As I blogged about here, AdWords recently announced they will start allowing an overspend of 2x your daily budget, rather than 20%. As per usual, the PPC industry went into panic mode (clearly assuming Google did this without any proper thought or logic or worse, as some sort of conspiracy.)
PPC ‘professionals’ immediately took to Twitter protesting:
- “We set budgets for a reason!”
- “One of the most anti-advertiser changes you’ve made”
- “What if the client has a short-term campaign?!”
- “Seriously? I could theoretically be out of budget by the 15th of the month? WTAF guys?”
Complete and utter meltdown. Industry ‘experts’ took to their columns ‘deep-diving’ into this announcements to uncover the “implications” and what we should do about it. Twitter was abuzz with panic, protest and… overreaction.
Today, a few minutes ago, Google addressed these concerns with this post.
Amongst other things, Google state that it is NOT possible to spend your budget within the first 15 days of the month – a ‘concern’ many a PPC professional tweeted in a fit of rage a few days ago. In fairness, to save the PPC industry the embarrassment, Google would have been better off leading with this post but then again, they probably didn’t expect that professionals who make a living from analysing data would instantly assume the worst – without any data.
And this is my point. PPC is a data-driven, test and measure process. So why is it, that PPC ‘professionals’ often overreact to a change Google AdWords makes, before they’ve had an opportunity to test, measure and form a data-led opinion on? Quite ironic really. If I were a customer, I’d expect my agency to not panic, rather, observe effects objectively and make calm and sensible decisions based on it.
As I said when Google first announced this change:
//twitter.com/BrettDixon/status/915678331802091520
And work out fine it will: Google has confirmed that they didn’t make this change on a whim, and that, SURPRISE, SUPRISE they’ve thought it through: Did anyone REALLY think you’d spend your budget in 15 days? If you did, then I’m afraid this job probably isn’t for you! We have over 200 clients in our MCC and I’ve not observed any issues whatsoever – and frankly, I didn’t expect to.
So, PPC folks, calm down, embrace change and follow your data before panicking! You owe it to your clients.
