Starting yesterday (this was announced last night!) AdWords campaigns will be able to spend 2x your daily budget. This means, on days with “lots of high-quality traffic” your costs could be double your daily budget.
Don’t worry though! Google assures us that you’ll never spend over your monthly budget and any overspend will be met with underspend on other days. Here’s an example:
If you have a monthly budget of £500, your daily budget will be £16.44 (£500 / 30.4 (average days in a month) = £16.44) AdWords will now be able to spend up to £32.88 on any given day. If this happens, you will see that on other days, you’ll spend £10 for example thus, over the course of the month, you’ll still spend your £500 budget.
Why is Google doing this?
In Google’s own words:
Internet traffic is like an ocean. Some days, there will be small waves. Other days, there will be great big ones. So, if your ads don’t show up much because of low traffic, then we’ll make up for that by showing them more when traffic’s higher.
That’s why we allow up to 2 times the clicks in a day than your daily budget allows. This is called over delivery. And it’s a good thing: if we end up showing your ad too much — to the point where you accrue more costs than your daily budget allows for over a billing cycle — then we’ll give you a credit for those extra costs.
Should I be concerned?
Probably not. Google has ALWAYS allowed a 20% overspend on your daily budget but is now lifting that range to 100%, and the PPC community aren’t too pleased, a quick look at Twitter shows sheer panic with concerns including:
- Running out of budget by mid-month
- Managing budget on short-term campaigns that run for less than a month
- Are daily budgets now “pointless”?
I have little doubt that as always, it’ll soon settle down, and the earth will continue to turn. Google will probably make some clarifications as we go but it’s likely Google has pre-empted these concerns and we can assume all will be well. Remember, you’ll never spend more than your monthly budget and if you do, Google will credit you.
If you’re one of our clients, certainly don’t be concerned: We use the latest budget management machine learning technology so in the majority (likely all) cases, we will ensure your budget is paced evenly throughout the month so not only will you not spend over your monthly budget, you won’t spend your monthly budget before the end of the month.
