Set the budget before the start of the month

The ideal time to set a budget is at the start of the month so that the budget optimization can run from the very first day itself and there is a lower probability of misalignment with the plan.

Remember to take action in the regularly during the month

The budget plans change significantly from month to month so at the beginning of each month there will be many budget and bid adjustment recommendations and not acting on these may lead to big changes as per the new set plan.

Make all portfolio/campaign mapping changes at the start of month before uploading the plan

Not doing this may lead to misalignment with the plan by the end of month

Try launching new campaigns at the early part of the month

If started later in the month, this can lead to underspending as BO will keep giving a higher budget than users can spend. If there is no overspend, BO will not cut budget for new campaigns for the first 14 days after the launch to allow users to ramp up.

In case of large budget changes consider making manual bid adjustments outside budget optimizer also

Bid increase changes in budget optimizer are limited by historical CPC, spend and sales data on the keyword and system limits the changes to a maximum of +50%. In case of big sale events this may or may not be sufficient.

Do not plan the whole month as a series of seasonality events

This may lead to underspend at a monthly level as budgets cannot be moved in between events.

Do not make any row deletion changes to the budget plan template manually

If you have made any changes to an account - added new profiles/portfolios or deleted some then it takes a day for changes to reflect everywhere in the product (including BO). Please wait till changes are reflected in the product and then re-upload the plan. Also, do Not remove any rows, instruction sheet or many any other modification to the upload sheet other than entering the plan values.

Do not enter budget values in no decimal values rather whole numbers

This is a known issue in BO where if the uploaded budget values are in decimals, the upload fails sometimes and the plan doesn't refreshes. This is a limitation of Javascript and we are fixing this soon but till the time we fix it, please limit budget values to whole numbers only.

Do not make large budget changes from AMS during the last few days of the month This is because BO data lags by 2 days, so if any large budget change is made from outside, spending corresponding to these changes will reflect late in the product and BO will have very little or no time to realign the spend.

Do not set different portfolio/profile level budget values in AMS and in budget optimizer

This may lead to spend throttling either at AMS or Budget Optimizer level. We have a feature in the roadmap to sync budget optimizer plan values in AMS as well but it will be available only by year-end.