Why Google isn t Spending Your Google Ads Budget

Do you find yourself in the weird situation that you have money to burn in Google Ads, but for some reason Google just isn't spending your money? Now, you don't need to take this personally because trust me, Google will more than happily take your Google Ads budget. So if you do find yourself in this situation where your Google Ads campaigns are just not spending their allotted budget, so you might have a daily budget set in your Google Ads campaign of $50, but you're only spending about $10 a day. In this video, I want to take you through the exact reasons for why that is happening. But just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron young, I'm from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. Now for the issue of why Google Ads is not spending your money in Google. There is usually one core major reason for why that is happening, and I will be getting to that very, very soon. Before we get to that big talking point that I want to go through is in today's video, I do want to take you through three quick quality control checks because these three issues could also be the reason for why Google Ads is not spending your money. And before we get to that bigger reason, we need to go through and tick off those three quick reasons to make sure that this isn't one of those contributing factors. And to show you these three reasons and also show you how to resolve them. Let's jump into a quick screen share. Let's go. Now, the first reason for why your budget won't be being spent in Google Ads is because you've got some sort of status warning. Now the, the way that you would see this is that you go into your search keywords. So we're in the new dashboard here. And you go into your Audiences keywords and content tab and then you go into search keywords and you'll see this status column. Now if you don't see this status column, you need to go over into columns, modify columns and then just write the word status and then just add the status column in here. And what you can see down here, you can see that we've got some warnings here. And this is telling us that this keyword is rarely shown and it's only got a limited visibility because of a low quality score. Now other warnings that you would get is sometimes you'll get warning saying that you might be breaking some sort of policy, but this is the core way of checking it out. And what you need to do is scroll over and then you can go through and Learn more. So that's the first thing you need to check is you need to go through and check your keyword status because the reason why Google Ads may not be spending your budget is because you've got a lot of warnings. And that brings us to the next issue because as I said, sometimes that could be a policy issue. But another common reason is because you've got a low quality score. And once again, if you're not seeing your quality score, just go through and add in the column in there. And ideally what you'd be wanting is that you'd be wanting a quality score of 7, 8 or 9 or 10 out of 10, but the bare minimum is a 5 out of 10. So these keywords are just at the bare minimum, if you have a keyword quality score of 3 or lower, especially a 1 or 2, you will see this low quality score warning. And what that means is that Google is not seeing that your keywords are relevant for the search terms. So you need to either go through and update your ads or you need to go through and update your landing page. So they're the two things and what you want to be making sure is you want to be making sure that the keyword that you're targeting is relevant to your ad copy and then that is relevant to your landing page. So the first thing is you want to go through and check that status warning. The second thing is you want to be going through and checking your keyword quality score. And then the next part you want to be checking is your click through ratio and your cost per click. And what we're looking at in here is first we're looking at your cost per click and let's just say your average cost per Click is at $3.49, but you only have a budget of $5 a day. You're going to have a real big trouble of regularly ranking because Google, we see it doesn't want to be spending, you know, 80, 90% of your budget on one click. So it's autom automatically going for lower clicks. A quick formula of what you would want here is that you want to make sure that your budget is at least 10 times your average CPC. So for this campaign, with a CPC of $3.49, we'd want to be making sure that this campaign has at least a budget of $35 a day. And then the other thing you want to be reviewing is your click through ratio. Now for search campaigns, which this one is, this is just meeting the benchmark click through ratio across all industries. The average for 2022 was 7%. Ideally for a search campaign you want your click through ratio to be well above 10, 10% and as close to 15% as possible for a performance max campaign. The data is still a little bit fresher on that one, but from all the campaigns I'm seeing is you see an average click through ratio for performance max of about 1%. So as long as your click through ratio is above 1%, you're doing okay there. So if you've gone through your Google Ads campaigns and you can see that you don't have any issues with your status warnings, you've got a good keyword quality score and you're also happy with your click through ratios and you're still having the issue of Google not spending your full allocated budget with Once again, you may have a budget of $50 and you're only getting about 10 to $15 in ad spend a day. That brings us to the final big issue of what the cause would be for why Google isn't spending your money. And it all comes down to that. You've got your target roas set too high or you've got your target CPA or your target cost per conversion set too low. And what's happening here is that Google is not spending your money because it can't find enough users targeting enough search terms to be able to achieve your goals. So let's just say for example, you've set a target CPA or target cost per conversion of $20, but your average cost per conversion is between 35 or $40. Google will only spend your budget where it's confident that it can get that conversion at $20. And if it's seeing a lot of traffic where it just knows that it can't achieve that goal of $20, it won't spend your money. The same is true for target ROAS. If your account is saying that your average ROAS is about 3 to 400% and you set your target ROAS at 800 or 900%, Google won't spend your money. Or it only spends your money in limited occasions where it knows that it can get $8 back to that target ROAS of 800% for every dollar that it spends on ad spend. When I do review accounts where this is the common issue, nine times out of ten it comes down to this is that your target ROAS has not been set correctly or that target CPA has not been set correctly. And another follow on issue for this is that people are changing their target roas all the time or changing their target CPA all the time. And what you need to remember with that is that changing your target ROAS or your target CPA is a significant change to your Google Ads account. And even for a mature account, adding in a Target CPA or or adding in a Target roas will put your account back into a learning phase. So another common problem with this is that I do see people who are just constantly changing their target ROAS or their target cpa. Sometimes people are doing it every week. And that just basically puts Google into an endless learning cycle that it's never able to fully find out the best data and the best users that should be targeting for your campaign. And to make sure that you don't fall into that trap of over optimizing your bidding strategies or what I want to do is two things. Firstly, I want to give you access to my Google Ads optimization checklists. And the reason for why these two checklists are so important is because it sets out rules of how often you should be reviewing and optimizing core strategies like your bidding strategies. And I recommend that right now, in 2023, you only want to be changing these every 60 to 90 days. So if you'd like access to my Google Ads Optimization checklist, which is perfect for search campaigns, or if you want access to my Google Ads e Commerce optimization checklist, which is perfect for shopping and performance max campaigns, always you need to do is to follow that link in the description. And this will not only let you know every different type of optimization action you need to complete, it also lets you know whether you need to complete these actions every week, every month, or every 90 days. And secondly, to help you further, and because setting your bidding strategies right is such a big item in Google Ads, I've got some extra training that I want you to see right now right here on my YouTube channel. And if you would like to learn more about how to correctly set your bidding strategies in Google Ads so that it's getting you extra conversions and so that you're not missing out on that ad spend or those impressions, always I want you to do is to go through it, which is video right here. Thank you again for joining me and I look forward to seeing you in that bid strategy video right now. See you later.