In this article we will learn more about Shared Budgets , the advantages and disadvantages of using them, as well as the ideal scenarios where they are most effective.
What are Shared Budgets?
Shared Budgets are a tool to manage the budget you have within your Google Ads campaigns . Basically, it is a single average daily budget that is shared by several campaigns in an account . When you assign a Shared Budget to a set of campaigns, the Google Ads platform automatically allocates a larger budget to those campaigns with better performance and/or with budget limitations, and leaves those that are performing less well with a smaller budget. This results in better optimization of the budget you have, since Google Ads will always allocate a larger budget to those campaigns with a better chance of conversion. Learn how to apply Shared Budgets to your campaigns, explained in detail by Google, by clicking here .
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using them?
Using Shared Budgets in your campaigns has many advantages. The main one is saving time , since by applying shared budgets you can spend less time managing your campaign budgets, and thus dedicate yourself to other activities such as finding other ways to optimize your campaigns. It also makes better use of the budget you have, especially if you have a limited budget, since the performance and ROI of the budget in the campaigns is maximized
. Now, using them also has some disadvantages. The main disadvantage is the lack of control you have over your campaigns , especially regarding how much each of them spends. As mentioned above, Google Ads automatically allocates budget to those with the best performance or highest probability of conversion, but this can also mean that those campaigns that do not perform as well receive little or almost no budget. If this happens and is left unattended, it can cause problems, since if you have different objectives or goals for each campaign, it is possible that they will not be achieved due to the little budget that those with lower performance are receiving.
Another disadvantage could also be that, when applying shared budgets, you cannot apply other delivery settings or make certain types of modifications to individual campaigns, since all the changes you want to make regarding budget will be applied to all campaigns within a set.
In which scenarios are Shared Budgets best used?
We already know what Shared Budgets are and the advantages and disadvantages of their use, but you're probably wondering if adopting this tool is the best strategy to optimize the budget in your campaigns.
Definitely, each account has different behavior and is in a different situation , therefore it needs different configurations. It cannot be taken as a guarantee that a strategy that worked very well in one account will work the same way in all of them; even within the same account, you can have different behaviors in different groups of campaigns.
Having said all this, we have discovered that Shared Budgets work best when you have a limited budget for a small number of campaigns . With a limited budget, it is usually difficult to know how to best allocate it, but, by applying Shared Budgets, this becomes an easier task. Also, Google Ads will be able to better optimize a shared budget if it is assigned to a small set of 2 or 3 campaigns .
Otherwise, if a large budget were assigned to many campaigns, there would be a huge loss of control, and the established objectives would not be achieved. In these cases, it is better to divide the budget into several Shared Budgets and make several sets of campaigns based on their similar objectives or similar performances.
