Ok....done ranting now.
Why can't Google just stick to my daily budget and be done with it? They keep way over-delivering my ads and then compensating for it the next day by only showing them once in a blue moon!...
I work like crazy to keep my budget in the profitable range, and have spent hundreds of hours fine-tuning the cpc, etc. When Google does this it really messes everything up.
JenniferL, as the advertiser, you are actually very much in control of this - and, although I can't see your account to confirm, I'm guessing that you can quickly resolve it. Let me give you a bit of detail as to what's most likely happening.
When one's daily budget is consistently being exceeded, it nearly always boils down to one thing: the daily budget is simply too small to support the keywords it's being asked to support, and the AdWords system is having difficulty limiting the ads appearance enough to prevent over-delivery. You can confirm this by checking on the recommended budget on the 'Edit Campaign Settings' page of the campaign in question. My guess is that you'll find the recommended budget is much higher than your actual budget.
The two most direct ways to prevent the cycle of overdelivery/slowing are to either:
* Raise your daily budget to the appropriate amount, or
* Reduce your keyword list (until the recommended budget is under your actual budget) by keeping only your most important or most effective keywords.
Lowering your Max CPC will also help, as will making effective use of negative keywords - but not nearly as quickly as either of the steps above.
One ad in particular is for a product that sells like crazy this time of year and it has been really slowed.
You may want to consider putting this especially important ad in it's own campaign, with a budget sufficient for it to show all the time.
Hope this helps!
AWA
Something has been bugging me for a while and maybe this is the thread to ask it in. Maybe it just depends on the business that you are in, but I've yet to appreiciate this concern with daily budget.
Jennifer, you say you have a product that "sells like crazy" this time of year. Why would you want to curtail your budget and more than likely lose out on sales? If you have a consistent conversion, wouldn't more ad showing mean more sales? And wouldn't the additional ad cost be offset equally by the additional profits?
Before I ever started on AdWords, I read a piece of advice I've been following since day 1. Very successful person in an area similar to mine said that they always set their daily budget to something immense since they believed that Google seemed to favor "big spenders". Now this person knew Google couldn't possibly deliver that many clicks so they got the advantage of having their ad virtually always showing, but never actually spending the full budget.
For most campaigns, I set my daily budget to $1000.00 and get anywhere from $2.00 of clicks per adgroup to about $200.00 depending on the nature of the product and season. Just a couple of times, I've been overwhelmed by armies of clickers, but I've learned to thwart them by avoiding the "obvious" keywords and staking out the less popular.
This technique has proven quite profitable for me though I'm not as happy as I could be. Maybe if I had a better understanding of the budget strategies, I'd come away with some helpful knowledge.
Is this just a matter of different businesses requiring different approaches or am I missing something fundamental?
patient2all
I think there's merit in this overbudgeting idea, I do it too, but within reason. If Google recommends a budget of $10 for me I set my daily budget to $20. I wouldn't set it to $1000 in this case!
I assume you don't budget more than you can actually spend if need be?
Okay, you've hit on the part that I never learned in school or something. If conversions happen at a predictable rate and I generated 10x the "legitimate" clicks that I normally do and went through my large budget, why wouldn't I have the expectation of having 10x the profits as normal to pay for the ad from?
No, I wouldn't happily "spend" my entire budget, but I'm willing to "invest" it. I realize there has to be some sort of saturation point, but there's enough of a market currently to support several advertisers in the areas that I concentrate on. If I suddenly had a better ad and consequently a better CTR than them, why couldn't I count on profiting better as a simple economic rule?
See my question yet, or am I thinking too simplistically?
patient2all
Most of my PPC campaigns are profitable, but the volume is sometimes quite low. I'd LOVE to have the problem of google trying to send too many customers to me! ;-)
JenniferL, I don't really see the problem. You've paid for X number of clicks, and Google gave you X clicks. As AWA said, raise your budget if you want to show all the time. Or manually pause your campaign after a certain number of clicks per day.
-V
If you do it, keep a close eye on your CTR to ensure your ads stay up. Ideally, if marketing via AdWords is really profitable, then it is an investment and the spend may be unlimited at the right click price.
What? You don't take your laptop on vacation? I hope my wife doesn't see this post :)
patient2all
And I'm with patient2all - I don't care how much I spend on Adwords so long as my CJ cheque is equal to or greater than that amount!
My CTR is always between 8% and 20% which is pretty good.
