It is my understanding that if this is the case the Recommended Budget should be increased but is wasn't. Bug or timing issue?
Today I had another occurance where the campaign settings said that the daily budget was ok (after click on Recommended Budget), the ad was not showing and the Ads Diagnostic Tool said that the monthly budget was exceeded.It is my understanding that if this is the case the Recommended Budget should be increased but is wasn't. Bug or timing issue?
Robsp, this is a topic that can get a little involved, and there are a bunch of threads in the past that really went into it in detail.
However, the short (?) answer is that, even when your recommended budget shows as OK, your ads may still not show all the time. This can happen when, for example, you have a lot of keywords with an especially high CTR. This can throw off the system, which (to make a long story short) calculates based on an average CTR of roughly 2%.
One check you can perform to confirm that budget is the problem: use the date range tool to see how your actual accrued clicks compare to your budget, on a day-by-basis for the past few weeks. I'll bet you'll find that your budget has been exceeded on a fair number of days.
Here are the two most direct ways to solve the issue, and have your ad appear more often:
* Increase your daily budget, or
* Reduce your keyword list (since the budget has to support all of your keywords, the fewer you have the farther it will go.)
Another thing you can try (which will not have the same impact as the above) is to lower your Max CPC.
AWA
The strange thing is that my daily budget was not exceeded in the last couple of days. I'm building this campaign and have actually increased the daily budget on a daily basis and consistently about 20% higher than the most recent spend, that's the weird thing.
The lesson here for me is to use even higher daily budgets I guess.
1. Your daily estimated balance is based around a 2% CTR.
2. If you get a higher CTR than is recommended (and you're using the estimated daily budget), your ads won't be shown all time. (this is based on you getting more clicks than your budget will allow due to your CTR).
3. If there are times where your ads get a very high CTR or use up a lot of the daily budget in a short time spam (i.e. if you use the KW 'new york widget' your time zone is EST, but since Google is west coast, their budget vs shown estimator is 3 hours behind), Google will start to slow the ads in their morning/afternoon anticipating that your going to need more of that budget in the late afternoon/evening.
4. In reality, you didn't need your ads slowed because in the evening people aren't doing nearly as many searches for your keywords (New Yorkers are home eating dinner at 7pm and Google is still looking at another hour or four in the office as it's 4pm for them).
5. This causes you not to hit your daily budget, because your ad was slowed at peak times for searchers, and Google didn't take into account that the volume of searches would significantly change in the evening.
I've noticed over the years that when using a term that is specific to a geographic region, or if you're targeting a time zone outside of west coast, that Google can miss your daily budget on many occasions. If your targeting the entire US, then their ad delivery is usually much better.
They usually (not always) make this up after several days of your budget not being hit (daily budget is estimated on a 30 day scale - not really every day), by showing your ads a lot on a single day or over the course of several days to 'catch up' on your allocated spend.
Hope all of the above made sense, still need to get more coffee into the system :)
