Beware AdWords budget overshooting
We recently made some changes to a client’s AdWords account that reduced clicks, traffic, and spending. Several days later we reversed those changes. Over the next several days, AdWords spending exceeding our daily budget by 20%. This came as a surprise to us as we are used to seeing some slight overage some days, but we are used to it being pennies or a few dollars totaling up to less than 1%.
The daily budget is not a true daily budget. This page in the AdWords help center explains what is really going on. Basically they take the daily budget and convert it to monthly, then try to spend your monthly budget by making daily adjustments. If you never hit your daily budget, this won’t matter. If you don’t change your daily budget very often, it won’t have much of an impact. But if you do short-term testing and make temporary adjustments, you might see some surprises in your daily spending. In theory it won’t exceed 20% of your daily spending, and it shouldn’t exceed the monthly equivalent.
We find this behavior very misleading and entirely inconsistent with the concept of a daily budget. Google said they will consider our feedback. If you are equally concerned, please express your thoughts to AdWords support.
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