Last week, I shared my worst PPC nightmare and asked you to share yours.
Many of you took the time to respond. Thanks for that!
Today, I’ll share one response by Alberto Esteves Correia (shared with permission):
“My worst nightmare is the opposite of an account not serving any ads; spending WAY TOO MUCH in a short time.”
Alberto described the situation where he was running a Smart Display campaign with a €500/day budget. The campaign had not generated any clicks for almost a week, and then on Dec 24th at 21h… he noticed almost €4000 of spending on that single day! Google reps told him it was “probably due to a system bug.”
You can imagine how Alberto felt that Christmas.
Good news: we can use scripts to ensure you can peacefully enjoy your next Christmas without worrying about Google stealing your money.
To prevent Google from spending over your budget, have a look at these two scripts:
1) Daily Budget Overdelivery Alerts
https://nilsrooijmans.com/daily-budget-overdelivery-alerts-script/
What it does:
The script will compare the anticipated ad spend based on your campaign’s daily budget settings with the actual ad spend. It will check for overdelivery in any of three periods: yesterday, last week, and last month. In case of big differences (e.g., due to overdelivery by Google), it will report an alert, log the alert in the specified Google Sheet, and inform you about the alert via email.
Why you’d care:
Back in 2017, Google introduced a feature that allows it to spend up to two times your daily budget. However, as illustrated by Alberto’s example (and my experience from running this script), Google does not always limit itself to 200% of your set budget…
2) Limit Google Ads Overdelivery to Any Amount You Want
http://www.freeadwordsscripts.com/2017/10/limit-adwords-overdelivery-to-any.html
What it does:
The script fetches every active campaign’s daily budget and accrued cost for the day. If the cost exceeds the daily budget + the allowed percentage of overdelivery, it will label that campaign and pause it.
Why you’d care:
The overdelivery mechanism used by Google makes it harder to limit spend to the amount you want unless you use this script.
– Nils