A few days ago, Google made a change to their AdWords advertising platform — allowing budgets to be overspent by 2x.
This means that advertisers will have to expect much more variability in their daily ad spend. For example, on days where there’s a lot of traffic, it could be the case that Google spends 2x your budget to drive traffic to your ad.
This increase in variability doesn’t necessarily mean that your ads will always be over budget. It could also be the case that you’re under budget on days where there isn’t that much traffic.
According to Google, low traffic days will balance out high traffic days in the grand scheme of things – so advertisers have nothing to worry about.
The worst case scenario is that advertisers are charged their monthly limit for search ads. The monthly limit is the daily limit multiplied by how many ever days are in that month.
Implications for advertisers
The problem for advertisers is the variability in ad spend that will come as result of this.
Advertisers will have a harder time predicting how much of their budget will be spent on any given day. And it’s also possible that depending on the keyword, their monthly budget could be spent much faster than expected — potentially after just a handful of high traffic days.