Skibum: I will definitely lower the CPC and watch my positions, etc.
Then I put the daily budget to $1. Did the recalculation again. Guess what? Still OK!
The only problem is that this month I have already spent some $200+ on this campaign already (which very well corresponds with the $10/day), so there is NO WAY the suggestion script is working properly!
AWA, any suggestions?
I have one campaign where the daily budget is $10. I just did a test, and let AdWords recalculate the budget. The calculator confirmed, that it is OK.
Then I put the daily budget to $1. Did the recalculation again. Guess what? Still OK!The only problem is that this month I have already spent some $200+ on this campaign already (which very well corresponds with the $10/day), so there is NO WAY the suggestion script is working properly!
AWA, any suggestions?
pmkpmk, it could be that a week with a pesky fever has slowed me down a bit more than I'd care to admit - but I'm not entirely certain what sort of suggestion you're looking for. ;)
So, here are some thoughts on the subject of budget, and I hope I hit the right high points:
The recommended budget is usually a pretty good indicator of what your budget would need to be in order to have your ads show the majority of the time. But it is not a fixed thing, and can vary widely from day to day, relative to what your competitors are doing. So use it as one resource, but also use the actual stats in your account to monitor your clicks accrued as compared to your budget. For example, check your accrued clicks day-by-day for the period of a week or two. Do you see that you are frequently hitting or exceeding your budget? This is a sign that your budget is probably too low to effectively support your campaign.
On the other hand, is your budget never hit - not even close? Then the budget is probably sufficient.
As a primary rule, I'd suggest setting your budget at a level that you'd be comfortable with, if you ended up spending that much - and absolutely no higher.
On the other hand, if you are able to track your ROI over time, and find that for every dollar you spend you are bringing in more than a dollar, then perhaps budget may cease to be of real concern, as others have noted.
On last thought: when starting out (or if you are not able to track your ROI) then start small and create an account in line with what you are willing to risk in an experiment with AdWords.
I find that many newer advertisers start out with thousands of keywords, or very competitive (read: expensive) keywords, and then give the campaign a daily budget of a dollar or two. This can be a recipe for frustration. It's far better to create Ad Groups with keyword lists that are inline with the daily budget of the campaign.
Looks as if I've rambled a bit here - but hope this has been of some value for you. ;)
AWA
...I'll be having sleepless nights when I shoot off again this March if I have to go cold turkey for more than a day... must.. check.. stats..
Christh, that's priceless.
I know the feeling. I'm coming up on three years with AdWords, and continue to dream about the program at least one or two nights out of every week. Who knew!?
AWA
The experiment I described above was made out of curiosity regarding your comment earlier in this thread:
You can confirm this by checking on the recommended budget on the 'Edit Campaign Settings' page of the campaign in question. My guess is that you'll find the recommended budget is much higher than your actual budget.
Admittedly, I paid rather less attention to the "recommended budget", because I always settled for a daily budget I felt comfortable with (which was - when I last checked - way higher than the recommended one). Since our industry is a very niche industry, and due to cross media marketing, we are - for quite some years now - actively CREATING awareness four our products, I figured very early when I started with AdWords that Google - no offence meant - probably has NO clue how many searches and clicks certain keywords might attract. I am bold enough to say that without our cross-media awareness campaigns, the searches (and clicks) on certain keywords would be significantly lower.
I will however do the researches you suggested when I'm back in the office next week. I never really checked if my ads are displayed all the day. I get leads and conversions on a daily basis, I see the ads every time I check, and I feel confident that the CPC relation fits with enough headroom with my daily budget. It would be interesting though to see the results to the tests you suggested.
Still, I don't quite see you giving an answer to my observation, that with a track record of 17 months continues time for the campaign, the recommended budget tool says "Yes, 10$ per day is ok" and less than two minutes later it confirms "Yes, 1$ per day is OK"?
I just did a test right now. I set the daily budget to $200. Guess what the "recommended budget" calculator said?
1. It always says "OK" if you are over-budget, so set it to $1 and see what it says.
2. You can only change the budget a few times a day, and then it will prevent you from changing it any further.
Wouldn't it be awful if it froze your daily budget at $200 per day? or alternately at $0.01 per day? I think the limit is 5 changes a day or something, and it doesn't warn you when you have just one chance left.
I've done a very minor bit of AdWords advertising, but intend to step it up quite a bit in the near future. This thread has spooked me pretty good, and I want to make sure it isn't because of something I am misinterpreting.
