For advertisers that manage PPC campaigns with fixed budget caps, tracking and monitoring spend can be one of the most difficult aspects of their job. This gets infinitely harder the more clients or companies a PPC advertiser manages. If spend is not actively managed, it can lead to costly overspending or underspending and unhappy clients/bosses.

Shape was built to help PPC advertisers monitor ad budgets, as well as optimize and automate ad spend as well.

An ad budget is the total amount of money an advertiser is permitted to spend to run PPC campaigns. Ad budgets are primarily utilized by companies with fixed budgets that can be allocated to their various marketing disciplines. Advertisers have target KPIs to achieve but must do so while also achieving a specific ad budget.

This method of PPC budgeting is different from advertisers that manage campaigns based on an ROI target. For these advertisers, the campaigns are allowed to continue spending so long as they are meeting their return-on-investment and cost-per-acquisition goals.

Shape is designed to help advertisers track multiple clients with multiple ad budgets. To do so, we walk our users through creating a Budget in Shape. A Budget (in Shape) is a grouping of campaigns that share a single Budget cap or target spend. Shape enables our customers to group PPC campaigns together in infinite combinations across 7 ad platforms.

To monitor your ad budgets, first, you must set up your budgets. Follow these instructions or watch a video to learn how to set up ad budgets for your company/clients.

Once you've set up a client and budget in Shape, the hard work is done. Shape will automatically pull in spend and metrics from the campaigns you added to the budget into an intuitive, easy-to-scan dashboard.

When you log into Shape, you'll be greeted by a dashboard that looks like this:

This is the "Client Cards" view. Client Cards provide an easily scannable and searchable view of how your advertising campaigns are spending against their target Budgets.

The dashboard displays a list of Clients and the Budgets underneath each client.

The progress bars provide a visual representation of where a Budget’s spend is in relation to its spend cap. If your campaigns are spending too slowly or quickly, you can update your campaigns directly from Shape by clicking on an individual Budget.

The dashboard also provides a quick view into which automation features (such as AutoPilot, CruiseControl, SmartSync, and RollOver) are enabled per Budget from the Client Card view.

You could also choose to flip the main dashboard to monitor your clients and budgets using a table instead. This is called the "Decision Grid."

Shape’s Decision Grid provides a table view of an account’s spend-to-date, Budget cap, and performance metrics. Toggling between the "Clients" and "Budgets" tabs will display 20+ metrics, including clicks, conversions, and cost-per-acquisition.

Selecting an individual Client or Budget will lead you to additional reports where you can monitor how specific campaigns, keywords, ad groups, ads, and keywords are performing.

The gear icon will allow you to customize the columns you want to be displayed and enable/disable filters and column totals.

To monitor ad budgets even more granularly, Shape provides additional views to segment your data by client, budget, and/or campaign. Learn more about what reports and data are available for each of the three views by clicking on the links below:

Please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team for more information on monitoring your ad spend at [email protected].