I am not a huge fan of working with Yahoo Sponsored Search, Panama upgrade or not I just don’t think it’s very intuitive to use. But there is one feature they use that I actually wish Google and MSN would adopt. If you dig deep into the Account Tab of Yahoo Sponsored Search Accounts you will find an area to set a daily account spending limit. This is your real daily budget.

It’s easy to get locked into Google’s way of doing daily budgets and just think in the context of Campaign Daily Budgets, and Yahoo really buried the Daily Account Spending Limit where it’s not very visible. It’s easy not to find or even know about this setting.

Yahoo has both a Campaign Daily Budget and the Account Daily Spending Limit. By setting the Daily Account Spending Limit you have a safety net that works pretty well at keeping you on budget.

So what’s the big deal, aren’t the budget tools supposed to keep you from overspending? Yes, that’s what they do, and some engines are better than others at doing that. The beauty of the situation with Yahoo Sponsored Search is the flexibility it offers you in leaving campaigns with open-ended daily spend.

If you go into a Yahoo Campaign’s Daily Spending Limit page, you can estimate the amount of daily clicks and impressions you can expect per day and how much you need to budget daily to get those maximum impressions. If you have a really good campaign from a conversion standpoint and you want the maximum number of clicks and impressions you don’t even have to set a daily campaign spending limit.

Clicks and impressions are often not consistent from day to day and if you have campaigns that are really performing well from the stand point of sales or conversions why put limits on them – with the exception of using the daily Account Spending Limit? Let the market decide which Campaign gets the clicks. If I just started advertising for a new PPC account I think I might initially leave all the individual campaigns unbudgeted, just to see how the money gets spent (again with an Account Daily Spending Limit in place).

I’m finding myself putting daily campaign budgets more on my poorly performing campaigns to try and limit my unproductive clicks. I’m often leaving my best converting campaigns with no daily spending limit and let them duke it out with maximum impression visibility – until I hit my Account Daily Spending Limit.

If you are working with less daily campaign budget than Yahoo thinks will be needed for the day it will rotate your ad throughout the day and might not be visible for every search. This is not the case if you don’t set a daily campaign budget or set your daily budget higher than Yahoo thinks is necessary.

Leaving campaigns with no daily budget is pure capitalism. It lets the market decide. Where the management comes in is figuring out which clicks are worth the most and which are worthless and then using bid management and daily campaign budgets to maximize both profitability and ad visibility. All of these decisions need to be based on conversion numbers.

It’s a nice feature.

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