Hi...just read one of the adwords books hoping to pick up some more tips. The only one I came away with was regarding the topic of 'coverage'...the amount of time your ad is presented compared to 100%. So some of your ads may only be shown 10% of the time, meaning lost opportunities. The author said that one way to improve your coverage was to remove your budget...so I thought OK, I'll give this a go and monitor closely throughout the day...turns out I can't leave the budget field blank as its a mandatory field? Does anyone know about 'coverage'...did I get the wrong end of the stick or was the author spinning a yarn? Any help would be appreciated... Thanks.
Depending on your market and how saturated it is, if you set your budget to like $100 a day it will most likely show up on each impression. There is a recommended budget estimator tool under campaign setting's as well, that should tell you how much your ad will show depending on your budget.
Thanks...so what do you think this author was on about suggesting that you remove the budget amount altogether?
Maybe he just did not express himself very well. I would read it as saying set a budget figure that is so high it is not going to restrict ad display. Incidentally, rather than mess around with the budget you can run a report that will tell you roughly how much "coverage" you are getting. Go to Reports>Create new report>Campaign Performance and tick all the boxes for Impression Share, Lost IS(rank), Lost IS(budget), etc. I would suggest Impression Share is your "coverage". Lost IS(rank) is % of impressions lost because your ad is ranked too low for page1, i.e. a search would have triggered your ad but the searcher did not go to the page you would be seen on. (Whether this is the exact proportion of potential impressions that are not seen as opposed to the proportion of times your ads are simply ranked lower than Page1, seen or not, I am not sure but it is a useful measure none the less.) Lost IS(budget) is the % of impressions lost because your campaign hit its budget limit and stopped for the remainder of the day (so this would give you a good idea of what budget you need to set to avoid it happening in future). BTW. If you are to follow the "no budget limit" route remember to have your display mode set to 'accelerated'. And, to achieve 100% "coverage", you must also ensure all individual bids are high enough to guarantee an average position of 8 or better for Google and 4 or better for the search network.
AdWords does not allow you to leave daily budget blank, so if you want to make sure you get all possible impressions set your budget at what Google recommends or a little higher.