.21 cent bid was $21. What do I do?

[surf4soul]

Today I increased some bids to $.21 cents. I come back several hours later and realize somethings wrong when i have spent over $1,100 dollars. It appears google set my bid to $21.00 per click. I always triple check my bids to make sure there set right.

I have sent them a email to refund my money etc...

Has anyone else had this problem before and if so did they refund you?

Im scared!

[Wlauzon]

How come nobody ever complains when they "wanted" to bid $9 and Google says they only bid $.09?

But this shows how important it is for anyone that uses PPC to have some kind of "stop loss" limit in place, whether it is daily budget or what.

Just yesterday I read a similar thing happening with pricegrubber

...she told me that in the previous day I spent $3700 for CPC advertising on their website, "That traffic was the result of MSN Shopping running a promotion to bring more exposure to Apparel...

Now that person normally spent $400 a month. But I have seen similar spikes in our own products, like when CNN runs some story. And that is exactly why we have limits on every campaign per day. Especially since 99.99% of those curiousity clicks have no ROI.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 9:13 am (utc) on Nov. 17, 2006]

[johnser]

We setup a client account last week for a new client in Ireland. All bids set to 10c. One KW with 3 other ads showing for it, was hit for €9.85 for 1 click = Not good.

All bids were still set to 10c
We checked the history tool
Everything looked cool - but client still got billed the €9.85

When you do lots of stuff for lots of clients with Google, you wonder how there are so many bugs in a system of its size - & why they're not ironed out.

Generally I have to say though that although they are often 2+ months giving us a response to some financial query due to a screwup at their end, in the end, the good guys we deal with in there, do try to do their best for us.

[gkgk11]

Wow this is an amazing forum.... I've gotten so many tips...

Congrats on your money back!

Google better start fixing their bugs =/

[shman]

I have a suggestion for Google. Why not make the two input boxes one for dollars and one for cents. IMHO a lot of advertisers use bids in decimals and this would avoid mistakes with the "." or ",".

[AdWordsAdvisor]

...Google gave me $1k back which I feel was fair. I did make money from the visitors so it almost came out to be a wash...

Excellent - glad to hear it. ;)

So google realized there was an error on adwords and they decided to refund you?

I have seen no details of this particular situation at all, so can't say for sure - but based on four years in AdWords support this sounds to me like a one-time 'courtesy credit' made, on occasion, when an advertiser has made a costly error. Hopefully, surf4soul will correct me if I am mistaken.

I have a suggestion for Google. Why not make the two input boxes one for dollars and one for cents. IMHO a lot of advertisers use bids in decimals and this would avoid mistakes with the "." or ",".

This is a clever suggestion, shman. I'll pass it on to the right folks later this evening in this week's Advertiser Feedback Report. Many thanks. ;)

AWA

[sailorjwd]

account-level max bid limit would be easier.