I am currently managing an active and expensive (opinionated) adword account with Google. I come to you with a few questions and some speculations. We have a daily budget of around 300.00 a day setup. I notice that people competing on adwords show up more than we do, but the thing is the adwords arnt displayed that much and not clicked through that much.
Infact the competitions shows up a lot more than ours and at the top but we've bid a HIGH amount but the current rate is at 12-25 cents a click sometimes 40 cents. If we INCREASE the amount of money spent on adwords a day would we see an increase of ads displayed even if theyre not clicked on? Does that pull a part, not only the highest amount paid per click but how much a day?
The reason for this is supply and demand, the figures Google use are estimates based on historical data from other advertisers using the same keywords. In cases where there is no history you tend to get very low estimates but often get very high clicks.
If you look at your "Account Management" tab, if you see instances of Overdelivery Credit that means you are getting more traffic to that campaign than your daily budget permits. Consequently, your ad will be shown intermittently through the day, so if the recommended budget is $30 and you set your daily limit to $20 then you will get your ad shown 2/3 of the time. That could still generate a higher CTR than your competitors even if they are showing all the time.
If your not getting that many clicks then your probably wide of the mark for relevancy. You could set your daily limit to any figure you like and it won't matter one bit to the results of your campaign, will just mean that 24 hours a day people will be able to ignore your ad.
Throttle and brake, that is what we use the daily limit for. If a client has an overall monthly budget and runs campaigns on Overture etc. it's difficult to throttle traffic as well as with Google, so we tend to use the daily limit as a way of reducing or increasing traffic without affecting the CTR, which governs the price you pay for the clicks you get when your ads are shown. Makes us able to work to deliverable traffic quantities and cost per click targets.
I would set the daily max very high for a day and see what happens. That way your ad will ALWAYS be shown and you can get a grasp on what your real daily spend would be.
Every day is different, so one day will not give you a representative feel. Work out how much you want to spend in a month and divide that by 30, that is what Google does to decide how much traffic to send your way.
