Development

How to stop Google Ads overspending your fixed budget?

Save costs with automation

Fixed budgets are a huge issue with Google Ads. Google tends to either under or overspend the campaign budgets. This may not be a big issue if you are running a campaign for yourself as spending $1,500 - 2,000 instead of a $1,000 budget will not break the bank.

Topic
Development
Author
Thomas Saunders

Fixed budgets are a huge issue with Google Ads. Google tends to either under or overspend the campaign budgets. This may not be a big issue if you are running a campaign for yourself as spending $1,500 - 2,000 instead of a $1,000 budget will not break the bank. However in the case of digital agencies who deploy and manage thousands of fixed budget campaigns on behalf of their clients, overspending could be a major problem. Google can overspend up to 100% of the daily budget so the final bill can be unexpectedly high, especially when there are thousands of ad accounts and campaigns involved.

There are a couple of fixes to stop Google Ads from overspending. One option is to have people check the campaigns regularly and stop the campaign if it is close to or exceeding the budget. Having people check the budget may be an option for a smaller client base but the work is hard to scale and it is easy to miss something due to the monotonous nature of the task.

People sitting near table

Another option is to use a custom built software to do the heavy lifting. We have developed and maintained numerous daemon applications which remove the human worker from the monotonous task and does the job automatically. The budget watchdog software can be integrated into any enterprise systems and database. The application communicates with Google Ads through the API and manages all campaigns all day, every day around the clock up to pretty much an unlimited number of campaigns.

The first thing the software does is it reads the ad account hierarchy with thousands of ad accounts and the underlying campaign details one by one. Then the daemon application compares the budget and the spend amounts and based on the result it either lets the campaign run or stops the campaign from continuing. There is a sophisticated logic in place which allows the application to check the campaign on a more frequent basis to see if the budget spent is getting close to 100%.

Depending on the number of campaigns and clients the digital agency is managing the annual savings can easily be tens of thousands of dollars. Team Brookvale has many years of experience in Google and Facebook marketing APIs and is the choice for leading agencies.

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