer lists for retargeting
• Create lookalike audiences

If you’re overspending, narrow your targeting. Basically, just do the opposite of everything above. You can also remove or turn off targeting and ad sets that perform poorly. Consider adding negative keywords that aren’t relevant and are driving up your campaign cost.

These are just some suggestions. Feel free to implement other tactics to broaden or narrow your targeting.

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5. Bidding Strategy Settings

Bidding strategy settings are quite tricky. You may think that your campaign will be able to spend smoothly because you’re using the default bidding strategy like maximize clicks or conversions or highest volume. However, there could still be issues and tackling them require some knowledge and experience.

Let’s say that your campaign is already using maximize conversions but it’s still underspending. This may be due to insufficient conversion data. For conversion-focused bidding strategies to work, you need some historical conversion data. Some ad platforms may require a minimum number of conversions. In such case, you may consider creating another high funnel conversion like pageviews, rather than low funnel conversion like add to cart. You’ll be able to gather more conversion data with this high funnel conversion. Another solution will be switching to another bidding strategy like maximize clicks.

You may also face underspending issue if you choose target CPA bidding and set a very low tCPA amount. With such a low target cost per action amount, your campaign will definitely not be able to spend much. The solution to this is to increase the tCPA amount or remove it completely.

If your campaign is overspending, you can manually set a lower tCPA amount or CPC amount so the ad platform will know not to bid too high. This will then lower CPC and the overall campaign cost.

The key takeaway here is that you need to critically examine your campaign, figure out if there’s an issue with your bidding strategy settings and rectify them.

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Now It’s Your Turn

Did you manage to solve your campaign’s overspending and underspending problems by checking the abovementioned? What have you done? Feel free to share your experience with fellow marketers~