In a move that shocked many, Google recently doubled the daily AdWords budget limit for digital campaigns. Previous to the change, your daily ad spend was capped at 20% above your set daily budget. Going forth, that budget ceiling is twice your daily budget, which is a significant increase.
The Pros
Google stated that a higher daily ad spend will capitalize on high traffic days in order to offset slow days that don’t reach the limit you’ve set. They feel as though this will help advertisers hit their monthly marketing goals more consistently and quickly. Furthermore, the change does not cost you any additional money, it just changes the way the money you have already spent is used.
The Cons
There are some drawbacks to this change that many have expressed via Twitter and Facebook. The most obvious con being a much higher likelihood that you will blow through your monthly budget in the first few days and then not have ads running for the majority of the month. For example, if the first four days of the month are high traffic days that use 20% of your monthly budget, that is upwards of 25 days of no ads, which makes consistency in your campaign exceedingly difficult to gauge. It is hard to track user behavior if you only have a couple of days of data per month.
Advertisers are irked by the lack of choice in this matter. Why not let each individual advertiser choose whether or not they want to have their daily budgets doubled? Why was this not rolled out as an optional feature that one could turn on or off depending on their needs?
Testing, Testing, Testing
Regardless of anyone’s feelings on the matter, we will just have to wait and see how this plays out. We are hopeful that Google knows what it is doing and campaigns will perform better than ever. In the meantime, we suggest altering your daily budget to account for the potential overspend.
