AdWords Can Now Spend Twice Your Daily Budget

What changed yesterday

Google announced yesterday that AdWords campaigns may now spend up to twice their average daily budget on a given day.

The monthly limit has not changed. A calendar month's charge still cannot exceed the daily budget multiplied by 30.4, the average length of a month in days.

Until now, a campaign could go only a little over its budget on a busy day. Now the gap between a quiet day and a busy one can be much wider.

The setting in the account is the same field. What it means has moved from a daily limit towards a monthly one.

What it means in practice

• The monthly figure is now the number to plan around.
• A single day can show spend close to twice the setting.
• Quiet days may spend less than the budget, balancing it.
• The monthly limit still caps what you are charged.
• Bids, keywords and ads are unaffected by the change.
• Short campaigns and mid-month changes need closer watching.

The second is the one that will cause worried phone calls this month. An owner who checks the account daily will see a day at nearly double the budget and assume something is broken.

The reasoning behind it

Searches are uneven. A plumber gets more on a Monday after a cold weekend, a restaurant on a Friday afternoon, a tax preparer in April.

Under a tight daily limit, a campaign could run out of money on its busiest days and leave budget unspent on its quiet ones. The new rule lets AdWords move spending towards the days with more searches.

For many small accounts that is a reasonable trade. It does mean the daily figure in reports will move around far more than before.

Setting the budget from the month

Start from what the business can spend in a month, then divide by 30.4. A campaign meant to cost about $600 a month needs a daily budget of roughly $20.

That arithmetic was always how the monthly limit worked. What has changed is that the daily figure now behaves as an average, not a ceiling, so the monthly number is the one to hold the campaign to.

If a budget was set high on the assumption that it would rarely be reached, look at it again this week. A busy day can now reach twice that figure.

When a single day matters

Some businesses can only take so much work in a day. A two-person crew that is booked out by noon does not want twice the calls on a Monday.

For them the daily budget used to double as a rough limit on enquiries. It no longer does that job.

Ad scheduling, which sets the days and hours ads may run, is the better tool. Run ads only when the phone is answered and the calendar has room, so any extra spend lands where it can be used.

A worked example

A costume rental and sales shop in a small city's downtown runs a search campaign every October, sending people to a page with its hours, its location and what is in stock.

For years the campaign ran out of budget by early afternoon on Saturdays, so the owner tripled the daily figure for the last ten days of October, the busiest stretch of its year, and checked it every evening.

Yesterday the owner saw the day's spend running well past the budget and nearly paused the campaign, assuming an error.

It was the new rule doing what it was built to do: shifting spending towards the days with more searches. On the busy Saturdays to come, the campaign is less likely to stop after lunch.

So the plan changed. The daily budget is now set from the month's total, the late-October increase is much smaller, ads run only during opening hours, and spend is checked each Monday against the plan.

Short campaigns and mid-month changes

The monthly limit protects the month as a whole. It says much less about any single week.

A campaign that runs for only a week or two, or one paused part way through a month, has fewer quiet days to balance the busy ones. The same goes for a budget raised briefly for a promotion.

For those, watch the daily figures closely in the first days, and check Google's help pages on how changes during a month are counted before relying on the monthly figure.

Checking spend in the first weeks

For the rest of October, judge spend by the week rather than by the day. Compare each week's total with the monthly plan divided by the weeks in the month.

Note the days that ran well over budget and what happened on them: calls, forms, bookings. With conversion tracking in place, the busy days should show whether the extra clicks brought anything.

If they did not, the fix is usually better keywords or tighter hours, not a lower budget that starves the good days too.

What the bill will show

Billing works as before, whatever the payment setting on the account.

A heavy day can bring a threshold payment a little sooner than usual. That changes the timing of payments, not the total for the month.

Keep the monthly plan written down, so comparing it with the month's charges takes a minute rather than an afternoon.

The counter-case

Accounts that never spend their full budget will notice little. If a campaign usually spends half its daily figure because there are only so many searches, there is nothing for the new rule to move.

The same is true for businesses that already plan by the month and never look at single days.

For everyone else the advice is short: set the daily budget from the monthly figure, judge spend by the week, and use ad scheduling where a single day's workload matters.

This month

1. Write down each campaign's monthly limit.
2. Divide the monthly plan by 30.4.
3. Lower any budget set high as a safety margin.
4. Set ad schedules to the hours you answer.
5. Check spend weekly, not daily.
6. Note what busy days actually brought in.
7. Watch short campaigns day by day.

Step two makes everything else simpler. A daily budget worked out from the monthly figure turns a startling Tuesday into an expected one.

Budgets for product ads follow the same arithmetic, and the rest of that setup is covered in shopping ads for a small store.

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