Managing PPC budgets is no small feat for ad agencies. Overspending impacts profitability and strains customer relationships. Underspending means missed opportunities and lower returns. Add the complexity of aligning budgets to unique customer sales strategies and it’s clear why PPC budget management can feel overwhelming.
Tools like automation can ease the burden of these budgeting tasks for your team. Automation can instantly pause exhausted budgets, align pacing strategies to client goals, and redistribute budgets across different channels to maximize performance.
Curious how PPC automation can transform budgeting workflows at your agency? Let’s take an in-depth look at how automation can simplify and optimize your PPC strategies.
Stop overspending on PPC ad campaigns
Overspend protection is one of the most sought-after PPC management tools for ad agencies, and for good reason. When you overspend a client’s budget, those credits come right off your margins and impact your agency’s profitability. Plus, no one wants to make that client phone call.
Budgeting automation solutions can automatically pause any account, campaign, or ad group once your set budget is exhausted. Gone are the days of manually adjusting daily budgets as month end approaches: simply set your budget within the system and automation ensures that nothing exceeds that budget.
Agencies have seen overspend drop to zero after adopting automation (plus, their budgeting workflows are significantly less stressful). Jared Drahonovsky, Group Media Manager at Johnson Group, can attest to the power of automated budgeting management solutions:
“Fluency helps reduce underspend to marginal nominal numbers and reduces overspend—quite literally—to zero for our customers,” he said. In addition to saving time, the agency also saw a 42% reduction in their Google Ads CPL (cost per lead)!
Tailor automated pacing strategies to specific sales goals
Pacing is an equally difficult PPC budget management task because publishers (like Google Ads) don’t let you set monthly budgets within the platform. You have to painstakingly align real-time publisher data—which changes every day— to static numbers on a spreadsheet. Multiply that work across every campaign for every customer and it’s easy to see why budgeting tasks take up 35% of your day.
To work around this, you might use custom scripts or rules that adjust budgets or pause campaigns throughout the month. But beware! These solutions can throw Google Ads' bidding algorithm off and could jeopardize performance.
Automated budget pacing algorithms are a more reliable choice for pacing management. These sophisticated systems correctly distribute ad spend throughout a campaign's lifespan. Teams can use automated pacing algorithms to stop prematurely depleting budgets and maximize campaign performance.
It’s also possible to leverage budget pacing algorithms to strategically align PPC budgets to the unique and specific strategies of your customers’ sales cycles—for every customer in your portfolio.
For instance, if your client wants to hit end-of-month sales goals, you may opt for a “Strong Finish” pacing strategy. This ensures you’re allocating the majority of your budget to the second half of the month in an effort to finish strong.
On the other hand, you may have a client that needs to drive traffic only on weekends but not during the week. A “Weekends” pacing strategy shifts higher spending amounts to Saturdays and Sundays and eases up during the weekdays.
Fluency’s Chief Revenue Officer, Brian McVey, outlines valuable budget pacing strategies in further detail in this short video:
Watch now: automated PPC budgeting solutions
Level up: ask AI for “quick win” pacing recommendations
Not sure if your pacing strategies are as effective as they could be? AI can help you uncover the lowest-hanging fruit quickly and easily.
AI can quickly analyze all your PPC campaigns from one integrated system, making it a valuable assistant as you identify optimization opportunities throughout the month. You don’t have to go hunting for the best thing to do: you can just do it.
Optimize search budgets in real time with critical alerts
Real-time actionability matters when it comes to PPC budget management.
With automation, timely budget improvement opportunities come directly to you. You can get real-time notifications from multiple channels and publishers via one comprehensive system. These alerts range from underperforming campaigns, misalignment between assigned and applied budgets, and even zero-spend alerts for campaigns that have flighted budgets but aren’t turned on.
Notifications also make it easy to keep search campaign budgets on track. With just one click, you can increase spend, decrease spend, or even reallocate spend across different channels or keywords (within your monthly budget limits) to achieve optimal performance.
Utilize AI for smarter bid management
PPC advertisers take great pride in expertly managing keyword bidding. But keyword bids can also be a major cause of budgeting stress.
Take Google Ads, for example. If your bidding strategy is based on Target ROAS or Target CPA, you may underspend if Google can’t meet your targets. On the flip side, opting for Max Conversions or Max Conversion Value bidding might blow through your budget quickly (or overspend) unless your targeting or keywords are too restrictive.
The constant see-sawing of bid budgeting eats into your working time but rarely adds a lot of value to your performance results.
With AI and automation working together, you can dynamically update bids based on real-time conversion data, historical trends, and keyword performance. This gives you more strategic control of keyword bidding while simultaneously eliminating the need for manual bid adjustments.
As you pursue automated PPC keyword bidding solutions, look for tools that can automatically:
- Add keywords: Start bidding on AI-identified keywords that align with your best-performing keywords
- Remove keywords: Stop bidding on AI-identified keywords that aren’t contributing to your goals
- Increase bids: Reallocate more budget to your best-performing keywords
- Decrease bids: Decrease spend on your underperforming keywords
Automated bid management solutions can also incorporate various factors such as ad position, keyword relevance, and past performance to make more informed bidding decisions. This ultimately leads to better performance and higher conversion rates.
As you grow more confident with AI-generated keyword insights, you can build automation rules that automatically move funds between keywords in order to optimize campaign spend holistically spend every month.
In short, you can continuously optimize your PPC campaigns by ensuring that the right budgets are assigned to whichever keywords are most likely to move the needle.
Reallocate budget across campaigns, keywords, or channels—24/7
Babysitting PPC campaigns just to move funds from an underperforming keyword to a higher-performing one is a waste of time. Besides, what about improvement opportunities that occur outside traditional working hours? Without automation, those moments slip by, impacting bottom-line results.
With automated reallocation, you can optimize campaigns anytime—day or night. These systems continually monitor your campaigns and redistribute funds in real time to ensure consistent performance improvements.
If your customer’s ad strategy extends beyond PPC, you can even use automation to reallocate budget across different publishers and channels. For instance, if a programmatic campaign is outperforming a search campaign, AI will suggest reallocating funds from the search campaign to the programmatic one.
Automation systems like Fluency can then automatically move funds between these different publisher channels with your approval. (You can even set up an automation rule that instantly makes this kind of cross-channel reallocation without needing your permission every time.)
The result? Holistic conversion improvements that aren’t tied to specific channel performance. One of our agency customers saw a 30% boost in performance the first month they implemented Fluency’s optimization notifications, plus a 30% increase in lead and impression performance for a key franchise customer.
Make budget automation your PPC secret sauce
Budgeting is often seen as a laborious chore for ad agencies. But what if it could be viewed as your strategic advantage?
With the right automation tools, your teams can advance your PPC strategies by taking tedious tasks off their plate. More time to plan, strategize, and lean into real-time opportunities means better performance and bigger margins—and that means happier customers.
Curious about other ways that automation can work for your ad agency? Check out our resources for franchise management solutions, bulk ad campaign management tools, and strategies for running successful multi-location campaigns.
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