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Shopping ads limited by budget.. performance has suffered. Good idea to increase budget?
Not sure what the best move is here. I know that generally these warnings can be taken with a grain of salt.. but, I have noticed a dip in performance since the campaign started to cap out. I’m wondering if its a good idea in this case to raise the budget or lower our bids.
For some reference: The products we sell on our store are expensive, we get a good margin on them. 2 sales in a day could easily cover $600-$1000 in ad spend.
Also, they are summer seasonal products. So right now as expected, search demand has increased by a lot.
We are running a standard manual (ECPC) shopping campaign, the campaign only has a handful of skus (15-20) that are all the same type of product. Total budget for this campaign is currently at $400 with bids ranging from $4 to $7.50 CPC. We had the bids lower, but noticed a pretty solid increase in performance when we boosted them.
For almost 2 weeks, it was running amazing. We were averaging about 2-3 sales each day and getting tons of phone calls showing interest in the products. (Who were then coming back to buy later.)
However, during this time the campaign was frequently spending over budget. (By about $100 to $200)
So at the start of this week we got the red warning that we’re limited by budget. Obviously, didn’t pay too much mind to it because things were great so whatever.
But through this week, there was a HUGE drop off. Barely any calls, and only 1 sale for the entire week so far.
It’s utilizing the budget completely, but it feels like we are getting shit traffic now.
Our busiest time of the day was morning to afternoon, we were getting flooded with calls every day during these times over the past couple weeks but now its like radio silence.
Am I correct in assuming, due to the limited budget, Google is showing our ads significantly less during these peak traffic hours to keep us from going over budget?
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1 Reply
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Check to see what the impression share lost by budget is. Multiply that by your daily budget and then add that amount to your daily budget. If you’re not losing impression share to budget you can probably ignore for now but would definitely monitor it over the next few days.
If you can afford to raise the budget, I would recommend doing so. You don’t really want to risk running out of budget and going dark during your prime time.
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It sounds like you are profitable or at least happy with your performance.
I would look at the Benchmark Max CPC column within the product group for the standard shopping campaign. That can give you an idea if competitors are bidding a lot higher or lower then you. That is one way to decide on adjusting bids.
If you have room between your ideal ROAS and your current ROAS. I would look at adjusting budget but only after playing with bids…if you can lower bids and not see any negative impact on traffic and conversions. You could get more clicks out of your current budget without raising the campaign budget just yet.
For the drop off in performance. Look at auction insights and see if new competitors are entering the ad auction over the last week or two. Even with a limited budget, Google should show your ads to people wanting to convert.
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To me. Limited by budget means you should take action. Raise your budget or lower your target. Your instincts are correct that you’re likely running into issues serving during key times.
If you make the system choose, it will pull back.
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