I do realize that the main topic of your article is to not just listen to Google’s recommendations, and make sure you really evaluate what is good for your business before making changes. I couldn’t agree more. Many, many times Google suggests things (or turns things on in the case of Automatic matching) which are in its best interest, but may or may not be in yours.

Now with your clarification for this particular situation, I can understand why you wouldn’t increase the budget. But I will push back one more time, for good conversation (I hope)…

If the goal of this campaign is a soft, or non-direct revenue generating conversion then I would ask you this: What is the value of that conversion to the business? Surely, they are generating revenue at some point from these conversions.

Lets say the conversion you’re targeting here is the acquisition of an email address. You’d probably want to use that email address to send out offers and eventually turn those into a revenue conversion. And, then in turn could figure out the average value of owning an email address and assign that value as soft revenue when someone converts using this campaign. In the end, you’ll be able to make the budget decision again using an ROI model.

The point of the post is to point out (in a satirical way) that it’s important to analyze and not just jump into something without proper thought. Also, I wanted to point out that there is an external factor that affects decisions like this: profit per conversion.

So maybe it wasn’t the best example, but hopefully the point of it makes it through.

You are right - and what you propose in your comment is a very good theory.

A couple thoughts (there are always outliers or ‘other’ parts to the story, right?):

Objective/Goal of the campaign -

The particular campaign we referenced in the post is exceeding the expectations of the client - while at the same time it is simply not a significant source of revenue for them because it is not a revenue driven conversion. It’s (almost) pure cost while there is some sort of residual revenue from the volume created with this campaign - just not enough to justify increasing said budget.

If the objective is not driven by ROI, then we will limit the budget on that campaign and apply the majority of the budget towards the revenue producing campaigns in similar fashion that you suggested in your comment. The campaigns that give us the most dollar for dollar are the ones where the lion’s share of the budget will go.

Clients typically agree with this unless they want to pursue branding or another goal that does not have a clear ROI to it.

Thoughts?

Also, unless this is a placement campaign, you’re paying for clicks. The only way you’re going to spend 3x as much and receive 2x as much traffic is to increase your CPC. I suppose this could be the case if you were currently exhausting your budget during off-peak hours of the day, and thus didn’t have your CPCs driven up by competition as much as you would if you were shown 100% of the time. But chances are the relationship between budget increase and traffic increase are much closer to a linear relationship than these estimates are showing.

So my question to you is: If this is one of your most efficient campaigns, and you can spend more money on it, why would you buy less then 100% of the traffic? Spending money on a less efficient campaign, and limiting the spend on your top performer seems like a lost opportunity.

Think of it as each campaign as a money machine. For each dollar you put into it, the machine gives you an amount of money back.

When you put a dollar in, here’s what you get:

Campaign A (The one you’re talking about above) gives $5.00
Campaign B gives you $3.00
Campaign C gives you $1.50
Campaign D gives you $.50

If you can still put a dollar into campaign a, and get $5 back each time, why would you ever spend a dollar on campaigns B, C, and D? Wouldn’t you buy out all of campaign A’s inventory, and then start buying up all of campaign B’s inventory? (and so forth)

In the end, if you

1. Have more traffic to buy
2. Would like to get more leads
3. Can spend more money on your best converting campaign

Then I think it would be silly to not reallocate some budget to this campaign and see what reality is for you.