Google Ads Shared Budgets

Key Takeaways

the daily budget you apply to your Google ads campaigns is one of the more simple controls that we have on the Google ads platform but for advertisers who need it there's actually a little more advanced option called shared budgets this is where you can utilize a single daily budget and apply it to a handful of campaigns or your entire account and they really help control costs for advertisers who need to make sure that they're only spending a certain amount for specific group of campaigns so in today's video I want to walk through what Google ads shared budgets are and show you when you might want to use them in your account I want to start off by giving a bit of a visual overview of what shared budgets are just in case the intro didn't work out for you visual Learners out there on the left we've got the regular standard campaign level budgets the way those function is pretty simple each of the three campaigns we have here has its own individual budget that's allotted to that campaign and that campaign only so campaign one is $10 two has 20 3 has 50 now if we were to make a shared budget for these three campaigns we' effectively just flip the relationship between the budget and the campaigns and then as the name suggests the budget would be shared so instead we would start with an $80 a day shared budget because that's the total that we have for the three campaigns right now and then that amount would be allocated across each of the three campaigns on a daily basis so that the combined daily spend would be no more than $80 but that $80 distribution could be in any different weights across campaigns 1 2 and 3 just because the original set had it broken down for $10 for campaign one and $50 for campaign 3 with shared budgets that number could be flipped or campaign 2 could take all of the budget for the most part it's a first come first serve basis there are definitely some benefits to Shared budgets if you have a Topline daily spend that you need to hit across a group of campaigns shared budgets is a great way to do that rather than trying to manage individual daily budgets for individual campaigns maybe you have an account that has 10 campaigns in it but two of them are allocated towards your holiday sale and you want to have just a budget designated for those holiday campaigns shared budget is an easy way to do that that will then leave the spend for those campaigns controlled and won't impact the budgets for the other campaigns in another example if you have an entire account that basically just has one budget and you don't really care which campaign spends the most you can create one shared budget and opt all of the campaigns into it and it makes that just a lot easier if you don't have particular preferences about campaign level spend the last one is better budget utilization now I'll be honest this one's 50/50 for me Google says that shared budgets will help you utilize your budget more efficiently but from their angle what they're thinking is that if you have lots of campaigns that are under spending the daily budget and some other campaigns that are being capped by budget they can then reallocate that unused spend from the first campaign and give it to the second effectively increasing your cost now that's not always a bad thing but that to me just sounds like you're spending more on Google on the flip side there is a way that you can make shared budgets perform even better but it doesn't have anything to do specifically with using unused budget instead if you combine shared budgets across a handful of campaigns with portfolio level bidding that optimizes toward the same goal across those campaigns then not only are you sharing one budget but you're sharing one optimization effort as well and that in my mind is a better budget utilization I'm not going to cover portfolio level bidding in this video Joe actually just recently released a video so if you're interested in that and how to combine it with shared budgets finish watching this video but then bookmark the video at the top of the screen right now and go watch that one right afterward now let's jump into the Google ads interface I'll show you how you can set up shared budgets in your account to create a new shared budget we need to go to the shared budgets manager in Google ads that's going to be over here in the tool section under budgets and bidding shared budgets we then need to click one of the blue plus buttons to create a new one we then give the shared budget a name ideally you'll give this a name that gives you some indicator as to which campaigns you're using it for so you can more easily manage it later but for now I'm not going to actually apply this so example shared budget it is now there are some finicky things when you're setting up shared budgets and what the total is there's a couple ways you can do this the first is to check the box next to the campaigns that you want to include if I chose the top two you can see down here at the bottom total budget $850 across two campaigns because it's taking the total of the two daily budgets combined now there is the option if you wanted to uncheck these to Simply add in a daily total here and create the shared budget without any campaigns applied to it but to be honest the workflow for this is not very good once you apply campaigns to that shared budget later Google still simply takes the combination of the daily total budgets that you have for the existing campaigns and just overwrites the total that you have here so there's really no reason to start this way and then opt campaigns in later because it's just going to overwrite it so for this example I'm going to choose campaigns that are paused in this account because I don't want to actually apply this but I do want to show you what the process looks like so let me go ahead and select those campaigns and with the magic of editing we'll move forward now that I've created my shared budget the daily budget is now $105 across two campaigns once these campaigns would run for a little while I would be able to navigate back to this shared budget manager and see the number of clicks Impressions the click-through rate average cost per click any of the different performance metrics that I wanted to see in here could also see conversions as well as any stats around call details if we were using those in this account now let's say we have this shared budget and we decided that we wanted to opt in other campaigns to this I would then go back to the campaigns manager I can then choose any campaign here click edit change budgets and and then rather than decide if I wanted to add a new budget increase or decrease you can see here that I can change from an individual budget into a shared budget from the library so if I click this button here you can see that I then get to select the budget I can choose the one that I want and then click save the biggest change here is that when you opt existing campaigns into existing shared budgets that already have campaigns associated with it the total budget stays the same it's still $105 it did not add in the incremental SP from the campaign that I was just trying to opt in so depending on which process you use whether you're adding them after the fact or altogether at the beginning make sure you're keeping an eye on the total that Google is setting for you for the shared budget so it actually is the amount that you want it to be since I don't want this campaign opted into this I'm going to click cancel but that's how you would create a shared budget in Google ads and apply it to your campaigns now let's say you want to remove a campaign from a shared budget or remove the shared budget altogether we can remove a campaign campaign from a shared budget from the settings tab in that given campaign to do that I'm going to filter for one of the paused campaigns that I opted into and you can see here we've got the average daily spend across these two campaigns so I would just need to click on the gear icon here go to the budget section and then to remove the campaign I would shift it back to an individual campaign budget and then I would need to reassign a daily budget to this campaign when you opt something out of a shared budget it will not revert back to the Daily budget that it had prior so you'll need to remember what that was or come up with a new amount this campaign's paused so it doesn't really matter just need to have a placeholder here and then I'll click save now you'll see that only the one campaign is opted into that shared budget and that campaign by itself now has $15 for a daily budget if you want to stop using the shared budget you could easily opt this campaign out of the shared budget and it will effectively do that for you but if you wanted to delete the shared budget we would need to go back into the shared budget manager and if we came here and I check the box you'll notice that this is going to cause a problem if I come up to edit and remove It'll ask if we're sure we want to remove the shared budget and when we try to do that we can't do it because it's applied to a campaign so if you want to remove a shared budget you would need to remove all of the campaigns that are associated with it first and then you can delete it but if at any point you wanted to just increase or decrease the daily budget for that shared budget you could do that here or you could do that back in the campaign manager just the same way you would increase or decrease an average daily budget for a given campaign but it'll always tell you that it will be applied across one campaign or two or however many you have in there shared budgets are a relatively simple tool but they can make account management a lot easier only having one daily budget to keep an eye on as opposed to a handful to regularly adjust based on performance and making sure you're hitting an aggregate daily spend can be challenging especially when Google is able to overspend your campaign daily budget by about double on any individual day remember one of the best use cases for shared budgets is to combine that with a portfolio bidding strategy across those campaigns to leverage a shared budget but also shared learnings trying to optimize towards certain campaign goals if you have any additional questions about shared budgets or anything else in the Google ads interface feel free to leave us a note in the comments below thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below if you really liked it maybe think about subscribing to the paid media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops if you really really liked it you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button all