Google Ads Budget Pacing Update: How the New Ad Scheduling Change Could Cost You Thousands

Google just changed how ad scheduling affects your daily budget, and if you haven't adjusted yet, you could be haemorrhaging thousands. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy Young breaks down the April 22nd Google Ads budget pacing update and exactly what it means for advertisers running ad schedules, from Monday-to-Friday B2B campaigns to weekend-only or single-day setups. 

The change means your daily budget is now spread across 30.4 days regardless of how many days your ads actually run — so if you're budget-limited and using ad scheduling, your monthly spend could spike significantly without you ever touching a setting.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

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Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Google Ads and Niche, guys. I hope everyone is doing fabulously this wonderful Monday morning. Google has hit us with an absolute shocker last week and it warrants an episode to give you a warning and it just goes to show why you need to stay the f*** on top of of your your ad campaigns. And that that is why you need people who are specialists and deal with this sort of stuff all the time because you could be losing a ton of money and wasting a ton of money as a result of constant changes that happen to the Google Ads environment. And specifically, I am talking about an update that came on the 22nd of April and that was updates to the Google Ads budget pacing for ad scheduling. So let's let's first of all digest a few facts. So, how does the daily budget work when you set sort of uh a daily budget within Google Ads? Because a lot of people think, let's say I set a budget of £100, that it stops at exactly £100 every single day and that it will not overspend or underspend. Wrong. How the daily budget works, the daily budget will never overspend up to 2x of the daily budget that you've set it to. So, if you set it to £100, it may spend up to 200 but not more but it may do so a few days consecutively may do so and underspend a few days consecutively because the daily budget actually is evened out over 30.4 days in a month okay so that means within any given month whether it's February whether it is uh uh whether it's March whether it doesn't really matter you will spend 30.4 times your daily budget even if it's set at £100. So even in in March and February, you will each time spend 3,000 and uh uh is it? Yeah, £3,040. Okay. Why is that? Because 30.4 is the average number of days in a month uh in a year. Okay. So that's how Google has just determined this. But the sneaky buggers are going to make a change now, right? What the change will um now have is that ad schedules do not count out of this. Okay? Is typically if you have a typical month, let's say um the this this month now um here uh when the episode comes out, I think it'll be the 27th, we would have had full days in April uh working days 3 18 uh and another four. So 22 working days. Okay. And all of the other days of the week would be uh weekend days. Now a lot of you either advertise uh for instance on on ad schedules like Monday to Friday especially in the B2B area but even we have clients where we have special campaigns for just the weekend or special campaigns just for the Saturday right that run on one single day um or we have um some some accounts where Sundays are completely excluded because um they're B2B buyers and people are typically not at their computers or in the office um buying this sort of stuff. And what is going to happen is is that those are not going to be included in this calculation anymore. So how was it up until now? So let's say I set a budget £100 at this account that only runs n uh Monday to Friday and we are advertising in 22 um uh days of the month now here, right? In 22 working days in April, we would have not spent more than uh well 22 uh time 100, so £2,200. Okay, so this is how it typically worked over um the past years. Right now, it's going to be different. What is going to happen is your daily budget that you set will be spent over 30.4 days regardless of what you ad schedule looks like. Okay, so you will be now spending if you set in the same example £100 budget and you would have uh if you'd spent it um or if you'd set the ad schedule as normal, normally £2,200 in in April with only 22 working days or if you had all of the uh days of the week active, then it would be £3,040. Um and you would have like sort of spent that money um over over those sort of two periods and over those two amounts. But what is going to happen now is that Google is going to squeeze that £3,040 into the 22 days your ads are active. Okay, so this is bit of a mindbender because what this means now is that pretty much on a your monthly basis you have to calculate what you if especially if you're limited by a budget. What is the budget that I have available okay for that month? and then divide that um by um by uh well you let's say you've got a budget of I don't know £10,000 or something like that. So that is then your um daily budget of um £10,000 divided by 30.4. That would be a daily budget of £328. And you will then have to understand that this is your budget regardless of whether you might want to be spending uh because what's going to happen is let's say you only spend okay I'm going to start again basically this would be for every day if your ads would be running for every day of the month right and then you'd have £330 a day roughly to spend but the what is going to happen going forward normally what you would have done is if you had only had let's say 22 2 days in the month like now then you would have set your budgets at £450. Okay. Uh but with the new sort of rules going forward if you take £450 time 30.4 you would have spent £13,800 £3,800 to too many. Okay. And that is a big big change. Okay. So your daily budget is now set to the 30 four days of the month, not to the number of days in the month that you've set in your ad schedule. Massive difference. Okay? And that's why you got to have us because if you don't see those sort of things and especially on bigger scales with B2B, you could be blasting dozens of thousands of pounds, dollars, euros into the wind. Okay? And if you want to stay up to date, just subscribe. I always try to share those uh nuggets. If you want to have a chat with me, you can find me on LinkedIn, Jeremy on Google Ads. You can also find us at youngdigital.marketing and and book a one-to-one with me, you could always send me an email to at jeremyyoundigital.marketing. Always encourage listener mail. So, if you have any specific questions what you would do when, please, please send that in. We we love listener mail and I'm going to try and answer promptly. As always, this has been Jeremy Young, personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.