advertiser budgets, spread over a month

how does it work?

[londrum]

just wondering if anyone knows how advertisers spend their money. i realise that it will be different for everyone, but is it normal for people to allocate a set amount every month?

because i've seen a steady drop-off in earnings at the end of the month for a while now, and a rise at the beginning of the month. i've been trying to work it out, but now i'm wondering if it's just something to do with advertisers using up their budget before the 31st.

[HuskyPup]

I've questioned this many times since, to me, it just does not seem sensible to have a monthly budget, surely a daily one is better?

Certainly within my widget industry very few use monthly budgets, my EPC usually stays the same more or less all month round unless someone at the Plex pushes the wrong button.

Maybe those who have monthly budgets are ex-employess from the public sector who love to burn an annual budget at the end of March instead of saving it? :-)

I guess you'll have to go to the AdWords forum to get a grip on what they are doing however bear in mind they are only a small proportion of the global advertisers and you'll probably get so many different reasons it'll make your head spin!

[netmeg]

You specify a daily budget, yes. But Google reserves the right to overserve or underserve that budget by a small margin, as long as the 30 day spend doesn't overshoot your daily budget * 30. In general, they do try to keep to that, and I've gotten overdelivery credits (without asking) when they've gone a little overboard.

Now, one of the unacknowledged issues with AdWords is that in some cases, you have to kind jack your daily budget in order to get the proper coverage. For example, on one account, I have to specify a daily budget of $1100 or so per day in order to hit $700/day (which is my preferred budget on that account) Google swears this can't happen, but it's *always* happened to me and others I've talked to as well. Of course, the danger in that is that some spike will come along and actually run up to $1100 if you aren't watching it like a hawk.

There's other types of budgets that advertisers can and do set. Plenty of people have a daily budget but exhaust it by mid-morning to early afternoon. You can also set your advertising to only run during certain hours - if you don't want it to run at night or on weekends, for example, you can set it for that.

[londrum]

so would it ever run out 25 days into a 30-day spend, for example? from what you say, it doesn't sound like it would.

[esllou]

I believe AdWords does now have a monthly budget option, but I've used a daily budget for 5 years and never altered it towards month's end.

[dibbern2]

People set daily budgets, but corporations don't think like that. Budgets are almost always broken down by either month or week, so even though a daily budget is used to manage an AdWords account, it must ultimatly conform to a planned monthly spend. If it starts to run ahead, as Netmeg describes, then you pull the plug a little earlier than waiting for the true EOM.

But there is another factor. Watch your eCPM fluxuations to see if you can correlate with months beginning or ending on weekends. There is a well known -and rather unexplained- effect when a month starts on a Sat or Sun. It depresses eCPM for several days.

Someone else here explained the 'weekend-effect' a while ago. I think it might have been Jane Doe. Nevertheless, it jolts my earnings every time. It's possible that the converse --a month ENDING on a weekend day-- could be in play.