I was checking on the status of my account keywords and it says my ads have been stopped because i have reached and exceeded my budget.
I know this is incorrect because i set a daily budget of £200 and i have only been using %30 of it.
Is there something i am doing wrong or is there a technical fault?
You’re doing fine.
Technically, Google AdWords system works fine, except that it has not been made to work the way you would expect it to do.
Two things to keep in mind:
Although it says “daily budget” it is actually monthly budget that has been spread over the number of days. This means that if your daily budget is 100, your monthly is 3,000 for a month of 30 days.
Wait… this is not all.
If you hit that 3,000 on the 20th of the month – simply because maybe your budget was higher than your current setting, your ads will stop showing. You HAVE to increase your budget. Pay attention to capital HAVE, otherwise you will have no ads showing up, take it or leave it.
If you by some case go over your budget on certain days, do not expect credit right away, this what was over will be calculated against your monthly (daily aggregated) budget and as long as you are not over your 3,000, no credit.
Now going back to your problem… If it is not that you have spent your “monthly” budget (that you maybe were not even aware of), it is about ad diagnostic tool that simply “went crazy”. That happens. For example, your ad is waiting for approval, you are running something relating to TM, anything can cause “monthly budget” message. That sometimes clears after some time (30 minutes, hour, few hours, day or more), and on some other times you have to ask for help.
Please keep in mind that ad diagnostic tool is accurate in many cases, actually much more accurate than it is not. That NOT still creates so much confusion as messages given to AdWords’ clients have nothing to do with real cause of the issue.
