When your peak sales season is short, your ad campaigns have to cover a sudden increase in search volume. That can mean large budget increases over a short period of time.
You don't have time for the campaigns to "learn." You need visibility and leads now, before the sales window closes.
A Recent Client Example
I started working with an online school right as their window to enroll students for the year was approaching. They had high goals for student acquisition and were willing to spend a lot on advertising to get there.
Their previous agency was scared to raise budgets too high because it might hurt performance. So they stalled and didn’t spend enough to get the traction the school needed.
When they finally made the big increases, all the client saw was double the CPC with flat traffic and flat leads. They paid more for the same results.
How Did I Help?
When I took over, I applied a more scalable campaign structure to help spend the budget more effectively across more keywords, and stair-stepped the budget up quickly, with strategic bid strategy settings in place. It was vital to be steady and thoughtful when making changes to prevent the campaign from going into a complete re-learning mode.
In 6 weeks, the client maximized their spend and hit their goals for the season.
How Exactly Do You Scale Your Budget as Fast as Possible?
Here's what I focus on when the window is short.
Make sure your campaign settings are set up to scale. Don't set goals that are too restrictive. Keep them loose so the campaigns have room to learn and grow in the short term. You can improve efficiency over time.
Keep budget increases to 20% or less at a time, when possible. Increases of up to 20% shouldn't have a major impact on performance. If you can plan for increases of less than 20% a day to reach your end spending goal, that's ideal. If your timeframe doesn't allow for that, get as close as you can.
Continue monitoring search terms. A bigger budget can find pockets of bad traffic and waste spend on it. Checking regularly keeps that from happening so you scale more efficiently.
Be steady. The worst thing you can do is make a bunch of changes in one day, especially conflicting ones. Raising the budget 20%, cutting it 10%, then raising it 40% again in one day is just asking for poor performance.
Heading into a very important season?
Scaling quickly without hurting performance takes someone who understands how campaign changes affect results. I've been managing Google Ads for 16+ years, and that experience is what moves the needle when your window is short.
Let's talk about your plan now.
