A guide to managing your advertising budget

The two most common promotion challenges businesses face are their advertising budget depleting either too quickly or, conversely, too slowly.

Let’s explore the reasons behind these issues and the steps to keep your promotional spending on plan and ensure advertising delivers intended outcomes.

One of the key features of VK Ads is its three-level campaign structure, which organizes campaigns into ad sets, and ad sets into individual ads. This helps with hypothesis testing and makes it easier to optimize promotion strategies.

We recommend reviewing your campaigns based on these structural levels.

The campaign level forms the foundation of your advertising strategy. Here you establish parameters that apply across all ad sets within the campaign.

The causes of a slow budget spend at this level can arise when selecting the target action for event-based optimization, such as:

• optimizing for conversions when promoting websites,
• optimizing for lead generation when promoting lead forms and surveys,
• optimizing for community subscriptions when promoting communities and profiles.

For the settings to work correctly, we recommend:

Let’s examine how these metrics are calculated for the key target actions available in the VK Ads account:

• if the target action is "Ad impressions", then eCPM = your auction bid,
• if the target action is "Ad clicks", then eCPM = your auction bid × CTR × 1,000,
• if the target action is an event (such as joining a community, adding a product to the cart, making a purchase, installing a mobile app, etc.), then eCPM = your auction bid × CTR × CR for the target action × 1,000.

Therefore, if you select ad clicks or an event as your target action, rather than ad impressions, you should focus on improving your CTR and CR metrics — this will help you win the auction and acquire your target actions at a lower cost. High click-through and conversion rates indicate that your ad is relevant to the selected audience segment, which is why the auction will favor showing it.

If, after your review, the issue of slow daily budget spend for the website promotion persists, we recommend testing optimization for clicks or ad impressions where feasible. Otherwise, you can proceed with the following recommendations.

A bidding strategy is the method that determines how the system spends your budget while your ad is running. VK Ads offers two bidding strategies: limit price and min price. The limit price strategy directs the algorithms to deliver conversions without exceeding your set cost limit, while the min price strategy pursues the highest number of conversions at the lowest possible cost. For further details, check out our VK Ads Help Center.

For campaigns using the min price strategy, we recommend expanding your target audience and setting your daily budget limits based on your conversion cost to make sure the settings perform properly. We’ll cover this in more detail below.

For campaigns using the limit price strategy, we advise setting your maximum cost at your average cost per lead (CPL) or cost per action over the previous month. If you are launching a new campaign with no historical cost data, we recommend setting an initial value based on your KPIs and gradually increasing it until your ad spend reaches its planned level.

We recommend setting a budget 3 to 5 times higher than your conversion cost.

When determining your daily limit, we advise using your target audience reach as a benchmark and setting a budget commensurate with it. For example, if your ad audience totals 90,000 users, a budget of RUB 30,000 is unlikely to deliver the expected results.

Now that we’ve identified potential causes of slow budget spend at the campaign level, let’s move on to reviewing settings at the ad set level.

At the ad set level, you determine how, when, and to whom your ads will be shown.

This is governed by your targeting settings:

• geographic and demographic characteristics, such as broad or local geography, audience age, and gender settings,
• audience interests and behavior: this can be configured using keywords, interests, ad display devices, VK communities, OK groups, and other parameters.

Slow budget spend at this level can be caused by overly narrow audience targeting settings. We recommend using:

• broad targeting based on socio-demographic characteristics,
• no more than two interests per ad set,
• a large pool of keywords,
• negative keywords to attract more targeted traffic and increase CR.

Within a single ad set, it is important to test high-frequency search queries separately from low-frequency ones, and to test audiences with different keyword sets separately from one another.

When configuring keyword settings, you can categorize them by:

• brand queries and queries related to business competitors,
• direct key queries for your product or service,
• keywords for similar products or services.

We also recommend testing audience lookback windows of 5, 7, 14, 21, and 30 days. When launching such audiences, it is advisable to proceed gradually while maintaining a daily budget 2–3 times your conversion cost.

For lookalike audience targeting, we recommend building audiences based on data from the past 14 days. This ensures you capture the most relevant and targeted users.

Optimizing budget spending is aided by using automatic placement selection. We recommend keeping this setting enabled, as it allows the system to display your ads across all available resources (social networks, the VK Advertising Network, and VK projects) and minimizes the cost of target actions by allocating a portion of the budget to the top-performing placements. For further details on ad placements, check out our VK Ads Help Center.

If you plan to use only one placement for your campaign, we recommend expanding your target audience as much as possible, using optimization for clicks or impressions where feasible, and deploying highly conversion-focused creatives.

Let's now proceed to the final campaign level — individual ads — and examine which settings available at this level can help optimize the spending of your advertising budget.

At the ad level, you can add headlines, descriptions, images, videos, and other ad elements. The available options may vary depending on the ad object. Ensure all texts, images, and videos comply with the requirements set for specific formats and the Rules for Placing Advertisements. Review these requirements before launching your campaign as non-compliance may result in slow budget spending.

We recommend using all available ad formats to maximize audience reach. Consistently testing high-converting combinations of creatives also helps optimize ad budget efficiency — employing unconventional creatives can improve key auction metrics (CTR, CR, and eCPM), thereby enhancing your campaign’s overall effectiveness.

Having identified the reasons for an excessively slow advertising budget spending, let’s now explore why funds might be spent too quickly during an ad campaign and how this can be addressed.

At the campaign level, a frequent cause of rapid budget depletion is selecting optimization for ad impressions or clicks.

When optimizing for an event, a fast-draining daily budget can result from settings that overly restrict your audience. Low CR and CTR metrics drive up your bid as the system tries to win the auction against competitors, exhausting your budget in an attempt to outbid others.

To ensure the system works efficiently, configure your targeting to reach a potential audience of at least 100,000 users and adhere to the recommendations outlined earlier in the Reviewing settings at the campaign level section.

Rapid daily budget spend most frequently occurs when using the cost cap strategy. For optimal performance, we recommend lowering the set cost.

Another cause of quick budget exhaustion is using too many ad sets and ads within a single campaign, combined with a limited budget. This happens because the total campaign budget is spread across all available audiences and targetings. We recommend pre-testing ad sets and creatives and allocating the campaign budget only to the top-performing combinations.