Set your campaign budget and bid amounts

Learn about your campaign budget type (Daily - Standard or Daily - Accelerated) and your keyword bids.

Before your ads can run, you need to set your campaign’s budget and keyword bids. Your budget tells Microsoft Advertising how much you want to spend on your campaign. You can set a daily budget and when you reach your budget, Microsoft Advertising will stop displaying your ads until the next day. Keep your advertising costs under control by keeping track of your budget.

About campaign budgets

Microsoft Advertising has two different budget types you can choose from.

Daily - Standard
What it is: Microsoft Advertising will help you spend for optimized performance based on the products or services targeted by your campaign and availability of corresponding user searches during the day.

Why use it: This is a great option if you have a limited budget and want your ads to show evenly throughout the day. This way, your ads won’t show all at once in the morning, using up your limited budget early in the day. You will also be able to monitor your budget on a daily basis, making adjustments as necessary, to maximize your budget.
Shared - Standard
What it is: Same as the Daily - Standard budget, but it is shared among two or more campaigns in the Shared Library.

Why use it: With a shared budget, Microsoft Advertising automatically adjusts how your budget is spent across its campaigns to help you improve your ROI.

Your daily budget setting is only a target, so your actual spend might be higher or lower. This is because Microsoft Advertising always calculates a monthly budget and then the actual budget limit is calculated for an entire month. Daily budget types simply help you make sure that your budget is spread out over an entire month and not used up in the first day.

To learn more about shared budgets, see How do I share a budget across multiple campaigns?

Change your budget type

From the main menu on the left, select All campaigns.
From the page menu, select Campaigns.
In the table, select the name of the campaign you want to edit.
From the page menu, select Settings.
Under Campaign budget, select Daily budget options.
Select the appropriate budget type.
Save your changes.

For information on setting up a shared budget, see How do I share a budget across multiple campaigns?

Change your budget amount

From the main menu on the left, select All campaigns.
From the page menu, select Campaigns.
In the table, select the name of the campaign you want to edit.
From the page menu, select Settings.
Under Campaign budget, enter a new budget amount.
Save your changes.

About your bid

Your pay-per-click (PPC) is the maximum amount you’ll pay every time a customer clicks your ad. You bid against other advertisers using the same keyword, so in general, higher bids help get your ad to display in more desirable locations on the search results page.

Bidding options

There are two bidding options you can choose from: Default bidding and custom bidding. When you bid on a keyword, you can use the default bid for the ad group or you can enter a custom bid.

Custom bids for keywords override the ad group default bid for those specific keywords. With custom bids, you can focus your time and money on the most profitable keywords but will need to spend more time on managing the individual bids.

How to set your default bid

From the main menu on the left, select All campaigns.
From the page menu, select Ad groups.
In the table, select the name of the ad group you want to edit.
From the page menu, select Settings.
Under Set bids, enter a new bid value.
Save your changes.

How to set a custom bid

From the Campaigns page, click the Keywords tab (or from the main menu on the left, click All campaigns and then Keywords).
There are two ways to change your bid from the keywords table:
1. Hover over an individual keyword's bid in the Bid column and select the pencil icon that pops up. Change the bid value and Save your changes.
2. Select the checkbox next to one or more keywords and then select Edit > Change current bids. You can then set the bid(s) to a specific value, increase or decrease the bid(s) by a percentage, or increase them to either the estimated top of page bid or estimated first page bid. When you're done, Save your changes.

Bid adjustments

You have even more control over when and where your ads can appear by setting bid adjustments. A bid adjustment increases or decreases your bid, depending on what (or who) you want to target. You can make bid adjustments for specific demographics, locations, days, or time of day, targeting the customers who are most important to you. Doing so can lead to higher conversion rates and a better overall return on investment (ROI) for your campaign. For more information on how to set your bid adjustment, see How to target my customers by adjusting my bids.