Coming Soon: More Improvements to Microsoft Advertising adCenter API Campaign Budgeting

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You told us adCenter’s budgeting options were too complicated and difficult to manage. The manner in which your search marketing dollars were going to be dispersed was not always clear nor consistent. We’re continuing to make changes to our budget options that will make managing your campaign budgets easier.

This month, we will make another change to adCenter’s campaign budgeting system to:

  • Provide a clear set of budgeting options with predictable spending behaviors
  • Provide better control over their budgets throughout the month
  • Better align with budgeting methods/options being used across the industry
  • Improve campaign data portability between ad platforms

What will change in how I manage my monthly budgets in API version 6 or version 7?

At the time of this change, if the MonthlyBudget is updated mid-month, the MonthlyBudget will be re-calculated and returned in the API as the MTD Spend + Prorated Budget available for the month.

In contrast, in today’s behavior, if the MonthlyBudget is updated mid-month, the behavior of MonthlyBudgetDivideDailyAcrossMonth may result in campaign pauses or unexpected spikes in daily spend. See Table 1 below:

Table1

If an update is made to the MonthlyBudget in the middle of the month, then at the beginning of the next month, the MonthlyBudget value will be reset to the last monthly budget value that was written by the advertiser (as no MTD spend or partial month needs to be factored in once a new month begins).

In reporting, the MonthlyBudget column in the Budget Summary Report will also reflect the same values surfaced by the MonthlyBudget attribute in the Campaign data object.

Two New Daily Budget Types Will Become Available in the adCenter Web UI, and will be later available in Advertising APIs version 8.0.

· The Daily Standard budget type will divide your budget throughout the day, pacing delivery to ensure there is budget sufficient for the later hours of the billing day.

In moving your monthly divided campaigns to the new daily standard adCenter will maintain the spend pattern you’re accustomed to when the monthly divided option is no longer available

· The Daily Accelerated budget type will attempt to spend your specified daily budget as fast as possible at the start of the day.
A daily accelerated budget is ideal if you seek to buy as much traffic as possible as quickly as possible. Keep in mind, this could cause your campaign to run out of budget early in the search day.

Version 6 and version 7 users will not be able to take advantage of  Daily Accelerated as that BudgetType will only be available in version 8. If an advertiser selects Daily Accelerated via the adCenter Web UI, when the budget attribute is read in version 6 and version 7, the budget type will be returned as DailyBudgetWithMaximumMonthlySpend (but adCenter will maintain the advertiser’s intent and persist “Daily Accelerated” in the advertiser’s settings).

Please feel free to add to the comments of this post with any questions you have about this update/change. Keep following the adCenter API blog for announcements on these and other changes coming to the adCenter API in July.

Thanks!

Tina Kelleher, SMB Community Manager