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Author: Matt Messenger – Attane
Case Study Disclosure: Matt Mesenger is the Vice President, Digital Media at Attane, a leading senior living marketing agency headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. Attane is an Adpulse client.
According to The State of PPC 2022 Survey, respondents (each of whom work in the paid media field) overwhelmingly stated that seeing the results of their work, driving profitable growth, and improving account performance was the most satisfying part of their job. Perhaps unsurprisingly, creating strategy and extracting actionable insights from the data came in at second and third.
When asked what takes the most time, common responses included: search query mining, reporting, writing and testing ads, and creating new campaigns. While encouraging to see that these time-consuming tasks align to the aspects of the job that pay-per-click (PPC) professionals find most satisfying, one time-consuming task – budget management – was an outlier.
Herein lies the salient point: PPC professionals spend significant time on budget pacing, but it’s not a task that brings them joy.
To better understand why such a reality exists in the paid search world, and to begin to understand how Attane uses a tool like Adpulse to make for a better reality in this case study, let’s first explore how paid search hard costs are accrued.
As the phrase pay-per-click implies, media dollars are spent each time a searcher clicks on an advertiser’s ad. Before this happens, though, advertisers must tell companies like Google how much they are willing to spend per-click (called max CPC bid).
In reality, advertisers frequently pay less than the max CPC bid because those per-click charges also consider the degree of competition for that search term, the quality of the user experience (how relevant and useful the ads and landing pages are), the context of an individual’s search, and more. The output of these factors is called Ad Rank, and the higher the Ad Rank, the more prominent the ad will be.
Once Google calculates the Ad Rank of each advertiser, it adjusts the per-click charges so that each advertiser pays just enough to beat the next-best advertiser.
Crazy, right?
Let’s try an example to help put this into sharper focus. Pretend two advertisers are bidding on the term “senior living near me.”
| Company | Max CPC Bid | Ad Rank |
| Advertiser 1 | $4 | 80 |
| Advertiser 2 | $3 | 50 |
Advertiser 1 is willing to pay $4 per click, but Google only charges $3.01 for that click because they determine that is just enough to outrank Advertiser #2.
The key takeaway: per-click charges are highly dynamic and therefore require oversight (time) to effectively manage.
Google policies compound budget management challenges. Specifically, using its own smart bidding technology as an argument, the search engine giant has the authority to spend up to twice your daily budget if they think it will generate more conversions.
While this may sound logical on the surface, this policy presents risk to advertisers because, depending on how your billing and payments are set up, it can result in overspend or a situation where your ads stop running early in the month because you’re out of budget.
The key takeaway: if accounts lack oversight, the effectiveness of budgets can be diminished due to Google policies.
Whether you work in-house or at an agency, mishandling dollars is a surefire way to erode trust and credibility.
Let’s say you work at an agency and you’re being held to some type of goal (lead generation, ROAS, etc.). If you come up short of your goal while failing to spend 10% of an approved budget, clients and colleagues won’t be happy. You’ve left ROI on the table.
Likewise, say you exceed the goal in one month, but also overspent by 12%. Now let’s say that overspend has been drawn from the next month’s budget…and that month is the peak month for seasonal interest. Not a good look!
The key takeaway: spending time managing budgets is a necessary evil. If done poorly, media dollars can easily be wasted, reducing the effectiveness of campaigns. Poor oversight and reduced marketing effectiveness is a formula for job insecurity, client attrition, or both!
Any company that includes paid search as part of the marketing stack – including Attane – faces these budget management challenges on a daily basis. However, the good news is that companies like Adpulse help businesses like Attane turn this dystopia into a utopia in four ways:
One of the best features of Adpulse is that it can, at the flick of a toggle, adjust budgets up or down on a daily basis. Adpulse also helps hit monthly budget targets by increasing per-day budgets where there has been underspend, or can reduce budget when Google decides to spend more than the previous day’s set budget.
Checking and then adjusting this manually would take hours per week. With Adpulse automation we can proactively diagnose and act on budget pacing challenges within minutes.
Another massive benefit that can be attributed to these pacing capabilities is the control it provides over how and when dollars are spent.
When we tell Adpulse how much a business wants to spend each month, the tool’s adjustments consider ad schedule to ensure budgets are allocated effectively across the entire month. And because Adpulse adjusts budgets daily, it has helped Attane get very close (sometimes within pennies) of a client’s approved monthly budget. Now that you know how dynamic media costs can be, you can appreciate how impressive that feat is!
Adpulse also allows Attane to group budgets based on our clients’ business needs.
In senior living, for example, we may learn that a community has a need to drive occupancy for a certain level of care or that it is having trouble filling certain apartments.
No matter the business challenge a client presents, we can use Adpulse to swiftly adjust budgets so more dollars are spent where the need is greatest. Yes, we can control budgets similarly within Google Ads, but Adpulse allows us to do it faster so we can get back to strategizing and optimizing…the work we know PPC professionals find satisfying and prefer to focus on.
Which brings us to the last point…
With Adpulse, we spend significantly less time on budget management, but we’ve also realized stronger pacing, more accurate spending, and greater agility in adjusting budgets where needed.
In other words, Adpulse allows us to spend more of the budget against specific client needs at times when people are more likely to engage.
But the best part is that the time the tool has saved has empowered us to dedicate more attention to high-impact, more-fulfilling tasks like ad copy edits, keyword and location targeting optimizations, competitive analyses, offline conversion imports, and more. These purposeful efforts allow us to squeeze even more value out of client budgets, which in turn makes it more likely that our work is more valued, both internally and externally.
And that, my friends, is a formula for success!
We love talking PPC and spend most of our time chatting with agencies, so if you have a question please do drop us a line!
Also, Adpulse comes with a 14-day free trial, and right now the first month is only $19.99/mth, so it’s a low-risk way to try it for yourself. Sign up now!
