Ever seen the Quality Score message “Your account spending limit has been reached“? When you have unspent budget, cash in the account, you’re not in a scheduled off-period and you have a burning desire to get clicks? You get no impressions, no clicks and no reason from Google Support as to why your adverts don’t run? And then suddenly, you get traffic again. It goes on for days and days and you only get pointless boilerplated messages from AdWords support staff?
I think I’ve worked out one of the reasons why you might see this misleading message.
I’m pretty sure that it is a bug.
Ad Scheduling Symptoms
I have a few clients who have Ad Scheduling enabled. Ad Scheduling, or Day Parting, allows tailoring delivery of adverts to the time of day when customers are most in the mood to buy. It’s another targeting mechanism in AdWords.
You can choose, once in the lifetime of an AdWords Account, the Time Zone. By default, Google picks their home town Time Zone – Pacific, some 8 hours behind me in the UK.
Take a look at this Google Docs Spreadsheet, which shows the effect of some of the Ad Scheduling for an account. Think “hosting service maintenance” or “shift change in the call centre” or something like that – late in the evening, Mountain time. Mid evening, Pacific Time, or in the wee small, and unimportant, hours in the UK.
The first evening scheduled period starts at 08:30 Pacific time until 09:30 Pacific. Advertising runs just fine. Then, even though advertising *should* run from 10:30 Pacific to 3:00 am Pacific, advertising doesn’t actually resume until we start a new *Google* Budget day – at Midnight, Google Time. In the interim, although there is unspent budget, cash in the account and a desire to spend, Google will insist that the account has reached the spending limit.
Google staffers believe that the delay in serving is caused by some kind of editorial review. I’m moderately expert in editorial reviews, about as much as someone who has never worked at Google, and who has been careful to avoid questioning Google about Editorial Review when under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, can be. There is probably more information available under NDA, but then I wouldn’t know about that :)
This is nothing like any other review process. I’ve never heard of or come across a *daily* regularly scheduled review. Doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, but it seems like a very strange way to run a business. Editorial review, especially human mediated, is expensive. If you were automating one, then there’d be signs – like visits form the AdsBot. I have measurement tools in place, so I can look for visits by the AdsBot (I’m looking for user behaviour, to optimise adverts and landing pages – but I can also see the AdsBot, too). There are no coordinated visits from the AdsBot at the point at which advertising fails to run when it should.
So that means if it is a review process, it is human. I don’t believe that Google have a staff member assigned to suspending and reviewing an unchanged account at the same point every day, and enabling it at precisely midnight Pacific time. That would be stupid. Google isn’t stupid.
But not being stupid and not making mistakes are two different things. Smart people can make mistakes. You can learn a lot from a well judged mistake.
This looks entirely like a bug. A bug in which a late re-enabling of Ad Scheduling, has Google looking at the budget and going… “No – this budget, in 24 hours, set to accelerated spend? It’s gone already… Nothing to see, move along”. At midnight, Pacific, Google goes “so, what is on accelerated spend, and scheduled to run? Ah ha!” and you start getting Ad Flow again.
What Can You Do To Fix It?
Directly? Probably nothing. We’re in workround territory, not fix-it land.
Depends on the down time and the Schedule I think. From other clients, if you restart earlier in the day, then you can get flow. It doesn’t seem to be affected by budget. It may be affected by “accelerated spending” – I’m seeing signs of some relief from the problem if I pick standard serving.
If your down time is short, then just keep rolling – the loss of spend to bring people in when you can’t service them, is probably less than the loss of earnings for the longer period when you aren’t bringing in any prospects all.
You’ll really need to work out what costs you more – losing visitors for the late turn on, or spending to bring in prospects when you can’t service them properly.
Summary
I’m fairly certain that this is a bug. There may be ways to exploit this is specific markets. If you have an industry wide “down period” – then your competitors have probably altered their advertising schedules to fit. In which case, there should be a ripe spot where advertising costs are suddenly lower. Might be worth looking at whether you can tweak your down-time schedule and offer capacity when the advertising *should* be better…
If you are a big company… then lean on your advertising agency to explain why your spend misses some hours when you should have flow. And lean on Google to fix it.
There may be other reasons. I’m not claiming to have nailed them all. If you have the “Account Spending Limit Reached” message, with unspent budget… and you don’t have Ad Scheduling, drop me a note and let me have a look at your account. I might spot another pattern. :)
