Budgets? Who needs them

I have had a few readers ask about budgeting your PPC campaigns. I don’t really give a lot of thought to budgets, because for the most part I don’t use them. During an initial test, they are important to limit your losses until you know whether the campaign will convert. So I might set a budget of $100/day for test campaign, just so their are no big surprises. But once a campaign is up and running, I never set a budget or I set it so ridiculously high that it could never be reached. If you know you are going to make a certain percentage of profit off each click, why would you want to limit that? There have been cases of trends that I didn’t see coming and therefore saw a huge traffic spike of 500% on a day. If I had set a budget, I would have topped out and missed out on big profits. I have had some campaigns running nonstop and un-budgeted now for 18 months with no ill effects. It can be a bit stressful at first when dumping your budget, but once you are confident in your conversion rates, I really don’t see the need for them.