About budget management

Budget management incorporates planning, budgeting, and reporting tasks into Search Ads 360 to help you seamlessly manage spend and understand your campaigns’ success, removing the need to export the data to spreadsheets.

Begin managing your fiscal year, quarterly, monthly, or weekly advertising spend in Search Ads 360 by first organizing campaigns into budget groups that reflect your business structure, advertising focus, brands, or lines of business. Then, create a budget plan to define how much you want to spend in a specific time period. 

Organize campaigns into budget groups

To manage your budgets in Search Ads 360, first organize campaigns with the same focus into budget groups. For example, if you sell refrigerators and stoves, you might create a budget group that includes all the campaigns that advertise appliances. If you advertise both upscale and economy hotel brands, you might put the different campaigns into luxury and economy budget groups. 

A budget group can contain multiple campaigns from any supported search engine account. Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! Japan, and campaigns from other account types can be in the same group if the campaigns use the same currency. 

While a budget group can contain many campaigns, a campaign can belong to only one budget group at a time.

Supported campaign types

All supported campaign types can be included in a budget group, regardless of how the money is managed. That is, the daily campaign budgets can be managed manually or automatically, with either standard or accelerated delivery spend (pacing). 

To identify the campaigns that you want to include in a group, you can use the names of your campaigns, the labels you’ve applied to campaigns, your custom business data, or other criteria that uniquely identifies a set of campaigns.

Set spend in budget plans

Fundamentally, a budget plan specifies an amount that you want to spend and a time range (week, month, quarter, or year) in which to spend the budget to achieve your advertising goals.

A plan includes graphs that show projections or estimates of spend, a budget pacing chart, and an allocation table to help you to visualize the incremental spend and see how the budget might be spent over the specified time frame. You can use the graphs and allocation table to track and report on performance relative to an amount that you want to spend, to view estimated spend for each plan segment, and to set one or more intermediate targets.

Automate budget management with a budget bid strategy

You can let Search Ads 360 optimize spend during a plan by using a budget bid strategy to automatically set the individual campaign budgets, bids, and bid adjustments to achieve optimal performance. Learn more about how to automate budget allocation and spending in a budget plan.

Budget allocation table

When you're creating or editing a single budget plan, the budget allocation table shows the total budget, segmented by week or day, with estimated and actual cumulative amounts, and the estimated and actual key performance indicator (revenue, clicks, CPA, or conversions). For more details, see Review and set allocations in a single budget plan.

When you're creating or editing multiple budget plans at the same time, the budget allocation table looks different than when you're creating or editing a single budget plan. The primary difference is that each row in the multiple plan table represents a budget group instead of a time segment. Each budget group row encompasses the entire budget plan time range, not just a day or week (as is the case in a single plan allocation table). For more details, see Review and set target spends in multiple budget plans.

Reporting in budget management

Search Ads 360 reports on the performance of all budget groups and campaigns collectively, and on individual budget groups and plans, enabling you to compare actual spend with your targeted budget. Learn more about budget reporting.

Summary of budget management benefits

The benefits of budget management include:

• Graphs of the target, estimated spend, and key performance indicators (such as CPA or revenue) for all budget groups in an advertiser, enabling you to review budget and performance pacing.
• Optional automatic budget allocation, bid, and bid adjustment setting by a budget bid strategy.
• Reporting tables that list all the budget groups and budget plans and their performance within an advertiser.
• Use of historical performance data and targets to estimate spend and other targets. The performance history also enables Search Ads 360 to include some seasonality when estimating the initial allocations.
• Estimated cumulative spend for different targets and allocations, indicating whether the target spend is within range of historical spend for the group of campaigns.
• Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual budget reporting to help you develop insights into optimal budget allocation and view the pace of spending.

Supported and unsupported features

The following lists summarize the Search Ads 360 features that can be used with budget management components.

Supported features

• Goals. A conversion goal or a clicks goal is required to create a budget plan.
• Bulk edits. Add or remove multiple campaigns from a budget group using the user interface or a bulksheet.
• Business data and filters. You can use your business data to filter a list of campaigns to include in a budget group.
• Search engines only. Only search engine campaigns can be members of budget groups. Engine track and social engine campaigns can't be included in budget groups.
• Change history. Certain types of budget management changes are logged in change history reports. For example, changes to budget groups, plans, budgets, bids, and bid adjustments.
• Rules can be used to add or remove campaigns from budget groups.
• Monthly spend budget bid strategies. Monthly spend bid strategies are being replaced by budget bid strategies. Budget bid strategies can also optimize spend for weekly, quarterly, or custom time periods. Learn more about budget bid strategies.

Unsupported features

• Budget group and budget plan performance aren't available in Executive reports.
• Bid strategies can't be applied to budget groups or budget plans. Instead, you can create a budget bid strategy in a budget plan to automate changing budgets, bids, and bid adjustments. 
• Campaign copy. Budget groups, budget plans, and budget bid strategies aren't copied.

Overview of steps to use budget management

1. Create budget groups and add campaigns to them.
2. Create one or more budget plans and enable budget automation by enabling a budget bid strategy.