In Google Ads, a shared budget is a single average daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an account. Learn how to set up a shared budget.
Note: Campaigns using a total budget aren’t compatible with shared budgets. Total budget is spent evenly over the duration of one campaign while optimising that campaign's performance. Learn more About campaign total budgets.
Shared budgets streamline your budget across campaigns by allowing underutilised budgets to automatically reallocate to budget-capped campaigns. This will allow you to decrease campaigns limited by budgets and improve campaign performance.
It's best practice to implement shared budgets with portfolio bidding. Portfolio bidding allows you to be as efficient as possible with your total budget and with bid strategies on campaigns that share the same goals. Learn how to create a portfolio bid strategy and how to Link shared budgets to portfolio bid strategies.
Note: Shared budgets aren't compatible with campaigns that are part of an experiment such as App campaigns, Hotel campaigns with a Commission bid strategy, Performance Max campaigns and Smart Shopping campaigns.
Benefits of shared budgets
- Increased operational efficiency: Instead of spending time managing and reallocating budgets between multiple campaigns, budgets can be shared and automatically allocated across a group of campaigns.
- Improved budget utilisation: Instead of setting individual budgets, allow your overall marketing budget to freely distribute between campaigns.
- Maximise performance and ROI: When used with portfolio bid strategies, shared budgets can be utilised in the most efficient way across campaigns that have similar goals. This allows you to maximise performance and ROI towards your goals.
Example
Say that you've set aside £100 per day, split evenly between two campaigns. On a given day, one campaign could get fewer impressions and clicks than usual, resulting in only £40 spent. With a shared budget, if your second campaign can reach enough traffic, Google Ads could take that leftover £10 and reallocate it to the second campaign automatically to maximise your campaign results overall.
