We recently raised the click prices for a client and tripled the daily budget, way over the sugegsted maximum. And then, sitting comfortably in the top spot, where this client wants to be.....
Yesterday their subject made it to the daily news bulletins (not their product, but something else related to their area).
Result summary:
impressions 2,5 x normal
CTR 1,5 x normal
daily spend 1,25 x daily budget
Only a few leads, even fewer than on a normal day, most clicks seem to have come frome curious people simply clicking on the first result they found on the keyword.
Perhaps we'll see some compensation for the 25% overdelivery, but that is very unlikely as on most days we're well below daily budget.
Luckily we'd prepared the client for this possibility, but never thought it would happen so soon!
Well before I started AdWords, a forthright Vicodin Advertiser gave me a tip. He said Google likes big spenders, so he always set his budgets to 10k daily even though he knew Google couldn't possibly deliver the clicks, but at least this way he got to show for every search.
Knowing nothing about AdWords when I started, I more or less followed that advice, though the thought of a 10k daily budget was too much. I used 1k for my initial Campaign.
This particular Campaign manages a very consistent 2.0 CTR and NEVER spends more than $30.00 a day or less than $15.00 and is quite profitable. I more than double my spend every single month. This was my 1st Campaign and not knowing better I set up 13 diverse AdGroups and with all those keywords feel unlikely to get hit by clicks from the curious over a news mention.
Now the kicker: Fearing Google's upcoming major algo change and seeing the effects on sales during some of the minor updates, I thought I'd prepare and lower this budget to $300.00 a day to protect myself from potential havoc as an experiment.
For that single day, impressions went down 34% to 2385. My spend for the day was $9.49 I have never experienced variances like that. Daily impressions for 15 random days that I checked showed a norm of 3600 with a high of 5200 to a low of 3200.
It's easy to dismiss this as a fluke and suggest I do a week's worth of testing, but I can't play with my money, not with a 1 in 50 conversion rate on these fairly expensive products.
Am I paranoid? I'd be interested in the insight from someone with experience like HitProf. I had a few other campaigns in the past where I would have a $2.00 daily spend, cut the budget from $200.00 to $50.00 for the month and turn up unprofitable or barely profitable.
I know the overall Google AdWords CTR is allegedly just around 2.0, and I've managed an overall AdWords CTR of 1.6 and some big AdGroups are 3.5% overall, I find it hard to believe that I'm being penalized for falling just that short of the benchmark.
Few disabled keywords or ads, few hold. For the most part I'm in niches mostly my own.
I do not appear to get full delivery on ads unless my budget is 50 times my spend. I wonder if I should move my newer, more smartly budgeted AdGroups up to my lucky 1k daily max.
So many delivery issues on this forum seem to resolve back to budget issues. Is the "delivery calculator" out of whack or do you think I'm doing something massively wrong?
Thoughts, sympathies, suggestions?
Thanks,
patient2all
My normal budget is about 3x my "intended budget" but I'm always worried about being hit by fraud clicks so I thought I'd try lowering my budget to see how it goes.
I lowered it to about 1.5x my actual average spend for the preceeding week but quickly found out why this is a bad move - my ads stopped after a while.
The reason? Budget exceeded.
In other words, if you intend to spend $x, be prepared to have a budget of at least $3x.
This puts us at risks especially when we are away and can't monitor our ads every day. But not taking this risk could mean a serious loss of income :(
So, what did I do? I set my budget to their recommended amount without changing ANYthing else and voila, clicks went up, CTR went up and my ROI went up! Nothing was changed, except I increased my daily budget to what Google recommended and my ads started showing during the "heat" of the day when the "buyers" were looking. Just my experiences, yours may vary!
By the way, word of caution, watch your campaign like a hawk to make sure your spend isn't getting way out of control without the sales/leads to show for it!
Dave.
Any idea why the daily spend was 1.25 times the daily budget? I thought the daily budget, unlike on Overture, was an absolute cap? And if they can exceed it, why wouldn't they do so for those whose daily budget was set so low that their ads didn't show?
I tend to set mine on the high side, but if you're worried yours is too high, you could see what they recommend and then set it for that or a little above.
