You'll find a link to the budgets part of TrueClicks in the navigation menu on the left-hand side:
If you (and your team) have never created a budget in TrueClicks before, this page will be empty and you can create a new budget by clicking on the button in the top-right corner:
Each budget in TrueClicks has 5 components:
Account - the account(s) and campaign (types) involved
Schedule - the (repeating) time frame for the budget
Amount - the target budget amount (per time frame)
Budget name - a name of your choosing
Additional options - notification thresholds and notes
We'll explain how to use each of these below.
Account
This part lets you select for which account(s) and/or campaign(s) the budget applies.
Firstly, you'll have to indicate if the budget applies to multiple accounts or campaigns across multiple accounts. If that's the case, please switch on 'cross-account budget'.
Both for single-account as cross-account budgets, you'll have the following options when it comes to the campaigns you want to include:
All campaigns
Campaign labels: enter the words the campaign labels in Google Ads should contain. You can enter multiple label values by separating them with a comma.
Campaign Label Ownership (Account vs. MCC): TrueClicks requires campaign labels owned by individual advertising accounts, not MCC accounts. Labels owned by MCC accounts are inaccessible in TrueClicks. Set labels at the account level for optimal performance.
Campaign type: by selecting one of the listed campaign types, we'll automatically recognize which campaigns should be included. Campaign types we currently support are:
Search
Shopping
Display
Video (YouTube)
App
Smart
Local
Hotel
Schedule
In this part, you can select the time frame the budget applies to. You can choose between:
Weekly
Monthly
Quarterly
One-time (custom start and end date)
Please note that the weekly, monthly, and quarterly options don't have to start on the first day of the week, month, or quarter.
You can pick any start date, and we'll "auto-renew" the time frame once a week, month, or quarter has passed.
If you don't want to repeat a weekly, monthly, or quarterly schedule for this budget, please turn on the 'Don't repeat indefinitely' switch.
But please note that it's possible to have different budget amounts for the coming weeks, months, or quarters within the same budget, as we'll show in the amount part below.
So if you have $10,000 for this month, you could still have a different target budget for the next month, within the same budget.
Also, the start date of your budget can be a date in the past.
Amount
This is the target budget you have available for the accounts/campaigns and time frame you have filled in above.
You can enter this in a currency of your choice. If (some of) the selected account(s) use(s) another currency, we'll convert it on our end using the daily exchange rate.
If you've chosen weekly, monthly, or quarterly in the schedule part, you'll see the option to enter multiple budgets for that timeframe. If you don't enable this, we'll assume the same amount for the following weeks, months, or quarters.
We recommend enabling this if you already know the budgets for the coming weeks, months, or quarters. In that case, you can simply enter them, one per row:
Budget name
We can be short about this part, you're free to give the budget any name that makes sense to you and your team. We recommend including the time frame in the name.
Some examples:
{Client name} monthly search budget
{Region} quarterly GDN budget
{Brand} Black Friday - Cyber Monday budget
Additional options
In this part you can further customize the budget with the following:
Thresholds:
These are the percentages you (or your client/manager) are comfortable with when it comes to underspending or overspending compared to the target budget. By default, it's set at 5% but you can enter any value between 1 and 99.
These thresholds will be used to send you emails when we expect you'll exceed them, and to visualize the current pacing of the budget.Notifications:
Next to the expected deviation from the thresholds entered above, we can also send you emails about the actual spent budget so far. The default thresholds are 25%, 50%, and 75%. You can add any value between 5% and 95% (with 5% increments). You can also remove any thresholds.Notes:
You can enter any details about this budget you want to remember or share with your colleagues in this section.