Hey everyone, Regina here at Starter PPC. Today I want to talk to you about the overpacing, underpacing spend schedule that we like to use here at Starter PPC. You can too. We find it to be very helpful when you're trying to force the algorithm through mini learning periods so that it will gain some strength. Over time, it seems to help the algorithm to grow. More subtly and more quickly than if you were to just set a daily spend and just keep it that way month over month over month. I will say this seems to be more necessary in accounts with smaller ad budgets, you know. So at Certified PPC, we're always working with people who have ad budgets of 5, 000 or less. But like at our sister agency Solutions eight, for example, they don't use the over pacing, under-pacing schedule as often because when you have more budget, you have more conversions and more conversions means more power because you have more frequency of data points. And the algorithm can use that to get a leg up over the competition. And basically what that means is it's gonna grow. On its own, and you don't really have to encourage it and force it to do hard things. So I'm going to talk about this overpacing, underpacing, and the philosophy behind why it works, and also the technical management of how to manage it day to day. Or week to week, I should say, because you really only have to do it once a week. let's dive into it. So, first of all, I just want to say, the theory behind this is that, let me see if my face can fit here. That's good enough. theory behind this is, the algorithm, If you just give it a standard amount of budget day over day over day, it seems to kind of hone in on what works and it stops trying after a while. what we do is we kind of force these mini learning periods and we force it to do hard things. What I mean by hard things is we give it more budget than it's used to, right? Maybe 20 percent more, 40 percent more. just for a short period of time. And that makes it try new things. It's going to have to try some of these products over here that it usually doesn't show or some of these placements over there that it doesn't usually test. Sometimes it even tries new users, like new pockets of the market. And through this process, it can kind of discover new things that work that it wasn't using before. So what happens is when you lower the budget back down to where you want it to be, right? You just have to underpace then to try to make up for all the time when you were overpacing. The algorithm goes, oh, that's all I have to spend today. Well, no problem because I just spent way more than that for the past two weeks. now it can just gobble up all the easy low hanging fruit that it's discovered. And you'll find that your return will shoot up during this time period. even though your conversions have gone down because you're now spending less every day. So it's got some pros and cons. It's a little bit like a roller coaster, I feel at times. And so we do warn our clients that it's going to be a little bit like this. we do the first half of the month is over pacing. The second half of the month is under pacing. what you find is that, the return goes down during the first two weeks and it shoots up in the last two weeks. The. Conversions go up and up and up in the first two weeks and they go down in the last two weeks. but it all kind of evens out in the end. I just think that when businesses get a little bit bigger, they stop doing this because it is a little bit disruptive to your life as a human and as a business owner, especially if you have, people you have to report to with numbers and you want some steadiness. So. We only do it because we're working with small businesses, and we find that it is pretty necessary when you're trying to get the algorithm to grow over time, over months, it seems to encourage growth instead of just keeping things the same. I'm going to actually give you guys this spreadsheet, which is what we use internally. I'm going to show you how it works and a lot of. The people watching right now are probably like, Oh, but I only own one ad account. That's fine. Just delete all the rows. We have multiple ad accounts because obviously each person on our team is working with multiple clients. If you're an agency, you might also use all these rows, but if you're a business owner, you might only just need one row. Each row is an account. here's how it works. So this is week one. It says fill on the first. So on the first you come in and you put in your monthly budget. Let's actually just start another row and let's call it business a very creative business name. Okay. So business a has a budget of about 3, 000. Let's say. it's going to tell you what to spend every day for the first week. And that's 120. Why is it 120? Because they're overpacing by 20%. It says that right here. Pretty straightforward. Now you don't have to do anything for a week except for make sure it's kind of spending about 120. Obviously Google's going to spend some more some days and less other days, but it should average at about 120. week two, it says fill this one around the 8th. I say around the 8th because you can't always get to it on the 8th, right? Maybe you only want to do this on a weekday. It's really not that important that it's done on the day. But you should try to do it on the 7th or the 9th or something like that. So you're going to come in and just put the month to date spend. Now, let's pretend you've spent about 105 up to this point. It didn't quite spend 120 per day. It spent about 115. That's okay. We're going to make up for it. And so now, in week two, we want to overpace by 40%. So we're really pushing the algorithm to try new stuff and grow, grow its abilities and its powers. So this time we're spending 143 every day, this goes on for a week, et cetera, et cetera. So, at the beginning of each new week, you're going to put in how much you spent. Let's say we spent 806. Now it starts to pull back, right? And it's like, okay, we're just going to start to pace to spend whatever's remaining of the budget for whatever's remaining of the month. So now we're spending about 80 a day. And in the last month. let's say you've spent 2, 400 by now, and let's say there's six days in the month left. That's important. You have to put how many days are left in the month. So let's say there's only six, because maybe you're doing this on the 23rd or the 24th, or maybe it's a February and there's not that many days in the month. So six, and now you're going to spend a hundred dollars. And that's because you want to spend that as, as close to the perfect amount as you can to try to spend the full 3, 000 by the end of the month. Right? So that's how this is. Okay. So if you're wondering what are these notes here, T ROAS, TCPA recommended for this week, remove T ROAS and TCPA. So T ROAS and TCPA are restrictions that you can put on the bid strategy. And this is a little bit more advanced, but if you know what they are and you want to use them, great. I would say this is an optional strategy, but I left it in here to show you guys, because this is. That's often what we do, not always. So sometimes if we see an opportunity to apply a target ROAS, for example, on one or two of the campaigns inside of the account. We will do that, but we don't leave it on. that's the important part. If you're using TCPA or TROAS, do not leave it on because what you want to do is you want to force the algorithm to learn how to hit that goal, but if you keep it on, it's going to lose all of its knowledge. That it has about all the other products, right? Because it's just going to hone in on what it can do to hit that goal. it's a blessing and a curse because while it's on the algorithm is losing power, but it's gaining a really high return and it's learning how to hit a really high return. So it's good and bad. feel free to use that. There are exceptions to this rule. For example, standard shopping, we found sometimes we just apply like a low target row as like 30 percent or 40%, which we find helps, but it's not restricting the algorithm because it's so low that the algorithm kind of just ignores it. So sometimes we. have other reasons for using TCPA that are less restrictive. But in, in, if you see us applying a TCPA or a tROAS that's, that's, you know, actually at the goal that we need it to get, we'll only do that for short periods of time each month. this is our secret sauce, you guys. Well, one of our secret sauces. Unfortunately, it's really hard to prove that this is working. I do think that over time, even if you don't overpace or underpace, Over time, the algorithm should gain knowledge about your products and your business and it will start to gain some power and to grow over time. But I do think that this, when you're small, at least, this type of learning phase. you're going back and forth from learning phase to goal phase, learning phase to goal phase. So I call it taking the algorithm to the gym, right? So I think that when you're small, this type of thing really speeds things up. And in some cases seems to be, sometimes it just feels like it's the only thing that's helping the algorithm to grow. Which is a whole nother rabbit hole that we could get into, but I hope this helps. Play with it. There's a link below where you can make your own copy of this calculator. Make sure you don't change any of the fields that are in yellow because these are calculations. You only want to change the fields in white. Okay, Best of luck to you. Don't forget to like and subscribe