Choose your bid and budget

To run your ads on Google, you'll need to decide on the right budget and bidding options. Your budget establishes a spending limit for an individual campaign, so it should be the average amount that you'd be comfortable spending per day. Your actual costs may be lower, depending on how you manage your bids.

Note: Google Ads calculates the budget on a daily basis. If you need to determine the monthly budget, multiply the daily budget by 30.4, which is the average number of days in a month. For more information, read Budgets overview. Utilise your Budget Report to view your monthly spend limit and monthly forecast.

Your maximum cost-per-click bid (max. CPC bid) is the most that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad. By managing your bids, you may influence the amount of traffic that your ads receive, as well as the Return on investment (ROI) they generate. With higher bids, your campaign is likely to receive more traffic, although you're likely to spend more money. With lower bids, your campaign is likely to receive fewer clicks and conversions.

This article explains how your campaign budget works, discusses different bidding options and explains the steps that you’ll need to take to set your bid and budget in a new campaign.

How campaign budgets work

With Google Ads, you have the option to set an average daily budget or a shared budget for a campaign. You can set an average daily budget with the average amount that you're willing to spend per day in that campaign. If you want to check your average daily budget across all campaigns, you can use the 'Budget' column under the Campaigns tab. If you prefer thinking of your budget in monthly terms rather than in daily terms, you can calculate your monthly budget by multiplying your average daily budget by 30.4 (the average number of days per month).

Tip: Start small

Check your account daily after applying a new budget to see how your campaigns have performed.

You can set a shared budget with the amount that you’re willing to spend across multiple campaigns for the same client. The following example shows how Google Ads optimises your campaign performance when you use a shared budget.

Example

Say you've set aside $100 AUD per day, split evenly between 2 campaigns. On a given day, one campaign could get fewer impressions and clicks than usual, resulting in only $40 AUD spent. With a shared budget, Google Ads could take that leftover $10 AUD and reallocate it to the second campaign to maximise your campaign results overall.

Shared budgets are effective when you have a number of campaigns with a shared goal for a client. For example, you can set a shared budget when you have seasonal campaigns that take advantage of specific holidays, like New Year's Eve or Valentine's Day, and set a client-specific shared budget to cap spend related to all their seasonal campaigns.

You can access shared budgets in the Shared Library in your Google Ads account.

Shared budgets don’t work with campaigns that are part of a campaign group or campaigns that are part of an experiment.

Overdelivery

Because traffic fluctuates from day to day, Google may allow your campaign to spend more in one day than your average daily budget specifies. This is called overdelivery.

However, your campaign spend will never exceed 2 times your average daily budget on a given day, and our system makes sure that in a given billing period, you're never charged more than 30.4 multiplied by your average daily budget amount. For example, if you budget $10 AUD per day, the maximum you would pay is $304 AUD.

If Google shows your ads too often and your costs for the month end up exceeding what you should have paid in a month given the average daily budget that you've set, your charges will still not exceed your monthly spending limit. For instance, if your monthly spending limit is $304 AUD, and you've accrued $310 AUD in costs in a given billing period, you'll only be charged $304 AUD. You can see these adjustments on your Transaction history page.

Tip: View your recommended budget

Are your campaigns using up all of your budget? Your budget settings include the option to View recommended budget, which is based on analysis of your campaign performance, typically from the past 15 days.

How bidding works

When many people think of an auction, they often think of a prize being sold for the highest bid. But our ad auction uses both quality and bid to determine your ad's position. So even if your competition bids higher than you, you can still win a higher position – at a lower price – with highly relevant keywords and ads. You'll often pay less than your maximum bid because you'll only pay what's minimally required to hold your Ad Rank and any ad formats shown with your ad, such as sitelinks. The amount that you pay is called your actual CPC.

There are many different ways to set your bids, including an entire suite of automated bid strategies. But most people start out setting their bids with either Maximise Clicks or Manual CPC bidding.

Maximise Clicks vs. Manual CPC bidding

If your goal is to gain clicks to generate traffic to your website, there are two cost-per-click bid strategies to consider:

  • Maximise Clicks is the simplest automated bid strategy. All you have to do is set an average daily budget, and the Google Ads' AI manages your bids to bring you the most clicks possible within your budget.
  • Manual CPC bidding lets you manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. You can set different bids for each ad group in your campaign, or for individual keywords or placements. If you've found that certain keywords or placements are more profitable, you can use manual bidding to allocate more of your advertising budget to those keywords or placements.

Tip: Estimate keyword traffic

Try Keyword Planner to get traffic estimates, like estimated clicks, estimated impressions or estimated average CPCs for your keywords. These estimates can help guide your decision on which bids and budgets to set.

Bid adjustments

You can set bid adjustments that increase or decrease your bids when your ad is competing to appear on mobile devices, in specific locations and at particular days and times. Bid adjustments can help you steer when and where your ad appears, and are applied on top of your existing bids. You can also customise your bid strategy by setting multiple adjustments that work together, such as location and time of day or time of day and mobile devices. Learn more about bid adjustments.

Instructions

Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the 'Appearance' icon, and select Use previous design. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the Search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page that you’re searching for.
  1. In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon Campaigns Icon.
  2. Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu, then click Campaigns.
  3. Click the plus button , then select New campaign
  4. Select the campaign type that you’d like to create.
  5. (Optional) Set a campaign goal, and enter the URL of your business’s website.  
  6. On the "Select campaign settings" page scroll to the “Bidding” section and select a bid strategy.
  7. Scroll to the “Daily budget” section and enter an individual daily budget or use a shared budget.
  8. Finish choosing your other campaign settings and click Save and continue.

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