How Not To Go Over Budget in AdWords Ever Again

Paid Media / June 16, 2016

Budget maintenance is probably the most important is the most important thing when managing your AdWords campaigns. If you overspend, the client may be at risk of leaving. Also, you’re probably not doing your job effectively if you’re consistently under spending budget but that’s a subject for another article.

What you’re about to read is the magic sauce to never go over budget but there is a small note: this option is for the agency or enterprise folks out there. The reason being is that this “secret” involves Optmyzr, which may be too expensive for a lot of AdWords campaign managers.

The team at Optmyzr have put together a nice script that monitors your spend, will alert you about an overspend and, best of all, it will pause the things you’re monitoring.

Script Features

This is a really powerful script and it allows you to:

• Set budgets for campaigns, ad groups, keywords, or ad texts.
• Set budgets for monthly, weekly or daily periods.
• Pause items when their cost exceeds the maximum budget you’ve specified.
• Re-enable paused items when a new budget period starts. (ex: a new month)
• Get notifications via email when changes are made or when an account exceeds a total cost for the period.

Example Setup

For one of my accounts, I have a monthly budget of 15k and I can’t, under any circumstances, go over budget. So what I’ve done is set the script’s settings to monitor the total monthly spend for the entire account. The script will pause all campaigns if the account reaches $14,815 in total spend, or just over 98%. Furthermore, the script will apply a label – Auto: Paused due to budget – to each campaign affected and then send me an email alert.

What’s even better is that the script will re-enable my campaigns on the first of the next month so I don’t have to worry about manually reactivating the campaigns!

This is a basic application of the script and you can start to do some fancy things like monitoring spend on labeled entities like ad groups or keywords. Let me stop you there. The script has label support! This is so hard to find in existing scripts anywhere and it’s so very much appreciated.

Steps for Setting Up the Script

The setup is pretty straight forward.

First, login to your Optmyzr account, go to the account you want to setup the script for, and then select All Enhanced Scripts from the Enhanced Scripts drop down menu item.

Next, choose this script: Advanced Budgets – Pause When Things Spend Too Much

When modifying the script’s settings:

1. Name the script descriptively (I like to include the budget amount)
2. Enter the budget max.
3. Select the item to check (In my case, I’m monitoring the spend for the entire account)
4. Choose the Budget Period (In my example, I chose Monthly because I’m monitoring the budget spend for the entire month)
5. Choose whether or not you want the script to automatically pause the items.
6. I like getting notified about everything so I’ve added my email address so I can be notified the second the script makes a change to the account (ie pauses something)
7. In Advanced Settings, you can change the name of the label.
8. You can also let the script re-enable an item when you’re in a new budget period (ex: a new month).

After this, you’ll have to download a small script that you’ll need to add to the account. Once it’s been added to the account, you won’t have to touch it ever again; just change the settings in Optmyzr from here on out!

Remember: This script must be scheduled to run every hour if you want it to re-enable paused items at the start of a new budget period!

A Word of Caution

You can be a bit more assured that you won’t go over budget if this script is properly worked into your campaign management workflow but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re immune from blowing your budget. This script does not automate budget allocations between campaigns nor does it in any way adjust your daily pacing. You should be checking your budgets and how you’re pacing for the month at least twice a week (I like Mondays & Fridays for obvious reasons).

Hope this helps!

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This is an original article written by Sam Lalonde, a Campaign Manager at Bloom!