My Google Ads campaign went $400 over budget in 2 hours and support was useless

Honestly, I set a strict $50 daily cap on a new campaign last Tuesday, and by 10am it had spent $450. No warning, no email, nothing from Google. I was at a coffee shop in Austin trying to fix it on my phone, but their live chat kept sending me canned responses about 'system optimizations.' Turns out some broad match keyword I added was matching to random search terms nobody would ever use. Has anyone else had Google just ignore your budget settings like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

paulw5311d ago

Check your shared budget settings first - Google sometimes lets campaigns pull from a shared pool even if you set individual caps. I've had that happen where a campaign acted like it had unlimited access to a higher account limit. Also turn off accelerated delivery in your campaign settings, that lets them blow through your budget way faster than standard.

shane_hayes11d ago

Yeah that's weird, Google usually caps at 2x your daily budget.

sean_green4411d ago

Did you check if they had any extended device targeting options turned on? I've seen some weird budget stuff happen when you accidentally have display network or something running on a search campaign. Are you using any automated bidding too, like target CPA or something? That threw my numbers off once until I figured out the system was just spending faster to find conversions.