Learn About Budgets in AdWords

For people not deeply familiar with Google AdWords, it can be a bit intimidating to try to use it. One of the scariest parts has to do with costs. People are worried that their costs will be out of control, and rightly so. If not set up properly, campaigns can waste a great deal of money. Fortunately, AdWords offers ways to control your budget that are easy to understand.

The basics of AdWords budgets

When you create a new campaign in AdWords, you will be required to set a daily budget. The amount you set is intended to be the maximum you are willing to pay in click costs per day for that campaign. For the most part, it’s as simple as that. However, Google has a process that it calls “overdelivery” that allows your budget to be exceeded by 20% on any given day. Though it may over-deliver on one day, it will compensate by under-delivering on another day.

Here is the important thing to remember: the average length of a month is 30.4 days. If you take your set daily budget, and multiply it by 30.4 days, the resulting amount is the most that Google will charge you in a month for that campaign. In rare cases, that amount can be exceeded, however, your account will be credited for the difference. If you are overcharged and credited, you can see it in your account transaction history. You will see a credit called an over-delivery credit.

Shared budgets

Besides simply setting a budget for each campaign, AdWords also lets you set up a shared budget. A shared budget can be shared across different campaigns. One of the benefits of having a shared budget is that if one campaign has money left over in its daily budget, it can share the left over amount with another campaign to be spent there.

Here are a few other key things to know:  

-Enabling the budget column in campaign view allows you to see the budget set for each campaign

-When your budget is reached, your ads stop showing for that day.

-Your ad delivery options affect how soon your budget will be depleted— you can select standard, or accelerated for your ad  delivery. Accelerated will spend your budget at a faster rate.

-In the status column, you may sometimes see the words “limited by budget”— by clicking next to that, you might see a  recommended budget amount.

Hello. My name is Barry, and I love Google AdWords! Would you like to connect with me? If so, send me an email at this address: