In October 2017, Google announced a change in how Adwords budgets would be used, called overdelivery.  Here’s the rundown.

Overdelivery is a policy in Google Adwords that allows for up to twice your daily budget limit to be spent.  The goal is to get you more traffic at times when there are more people searching for your offer.

Google prefaces their motivation for overdelivery like this:

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.

Your first though is probably that Google is going to spend twice as much money as you’ve budgeted.  Not so.  They will maintain your monthly budget, and state that they’ll give you credits if they go over that amount.

The idea is that if on certain days you can get far more targeted traffic, they want to have your ads show more.  The budget discrepancy is made up for on days when you get less traffic.

This is pretty much a way to automate dayparting and – to a certain degree – bid modifications.  The system is identifying when you get the most traffic and using your budget to maximize results.

Here are some tips to make sure overdelivery is working for you:

1. Set a sufficient monthly budget.  With this change, your monthly budget, rather than your daily limits, will be the number you want to watch closely.  Google doesn’t specify this, but it’s safe to say they’ll only credit you a certain amount if they go over.  You’ll want to develop a budget number based on monthly data.
2. Watch your conversion data.  As your budgets adjust to drive more traffic, watch how this affects your conversion data.  You should start to see trends with certain days or times of the month converting better.  Reflect on what this says about the behavior of your audience and how you can take advantage of this to get more conversions.
3. Be aware that you’re unlikely to have monthly carry-over.  With this policy, Google won’t be leaving any money on the table.  You may have had carry over with your Top Placement Ads® budget in the past, but with overdelivery this won’t happen on Adwords.

Drawbacks to Consider

Are there drawbacks to consider with overdelivery?  Since it’s so new the jury is still out, but this policy is raising some concerns.

One big area of concern is when you’re dealing with larger budgets.  Say you’re spending 30k a day on Adwords.  Now, Google can spend 60k a day, whether or not the conversion data warrants this increase.  It’s still how uncertain how they plan to deal with shifts that affect large budgets.

Overdelivery takes away control from people managing Adwords and asks them to trust “big data”.  With such a significant alteration in service, Google will have to prove that this change is not just a way to burn through budgets.  It must result in more conversions or businesses will have legitimate issues.

If you want more control on a daily basis, the only way to get it is to pause ads on certain days.  This pretty much works against the goals of overdelivery, but could prevent a massive overspend on a single day.

If businesses see improved conversion rates and more ROI from overdelivery, then it will be seen as a success.  But a lot of this is relying on how well Google’s algorithm works based on a wide range of data points.

The coming months will tell us more.