Earlier this month, Google AdWords notified advertisers in their accounts and via Twitter that they had implemented changes to the way AdWords calculates your daily spend.
Moving forward, AdWords can automatically over spend advertisers’ daily budgets by as much as two times the allocated amount.
In the tweet, Google announced, “To help you hit your advertising goals, your campaigns can now spend up to twice your average daily budget.”
This shocked a lot of advertisers and digital agencies managing their clients’ accounts, as the brevity of the tweet didn’t allow for further explanation. However, the link leads to the full announcement, which had been actioned earlier that day.
Those who actually read the link quickly discovered that advertisers “won’t be charged more than [their] monthly charging limit: the average number of days in a month (30.4) multiplied by [their] average daily budget”.
This means that Google will be actively monitoring your campaign, and making spend decisions based on lulls and spikes in daily activity.
Google AdWords had already been doing this, but at much lower increments, as before the update campaigns could only spend 20 per cent more than the daily budget on any given day, but still wouldn’t spend more than the calculated monthly average.
However, the announcement still left a lot of advertisers and account managers confused, so Google AdWords provided further information in a tweet that went out yesterday – a week after the initial announcement was made.
The referenced link details the specifics of Google AdWords’ latest daily budget updates, and how this will affect advertisers’ campaigns.
In this document, Google again emphasises how this over delivery will not cause an increase in the maximum monthly spend. These changes have merely been implemented to “provide flexibility during traffic fluctuations and isn’t intended to spend your budget more quickly”.
