How do I decide whether a campaign can spend more even when it doesn’t say “limited by budget”?

If you have extra ad spend to work with (or if you pause another campaign and need to allocate its budget), check out the impression share (IS) lost to see if an existing campaign can take on the new spend. If (IS) is lost due to budget OR due to rank, then it most likely can. This is due to the cyclical nature of bids:

• Rank determines your ad’s position in the results.

• Rank is affected by bid.

• Bid is set based on what the business can afford (for example, [Max CPC] = [Break Even CPL] * [Conversion Rate]).

• Higher Bid = Higher Ad Position = Better Website Visitors = Higher Conversion Rate (clicks to leads) = A Higher Bid can be afforded. So, you can sometimes raise the bid in the anticipation that the conversion rate will increase by guesstimating what it will increase to and “putting the cart before the horse.”

• If NOT Smart Shopping campaign - you might temporarily switch the campaign to a manual CPC (with enhanced CPC enabled) bidding strategy if it was using an automated bidding strategy before, because the algorithm most likely isn’t intelligent enough to push the max bid in this way.

• If Smart Shopping - it’s not possible to switch to manual, so here are some other options:

  • Give it more budget in order to get it to increase the bid
  • Before increasing the budget, make sure the product feed is optimized by including a lot of optional information that helps with rank. Be sure to optimize your feed during the eCommerce setup process.