If you are like every other online or ecommerce site and you use Google Adwords for PPC Marketing, you’ve either gotten the message or will get the message, Your ads are not showing, increase your budget to continue to show ads. The thing is that when you use Adwords and bid on keywords and build more campaigns, you eat up more budget if those keywords generate more clicks. If more people enter your niche and start bidding on the same keywords as you or competitors start bidding on your terms, then that causes your costs to go up. If you have Affiliates or your Affiliate Manager or OPM convinces you to allow trademark bidding, this also increases the costs of not only your own PPC budgets but also the costs of bringing back your own customers. There are numerous things that can cause you to have to spend more or to increase your budget so what do you do when Google tells you that you are missing thousands of clicks due to a lack of budget? The first thing to do is to look at why you need to increase your budget. I’m going to do this with three different solutions and go into the profit and loss scenarios with them. Increase your budget, Keep your budget the same and Ignoring the warning message.
Increase your budget.
This is what Google wants. If you increase your budget and spend more, they make more. It could be a good idea or could be a bad idea. The thing to think about and look for is why Google is recommending that you increase your budget. Go through your history and look to see what the latest campaigns you built were and then look to see if they are getting traffic and sales. If they are profitable and that is the reason Google is recommending the budget increase then you can make the assumption a bit more safely that the increase will help to bring in more sales mainly because if your ads stop showing due to a lack of budget then your campaigns that are performing like your trademarks will stop showing and you will have an almost definite loss instead of a revenue gain. That is why it is important to do an analysis when Google wants you to increase because if your ads do stop showing then you have an almost guaranteed loss because non profitable campaigns may be eating the budget and stopping profitable ones from showing.
After finding out if it was from new campaigns you’ve added and they are profitable and you increased your budget, then just keep an eye on how they do. If you find out that they weren’t the thing that caused your budget to be eaten up then you should look at other things like competition, CPC going up, your Quality Score falling or anything else that can lead to budgets being eaten and then make your decision on if you should increase or what actions to take.
Keep your budget the same.
There are two things that you could do, well a few more but I’m only going to mention two. When you get the increase your budget warning or your ads won’t show message in Google Adwords, if you discover it is under performing keywords or ad groups that are eating up the budget, you can pause them and your budget may still be perfect so you can leave it alone since your performing ads and campaigns will still be showing. You could always ignore it as well but if you do your performing ads may stop showing which results in a guaranteed loss for your company. Keeping your budget the same without working on the campaigns is not a reasonable reaction as it does mean your ads will stop showing and it could be the ads that are driving revenue. That also means a loss of revenue for your company.
Ignore the warning message.
You could do this and make excuses like you are working on other things or fixing basic marketing fundamentals to bide time, but the reality is that if your ads are not showing and they are ads that do convert and drive revenue then you are causing a loss for your company and doing more damage than you could do good. Ignoring warning messages is not a good idea, especially when this is a small and simple problem that only takes about 5 to 10 minutes of review to make an educated decision on. If your performing campaigns aren’t showing than your company is losing money and you are causing the loss. It is about a 5 to 10 minute fix if you have never seen the account before so there really is no excuse to not address it.
I felt obligated to write this post because someone is having this issue so without giving away answers or who needs the answer I figured I could share ways to look at this message in order to figure out what to do. I hope this helps that person and anyone else who is worried or wondering about what to do when you get the warning message to increase your adwords budget because some of your ads may not be showing. If you found this useful or want to add to it, please feel free to leave a message below or click the tweet/retweet button at the top of the post.
