Campaign Daily Budget

What's the point?

[woop01]

We started testing out the site target functionality of Adwords recently. Due to apprehension about the program we set our daily budget at $XXX per day. Today we were charge 2.24 * $XXX for this specific campaign. The conversion rate was pathetic and didn't come close the justifying the expense, something we feared which is why we set a lower budget for the campaign.

Why do we set daily budgets if Adwords isn't going to honor them? This isn't the first time we've had a campaign go over budget for one day, it's just the first time it was by a factor of two.

[dmjarvis]

Googles Adwords help says that the campaign daily budget is the average that you are prepared to spend per day over the course of a month, and that your spend on any particular day could be more than your budget. So, if there are 30 days in the month and your campaign daily budget is £100, then Google will limit your spend to £3000 in the month (£100 * 30). Google will reimburse you if your monthly click cost is greater than this.

[inbound]

It's not unusual to have problems with daily budget, but it's usually that they have to be ridiculously high in order to get full delivery.

I'd say it's unacceptable for a campaign to be so far above the budget at the outset, surely Google knows that testing is done at the outset of a campaign.

I don't know what can be done to pressure Google into fixing the issues (they are probably trying to resolve the issues anyway) but I'd like a reply as to why the daily budget is so innefective (both under and over).

Remember Google, the better the service we get the more we spend. We recently pulled a big campaign from Yahoo due to their poor service, you may have the upper hand at the moment but if Yahoo get their act together you may find people switching back. Now you have us, please do your best to keep us.