The original poster's use of the word "over-deliver", does that mean that AdWords exceeded his daily budget? I don't see how that is possible unless the "display" server isn't in sync with the "click count" server. I was under the impression that the instant my daily budget was triggered by an ad click, that was it for the day. Period.
Now I can visualize a case where my ad might have already been displayed before the "terminating click" occurred, and that some of those people could generate an (after) click. But it was my hope that Google just "discounted" those clicks to preserve the trust an advertiser has in the daily limit.
Is my understanding wrong and that it's more like the stock market? That you can get a "running market" condition that busts through your stop loss orders, and wake up with a daily bill far in excess of your daily budget limit?
Thanks.
I was under the impression that the instant my daily budget was triggered by an ad click, that was it for the day. Period.
Nope, that's not the way it works. They are consistently going over my daily budgets, even when their budget tool shows that my budget is fine. Then when the system catches up to it days later, they totally reduce my impressions and my ad is under-delivered. So some days my ad is showing way too much and then other days it isn't showing enough. It all works out in the wash as far as how much it costs you overall, but it sure doesn't in terms of how much you want your ads to show per day. That's where my beef comes in.
I'd guess the problem is that because the program is so big that it can't be managed in real time, even automatically. I'd guess that the lag between when you've spent your budget and when your account is flagged is caused because the data is probably distributed over multiple servers and only updated X amount of times per day (because to collect that information and do updates more often would be impossible given the size of the program and the finite number of computers dedicated to running it).
I could be wrong.
Are you in the search and content networks also? AWA, could it take some time for the collective clicks from all those dispersed sources to filter back so they can be compared to your account preferences?
patient2all
Thanks.
Read AWA's post carefully. The right way to control the amount of money you spend is to limit your keywords and reduce your bids.
For example, if you observe that you get 100 clicks a day with a bid of $0.50/click (costing you $50/day) and you really only wanted to spend $5/day, rather than leaving everything as is and just reducing your budget it is MUCH smarter to cut your bid to $0.10/click and see what happens. I guarantee you your costs will drop: fewer people will click your ad, and you pay less when they do. If reducing all your bids to the minimum still gives you too much traffic start pruning your keywords.
Reducing your cost by reducing your bid is a win-win situation: your ROI will go up, because you are literally paying less for every click. It's well worth it to spend the time to tune this.
The "daily budget" is just a measure of last resort, to get some guarantee: Google promises not to bill you more in one month than 30x your daily budget, but they might go over your budget on any particular day. As Jennifer noted, this "cost control" is somewhat ham-fisted.
You are much, much, much better off controlling the cost by tuning your keywords and using the daily budget as a last resort guarantee "just in case".
1. It always says "OK" if you are over-budget, so set it to $1 and see what it says.
Which is what I did in my first experiment. It still said "OK", and that puzzled me because it conflicted with AWA's statement.
I think the limit is 5 changes a day or something, and it doesn't warn you when you have just one chance left.
Oops... I don't change the limit too often (actually hardly ever), but I think this is an important point to many readers here. Is that confirmed?
1. Search happens
2. All the fun occurs figuring out who can show based on daily budget, multiple domains, etc.
3. Click happens
4. Click added to 'fraud que'
5. Fraud analysis happens (this is one of the reasons stats are delayed, you don't want to be charged real time if you get 50 more clicks in the next hour from the same IP - the filtering happens now).
6. Campaign stats page is updated (i.e. your daily spend has been updated)
7. AdGroup stats updated (your individual keyword stat is updated).
This seems to be Gs reasoning: If you have a budget that allows for roughly 100 clicks a day, not only do you want them shown throughout the day, but if you get 100 fraud clicks by 8am, you don't want your account to go offline until G determines it's fraud (i.e. all the clicks are filtered before you see the stats), you want the ads to be shown, and the filters to remove those clicks before your stats are updated so that you receive max exposure throughout the day.
Because of the lag time between the click and the account being updated, it's easy for low budgets to exceed their daily budget before G updates the stats. Once these stats are updated, then when #2 above happens, your ads aren't shown as you've hit (or exceeded) your budget for the day.
The basic topic is well worth spending some time on, so give me a bit, and I'll see if I can't respond dirctly to some of the posts above - and also talk about daily budget in more general terms.
Clearly, it is the subject of some confusion.
Back soon.
AWA
