Google decided that accelerated ad delivery had run its course. From 17 September 2019, new Google Ads Search and Shopping campaigns could only use standard delivery. Display and Video campaigns kept both options.
What is ad delivery?
The delivery setting controls how quickly a campaign spends its daily budget when people search.
With standard delivery, Google paces the spend. If the budget is large enough, your ads show as often as the searches allow. If the budget is tight, Google spreads it across the day and decides when to show the ads.
With accelerated delivery, your ads showed every time a search triggered them, until the money ran out. The catch was obvious: a limited budget could be gone by mid-morning, and the ads would disappear for the rest of the day, including the hours when people might have bought.
The question every agency knows
Delivery is probably the setting we have explained most often to clients. Every agency gets the same call or email: "I searched for my business and I can't see my ads."
Our answer usually went like this. Your campaign uses standard delivery, so with a limited budget Google spreads your ads across the day. Please don't keep searching for your own ads. Each search adds impressions that never get clicked, which pulls down your click-through rate, and that can hurt Quality Score, raise your cost per click and push up your cost per conversion. Use Google's ad preview tool instead. (We wrote about that tool in our Google Ads preview tool guide.)
Mentioning wasted money tends to settle the conversation. Most clients accept the explanation once they see it costs them, and the preview tool gives them a way to check their ads without paying for the habit.
Some still want their ads on screen all day and ask how much more budget that needs. Most don't raise it. The ones who do often come back at the end of the month asking why doubling the budget didn't double the conversions. More budget in a young account means more queries, more keywords that suddenly start spending and more optimisation work. Results rarely grow in a straight line with spend, and it helps to say so before the budget goes up, not after.
What the change meant for us
Handing delivery entirely to Google's systems does make one conversation easier. When a client can't see their ads, the honest answer becomes "Google decides when to show them".
It also raised questions we could not answer. If the budget is not limited, will Google still show the ads as often as possible? Can we make sure they appear at the times when our ad copy works best? We had no switch left to test it, so the only way to find out was to watch hourly performance closely after the change.
We understand why Google did it. For a small business running its own Google Ads for Search or Shopping campaigns, letting Google pace the budget is the safer default. For agencies, it was one more control taken out of our hands, and it made us wonder how much of the job would end up being account sales instead of account management.
Existing campaigns using accelerated delivery were switched to standard delivery on 1 October 2019. One detail worth knowing: on any given day Google can spend up to twice the average daily budget, so spending the full budget was never the problem.
If you want a digital marketing agency to look over your search advertising in Google or anywhere else, get in touch.
Source: Google
