Charges and your daily budget
Starting October 4, 2017, campaigns will be able to spend up to twice the average daily budget to help you reach your advertising goals, like clicks and conversions.
On days with lots of high quality traffic, your costs could be up to 2 times your daily budget. This spending is balanced by days when your spend is below your daily budget.
Keep in mind, you won’t be charged more than your monthly charging limit: the average number of days in a month (30.4) multiplied by your average daily budget.
Internet traffic is like an ocean. Some days, there will be small waves. Other days, there will be great big ones. So, if your ads don’t show up much because of low traffic, then we’ll make up for that by showing them more when traffic’s higher.
That’s why we allow up to 2 times the clicks in a day than your daily budget allows. This is called overdelivery. And it’s a good thing: if we end up showing your ad too much — to the point where you accrue more costs than your daily budget allows for over a billing cycle — then we’ll give you a credit for those extra costs.
Overdelivery and your daily budget
As we mentioned, you might see that your advertising costs each day are a little higher or lower than what you set for your daily budget. If you do, don’t worry — over a month-long billing cycle, you won’t be charged more than your daily budget would’ve allowed for over 30.4 days.
Let’s explain that number.
Basically, 30.4 is the average number of days in a month (365 days in a year / 12 months = 30.417). Google multiplies your daily budget by this number so we know what your budget should be over the course of a month.
Example
Let’s say you set your budget at $5 a day and your billing cycle is 30 days. Over the course of the month, you notice that your charges vary. Some days you’re charged $2, on others you’re charged $10. But at the end of the month, your charges won’t exceed $152 (that’s 30.4 multiplied by your $5 budget). So even though your campaign costs tipped above and fell below your $5 budget from day to day, at the end of the month, you’re still charged no more than what you budgeted.
The waves of Internet traffic might make your daily costs go up and down. But at the end of the month, despite those unpredictable waves, you’ll find your costs at right where you expected them to be.
Check for overdelivery
Sometimes we deliver over your monthly budget. In those cases, we’ll credit the overdelivery cost back. If you’d like to see whether we’ve given you overdelivery credits, follow these steps:
1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the reporting icon in the upper right corner of your account.
3. Select Predefined, then Basic from the drop-down menu.
4. Click Overdelivery.
To calculate overdelivery, subtract “Billed cost” from “Served cost.” To perform these calculations in bulk, click the download icon in the top right of the report and save as a .csv file.
By default, the data is displayed daily and sorted by served cost. If you wish to see for a certain date range, remove the “Day” filter and and set date range in the upper left of the table.
Starting on September 30, 2017, the campaign activity link found on your Transactions pages will be disabled. On that day you’ll be able to find served and billed costs in the reports section of your account, which will allow you to check for overdelivery.
IMPORTANT: Once the new reporting feature is available, reports will only show data as far back as September 2015. If you would like to retain access to older campaign activity, please use the print function to save this information now.
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