Contextual advertising on Google, it would seem that it might be easier for the person who has just learned how to configure it ?! But experienced professionals who follow Google news can say with confidence that when setting up contextual advertising there are always pitfalls that Google itself systematically leaves behind.
Perhaps your advertising campaigns have been set up for a long time and work like clockwork, you have not opened your advertising account for a long time and have refused the advertising services, since it has already been set up. But beware, there is a possibility that everything will go to dust and it’s not the agencies that set up your PPC campaign that will be to blame, but His Majesty Google himself.
How does this happen?
1. When the daily budget of a campaign is not really a daily budget
Google ads let you set your campaign’s maximum daily budget.
A reasonable person will consider that this means that as soon as you spend your maximum budget for a day, ads will not be shown.
But a reasonable person is wrong.
In October 2017, Google ads changed their rules so your campaigns can spend twice the average daily budget.
The "maximum daily budget" is now calculated and applied during the month, and not every day.
In other words, Google calculates your monthly payment limit, which is the average number of days in a month multiplied by your average daily budget. And then they promise not to exceed this budget within a month.
However, in the end, you can open your campaign in the middle of the month and find that you have already spent your entire monthly budget. (Of course, we do not recommend waiting for the middle of the month to look into your account. You should monitor it daily. But if you try to manage your PPC accounts yourself, this can happen).
This can be an unpleasant surprise if you don’t know how the “daily campaign budget” works.
It’s especially unpleasant if you decide to suspend your campaign in the middle of the month and find that you have already spent your entire monthly budget.
As a workaround, you might be tempted to cut your budget by half. You don’t want to take risks and spend $ 100 a day when you want to spend only $ 50, so you set a daily campaign budget of $ 25. But this is also not the best solution.
You can understand Google in this situation. Campaigns naturally experience spikes and lulls in everyday activities, so flexibility in budget application sounds good.
But we are not sure that this approach is the best solution, especially when it is misleading.
Perhaps it would be better to set the maximum budget for the entire campaign. But for now, this feature is limited to video campaigns with specific stop and start dates.
However, rules and opportunities remain fluid. Just the other day it was noticed that it was possible to set a monthly budget for search campaigns - an option that was previously unavailable.
2. When an exact keyword match is not really an exact match
Once upon a time, “exact match” in the keyword matching options in Google Ads was just that — exact match.