Daily Budget Recommends from Adwords

Opinions

[glenv]

I have my daily budget set for $500 but am not going over $300 right now. I recived this email from Adwords and wanted your opinion. How do the ratios of budgets actually all pan out compared to what you can really expect to receive? Underlines are mine.

"As I was reviewing your account I noticed that your daily budget is lower than the recommended amount; therefore to stay within your set budget, [u]Google is not showing your ad every time searches are run on your keywords. We spread the delivery of your ad throughout the day to make sure you do not accrue all of your clicks in the morning.[/u]

When your daily budget is lower than the recommended amount, we list the recommended daily budget next to your current daily budget. If you view your campaign setting, you will see that the recommended daily budget for full coverage of your campaign is $2,690. If you set your daily budget to this value, or raise it an amount you are comfortable setting as a daily budget, you will maximize your ad's visibility. "

[Mikkel Svendsen]

Basically I think they need a headroom to be sure they do not over deliver. Remember, as Google serve the ads there is no way for them to know for sure how many clicks each ad will get.

[sysdomatic]

Holy smokes, $300 a day? What kind of site do you run if you don't mind my asking? Lots and lots of cheap clicks or just some really expensive ones?

[WebStart]

I have never been able to figure out Google Adwords program. It obviously uses a wide variety of variables to determine pricing for keywords, position of your ad, etc, and it is expensive.

Still, Google is the number 1 search engine in the world, so one assumes an ad there is worth the cost to put it there. But if you do not have a way to track conversion and revenue gained by each click ...... who knows what you get for the dollar invested? Google does not offer an ad analyzer and FindWhat now does. So watch and wait is probably the best advice, unless you can track the clicks and conversions you get from AdWords.

[glenv]

I have my own ad analyzer that tracks keyword conversions. Google is absolutely the #1 bet for your keyword dollar.

Findwhat: I am not impressed at all. The conversions I see with Findwhat dollar for dollar compared with Google are almost null. I am also very suspicious of some their link partners ethics.

[Rhadamanthus]

If Google accidentally exceeds your daily budget, it will refund you the money (this has happened to me more than once). This is a great customer relation move, but if you look at it from Google's point of view, they lose money every time they do that, because somebody clicked on YOUR ad (free, effectively) instead of somebody else's ad (which they could've charged for). They're looking out for themselves by scaling back your exposure if your budget is lower. In my experience this cutback can vary pretty wildly.

For example, in one of my keyword grouping, they recommend a $40/day budget. Since I make no profit off my web site, this is all coming out of pocket, and that's just insane, but I want to keep it up because I get an 11% click-through rate on it. So I set it to $10/day (which is still high, but it's a current event sensitive keyword). I've had everything ranging from $4 days to nearly $11 days since I set that limit.

The problem has to be linked to the fact that the AdWords reports aren't kept up-to-the-second accurate. I would guess that this is related to having to run on multiple data centers, and coordination between them being tricky.

However, it sounds like the real problem in your case may be a too general key phrase. $300 per day is pretty hefty already. You may want to consider breaking it into smaller, more targeted key phrases. In my experience, this generates substantially better CTR, anyways.