Today, we woke up to a tiny tweet from @adwords…
To help you hit your advertising goals, your campaigns can now spend up to twice your average daily budget. https://t.co/TUO08wXnl3
— Google AdWords (@adwords) October 4, 2017
As of the 4th October 2017, AdWords can spend up to double your daily PPC budget if Google believe it can help you hit your advertising goals.
Google’s official post says:
As you probably already know, Google have always been able to exceed a daily PPC budget by 20%, if it believes the clicks are of benefit. However, yesterday marked the day that figure went from 20% to 100%.
This announcement will obviously lead to lots of questions, which I’m sure will be cleared up over the coming hours and days. However, we’ve been chatting with Google and the change is not as scary as you might initially think.
From our conversations, the change has been implemented to capture spikes in traffic and ensure adverts are shown when keyword relevancy is at its highest. This will mean daily budgets are used much more intelligently. In addition, it’s not aiming to spend over its allotted daily budget. In fact, it will actively try not to.
Below, we’ve used our talks with Google to answer a few of the questions we’re sure to have. We will of course keep you updated as we can continue to learn more!
How will this affect campaigns which don’t run seven days a week?
In Google’s official announcement, they explained that your maximum monthly charging limit is calculated by multiplying 30.4 (the average numbers of days in a month) by your daily budget. So what happens if your campaign doesn’t run every day?
After speaking with Google, they have confirmed that if you run your campaign less than seven days a week, you adverts could still exceed your daily budget by 100%.
This is probably our biggest outstanding question with this change and we’ll keep you updated when we hear more.
Opt-out or opt-in?
In my conversation with Google they confirmed that this is a global change and, as such, we don’t currently have the ability to opt-out.
Will accounts already limited by budget be affected?
Google have confirmed it’s a no on this one. So that’s definitely some positive news for you all!
In summary, we doubt that this will have the impact that some people have feared. In contrast, it seems to be an effective way of utilising daily budgets to their fullest, whilst levelling out the peaks and troughs often experienced in clicks and traffic.
As always, comment or tweet with any thoughts you have on this!
Edit:
We’ve had further information from Google and this change will actually take effect from 18th October 2017.
We’ve also heard that it has been put in place to “capture spikes and seasonality to drive stronger results” and that “it will be relatively uncommon for advertisers to actually hit the 2x cap on multiple days in a month.”
