Are you overspending on AdWords?

Good afternoon, It’s been a  while but id thought id drop you a line or two to bring you up to speed on a couple of things that has been changing at Google recently in respect to their Adwords T’s and Cs.

So what’s happening John? Well our friends at Google have clearly been taking a look at how they can make a bit of extra cash, they must be a little short lately and as usual this is thinly veiled as things that will help YOU the Advertiser.

I know, I know, you’re all thinking here he goes again with his anti Google rants but you may be surprised that I actually love Google, they are still the number 1 place to advertise if you have an online business and without them making changes like this, I wouldn’t be able to employ such a fantastic team to help all the poor advertisers that don’t fully understand what Google is doing. Even Google understands this that is why they give Google partner and premier partner status. They know businesses like us who can make Adwords work or work harder for people these businesses will thrive and invest even more if they are getting a positive return.

OK so what are these latest changes? firstly a couple of weeks back Google decided to look at the number of adverts attached to each Ad Group with your campaigns they identified that many of you are still only running 1 maybe 2 adverts for each group. Google’s best practice is to have 3 to 5 ads per ad group to identify what copy is best. So what if you don’t have enough adverts?

Google is now going to add in its own adverts for you using certain keywords from your ad group or landing page. You will then have 14 days to approve or disapprove them, if you do nothing then they will be made live. Now what is the problem with that???? Google knows everything; well you know as well as I that you can tell the difference between an advert written by a person rather than a computer generated one. they won’t be employing rafts of people to write new copy for these ads it will be an algorithm that looks at keyword densities on your site and keyword lists within your campaigns mixed with some generic copy. This means that not only will it be obvious that a computer programme has written it but  also chances are that yours and your competitors adverts will end up being potentially identical!!

I’m not saying this is disastrous but chances are these automated adverts won’t work!

Secondly a week or so ago the following was brought to my attention by Google.

“Starting October 4, 2017, campaigns will be able to spend up to twice the average daily budget to help you reach your advertising goals, like clicks and conversions.

On days with lots of high quality traffic, your costs could be up to 2 times your daily budget. This spending is balanced by days when your spend is below your daily budget.

Keep in mind, you won’t be charged more than your monthly charging limit: the average number of days in a month (30.4) multiplied by your average daily budget.”

On its own this may look like a good thing raising budgets on potentially busy days and recovering the cost on days that are not so busy. Great stuff It clearly states I won’t be charged any more than my monthly budget so all is good however this isn’t entirely true the article from Google goes on to say;

“Sometimes we deliver over your monthly budget. In those cases, we’ll credit the overdelivery cost back”

Hang on a second ago you said we won’t be overcharged on our monthly budget however now they’re saying sometimes they will? I’m confused… but hey it’s ok again  because they will credit it back. The thing is notice the lack of the word “automatically” from our experience when this has happened in the past it has taken several weeks to get this back. Firstly YOU have to check if it’s happened then Secondly you have to go through a drawn out process to request the “overdelivery” costs back. and remember they can “over deliver” by 100%. That’s the scary thing that in a month like November or December your costs could skyrocket and for some small businesses out there this can mean complete disaster especially if it happens for a number of months!!

So my Advice is to make sure you spend time monitoring your campaigns for automated changes by Google and if you don’t think you’ve got time to do it yourself then why not give us a call and one of our dedicated Account managers will look after you.