Budget Pacer is a tool specifically designed to help you make data-driven budget recommendations and optimize your campaigns to achieve performance goals.
What is Budget Pacer?
Budget Pacer runs a client's historical and current performance data through Shape's budget and pacing algorithms to predict how campaigns will perform over time. On a daily basis, a PPC professional can view their Budgets’:
- Current performance metrics
- Projected performance metrics at the current pace
- Projected performance metrics at the suggested pace
Budget Pacer helps Shape members answer the following questions:
- Will my campaigns hit their target spend/performance goals by the end of my Budget cycle?
- If I change my daily Budgets, how will that impact my performance?
- What is the highest spend I can drive while maintaining my performance goals?
Where do I find Budget Pacer?
Budget Pacer can be accessed via the App Portal that appears on the top navigation toolbar on the Budgeting platform. It will remain available whether you are on the main dashboard, or Client, Budget, or Campaign views.
How Does Budget Pacer work?
Shape collects, measures, and stores daily snapshots of each campaign's spend and spend potential.
Search & Display Campaigns
For search and display campaigns, the platform utilizes performance metrics including (but not limited to) cost, impressions, daily budget, and impression share lost due to budget to provide spend and performance estimates.
Shape leverages these numbers to calculate the maximum possible daily spend campaigns can achieve. By projecting that number across the length of your Budget cycle, Shape calculates the maximum optimal spend campaigns can hit.
Social Campaigns
Social campaigns do not have impression share metrics as search and display campaigns do. Therefore, Budget Pacer utilizes an incremental approach to make suggestions for social campaigns.
Shape evaluates whether and how often social campaigns spend their entire daily budgets over an extended time frame and determines if they can spend more or should spend less. Campaign daily budgets are changed incrementally until spend data indicates that a campaign's total spend is being throttled by outside factors (not budget-related) and daily incremental changes should stop.
Budget Pacer Recommendations
In this example, imagine you are running campaigns to promote “Awesome Steel Chairs.” You currently spend around $110 a day and are on track to hit approximately $3500 in total spend for the Budget cycle, according to your “Current Pace.”
Unfortunately, your available Budget is only $2150.
The “Target Daily Spend” feature will actually recommend you decrease your target daily spend by approximately $65 a day to make sure you don't exceed $2150. Shape even tells you exactly what Suggested Daily Budget corrections to set per campaign to ensure you don’t overspend.
But if your campaigns are on track to spend $3500, then clearly you have the opportunity to spend more than your $2150 spend cap. The question is: how much more and will the results be worth it?
Maximum Spend per Day will tell you what your campaigns need to spend in order to maximize the inventory ads are displaying.
In the “Awesome Steel Chairs” example, Budget Pacer is reporting that you can spend upwards of $300 a day ($9300/month). By entering $300 into the “Target Daily Spend” field, Shape will automatically project new spend and performance metrics for the rest of the Budget cycle.
Can I optimize my Budgets based on my KPIs?
Shape understands that most PPC clients have goals beyond just achieving their target monthly spend. Budget Pacer helps ensure that PPC accounts achieve both their target spend and performance metrics.
Once you’ve set a Budget’s "Target Daily Spend," you can select whether you would like Budget Pacer to recommend daily budgets based on a weighted, balanced, or optimized model for the distribution of ad dollars.
Selecting “Balanced” distribution tells Budget Pacer to recommend increases or decreases to Current Daily Budgets that are evenly spread across campaigns.
With “Optimized” distribution, you prioritize the metrics that are most important. Shape will recommend changes to the Current Daily Budgets of campaigns that are the most likely to drive the best results based on priority.
Finally, “Weighted” distribution tells Budget Pacer to recommend increases or decreases to Current Daily Budgets that are proportional to the current budget rations you've set.
Does BudgetPacer take Automation into Account?
Yes, BudgetPacer does take into account if you have AutoPilot and/or CruiseControl enabled.
If AutoPilot is enabled on a campaign but you are underspending your target budget (for example), Shape may recommend that you reactivate that campaign. It may also recommend you set an active AutoPilot status (if it's on standby for example). Conversely, if your budget is overspent, it may recommend you pause a campaign with AutoPilot enabled and set the status to standby.
Likewise, Budget Pacer also knows when CruiseControl is enabled on a campaign. If the system identifies that you need to make changes to increase/decrease your spend in order to hit your target budget, it will not only recommend changes to your daily budget, but your CruiseControl daily budget minimum, maximum, and default as well.
How do I make changes?
Regardless of whether you’re lowering or increasing your daily spend, the platform gives you the power to update the advertising platforms directly from Shape.
To update a campaign, select the checkbox and then click the pencil icon.
- Budget Pacer (Platform)
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