Budget tracking is one of the weekly Google ads tasks we perform at Elevated Marketing Solutions in order to have successful Google Ads. This post is the first in a series of blog posts intended to help you navigate Google Ads.

Generally, whether it’s for yourself or a client,  you’ll have a budget in place for ad spend in Google Ads.

Sometimes a client will indicate that they want to spend xx amount of dollars in a given month or they might be using a rolling spend. Depending on your client and the budgeting scenario, you’re going to adjust your budget tracking accordingly.

For instructional purposes, let’s assume our client has a monthly spending budget of $25,000. 

First, don’t be tempted to do this.

Let’s say you need to check how much budget to date is left in the month of May for a particular client. The client needs to spend a certain amount. You may be tempted to think that all you have to do is put in a daily budget of xx amount of dollars and that’s what Google will spend. Sorry, that’s not how it actually works :(

So back to our example of the client who has a budget of $25,000 a month. Looking at the above account, you might reason that you’ve spent $20,000, almost $21,000 and today is May 28th  so you have 3 more days in the month.

So, you could take the number of days in the month of May and divide that by 28 and that’s your average daily spend. I would say that’s a mistake. The reason has to do with fluctuation in how Google spends the budget.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Google doesn’t always spend the money that you tell them to spend. Why? Your campaign might not be set up right, therefore you might not be getting the impression share that you have available. Alternatively, you might not have enough to even compete in cost per click. Irregular ad spend by Google happens for any number of reasons. So, your budget is something you need to watch and possibly adjust weekly.

Let’s start again using a better way to calculate the budget.

In this example, round out the monthly spend indicated above to $20,900 (the amount spent to date in the month of May).

Use the date selector and click on the last seven days.

$5,240 was spent over the last seven days.

1. Take that $5,240 and divide by 7 days and that gives roughly $748 a day.
2. Take the $748 a day and multiply that by the number of days left in the month. In this example, I have 4 days left in the month.
3. $748 times the 4 days is $2,992.
4. Add the $2992 to the $20,900 and the ad spend to date is $23,892.

Using this method, I actually have another $1,108 that I could potentially spend. $25,000 (monthly budget)  – $23,892 (ad spend to date).

Once I have the correct budget number, I can go into my campaigns and look to see what’s converting. I’m going to look at my daily budget and best-performing ads. I’ll take the leftover money, divide it between the remaining days and add it to the budget.

So, that’s how you do budgets. It’s something that has to be looked at every week to make sure that you’re on track.