A Daily Budget Worth a Fourteenth of a Click

Shared budgets let several campaigns draw from one pot. In the right setup they’re efficient. In the account I audited, they had become a quiet way to stop campaigns running.

The maths

One shared budget was split across up to ten campaigns. Each campaign’s effective share worked out to roughly one-fourteenth of the cost of a single click in its target market.

A campaign that can’t afford one click a day can’t gather data, and a campaign that can’t gather data can’t be optimised by Smart Bidding.

What else was sitting in the structure

Eleven empty shared budgets left behind after an earlier restructure, together holding allocation equal to roughly a third of the account’s actual average daily spend
A duplicate shared budget
One budget with eleven campaigns attached delivering zero impressions
Close to 28% of total spend running behind creative that had policy issues

A correction worth admitting

Early on, I inferred from the data that these shared budgets weren’t really pooling. A screenshot of the Shared Budgets screen proved me wrong: they were live and active. That made the finding worse, not better. I corrected the analysis and kept the correction visible in the working notes. A wrong inference caught by evidence is part of the process, not something to hide.

The useful conclusion

The client was considering new channel investment. The audit showed that money was already approved, just trapped in a structure that couldn’t spend it. Restructuring the budgets could fund the new work without a single extra dollar of approval.