Best practices for budget scheduling
Budget scheduling helps you automate budget increases for your Smart+ Sales campaigns. To get the most out of this feature, it’s important to plan your strategy carefully to balance scaling with stable performance.
Planning your schedule
Align with promotions: Schedule your budget increases to coincide with key business moments like holiday sales, new product launches, or special offers. This ensures you have more budget available when customer interest is highest.
Analyze performance trends: Use your campaign performance data to identify high-performing days of the week or times of day. Schedule budget increases during these periods to capitalize on existing momentum.
Plan for the entire event: If you are running a multi-day promotion, set up a single scheduled period that covers the entire duration to ensure consistent budget allocation.
Managing the learning phase
The learning phase is the period where our delivery system explores and learns the best way to deliver your ads. While Budget Scheduling automates increases, the underlying principles of the learning phase still apply.
For stable, always-on campaigns: To avoid performance volatility, consider more gradual budget increases. A sudden, large increase can cause your ad group to re-enter the learning phase. If stability is your goal, aim for smaller, more frequent adjustments.
For major sales events: During peak moments like Black Friday, prioritizing scale to capture high demand is often the main goal. In these scenarios, using a larger scheduled increase can be effective. However, be prepared for potential short-term fluctuations in your Cost Per Action (CPA) as the system adjusts.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Setting overlapping schedules: The system will not allow you to save schedules with conflicting dates. Before confirming, double-check that your time periods are distinct.
Exceeding budget limits: The tool enforces a maximum increase of 8x (or 800%) of the base budget. If you receive an error, ensure your planned increase is within this limit.
Ignoring base budget changes: If you manually edit your campaign's base daily budget, your scheduled increase will adapt. However, if the new base budget causes the scheduled increase to exceed the 8x limit, you will need to edit the schedule before the campaign can run.
Not monitoring performance: After a scheduled increase takes effect, monitor your campaign's key metrics. Be ready to adjust your base budget or future schedules based on the results to ensure you are meeting your performance goals.
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