Why Google Isn't Spending Your Google Ads Budget (and How to Fix)

So you've got a Google Ads campaign. It's getting conversions, it's hitting your goal, but it's not spending the daily budget that you gave it. So you're wondering, why the heck is Google not spending the budget? I want to get more, so I'm trying to give it more budget, but it's not spending the daily budget each day. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Austin leclair. I am co founder of a Google Ads agency called Grow my ads, the YouTube channel you're on right now. We manage over $50 million in ad spend per year. So we know a thing or two about these Google Ads issues. And this is one that we get quite often from clients when it's like, hey, I want to spend more, but it's not, what can we do? So in this video, I'm going to break down why this happens and what you can do about it. Let's dive in. Okay, so I pulled up an actual account here, and I am going to show you in a real campaign, this same situation. So this campaign has a budget of 500, but if we look at the daily spend, it's only spending like 100 to $200 per day. And if I even go back, let's go like 14 days. Yeah. It's never reached $500. Right. So they're willing to spend $500 per day. Google's like spending 100 or two. And it's like, well, what the heck? Why Google? Why won't you spend the budget? I tried giving you more and now you're not. Well, the main reason is usually because of your bid. So this happens a lot when you're using target ROAS bid strategies or target CPA bid strategy. Right there, you're actually creating a ceiling for Google to operate within. Right. So if you set a campaign to a Target ROAS goal, Google knows it must achieve this goal on average in order for you to be happy. Same if with if it's a target CPA goal. Right. Google will only enter auctions then where it knows that it can actually achieve these goals. Now, it will vary. It's not like it's perfectly hitting your goal every conversion it gets. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But when you set a target row as or target CPA goal on the campaign, you are creating a ceiling for Google to operate within, which means you cannot infinitely get all of the ad impressions or for the keywords you're targeting or the products that you're targeting. In Your campaigns. So for example, this is a shopping campaign. Again, $500 per day budget. It will only spend one to 200. Well, it's a troas. They have a troas strategy on here. And if I look it's at 900%, which is really, really high. And it is actually hitting 900% in the last 14 days. It's right on 900%. So it's hitting the goal. But Google knows it can't actually spend more without that roas more than likely dipping. How you can kind of see this is by looking at the impression share metrics. So there is, if you go into your columns, you go modify columns, you, you'll be able to go to competitive metrics here. And you can get these search impression share metrics, right? And this will tell you the ad auctions that you're eligible for. What you're getting from an impression share standpoint, top impression share absolute. And then you also can get these like search lost due to rank, search lost due to budget, which these are the two that we want to look at. In this case, I believe I have a video that breaks a lot of this down. If I truly do, the video will be in the description below to go further into these search impression metrics. Okay, so when I look at these search impression metrics, I see that we showed in the last 14 days, 20, about 25%. Okay, so of the auctions we were eligible for, we showed up 25% of the time. Now I know Google is not spending my entire daily budget of 500. So why am I only getting 25% when I'm willing to spend more and Google's not doing it. Well, it's obviously not due to budget. Look, search loss due to budget is 0%. Search loss due to rank is 75. So I got 25, but I'm losing 75 due to rank. And what does rank mean? Well, in this case, it's due to our bid. We are asking for such a high return on this campaign. Google literally can only operate within 25% of the auctions were eligible for to actually hit that goal based off of all the historical data that it operates within. Right. So on a daily basis, it can't go spend $500 worth of auctions that we get into in clicks because it knows it will not be able to on average hit a 900% ROAS for us based off of operating historical data within this campaign and, and within this goal. And so in short, the reason this campaign can't spend $500 is due to the fact that it's just literally capped by the bid that is set on it, which is set to a 900% bid. So there's going to be a visual somewhere on this screen. It may be the whole screen, I don't really know. But what I'm showing in this is the live auction. Right. And, and the ceiling cap. So let's say your bid ceiling is. And in this case, in this Visual it's like 33 cents because you have the bid ceiling. And it's because you're asking Google to give you a T ROAS of 900%. Like in that campaign I showed you, Google knows kind of a ceiling that it has to operate with on average, otherwise you're not going to get the performance that you're asking for it and you're going to be unhappy and not want to continue to pour money into Google Ads. So you've again, you've created the ceiling when you create a smart bidding cap. And if there are competitors during certain auctions that are very much more aggressive, you just absolutely might not be able to show because Google knows, hey, we can't bid within these auctions due to the fact that we have to bid at this sort of bid cap ceiling due to the fact that this campaign has a 900% target ROAS goal. So as a visual I kind of wanted to show you what like, technically there is a ceiling that gets, gets created and these are made up numbers. But this is what it could absolutely look like. Okay, I have another visual for you and this is a common question I get then because it's like, well, wait a second, some days my CPA or ROAS is like really high. So my CPA is high, my ROAS is low. Or you know, some days it's like, it's incredible. My CPA is really low and my ROAS is incredibly high. And it's like, you know, overachieving. Right, right. That is what happens on a daily basis. But you have to look at it. And this is why usually a 30 day timeframe is a period of time you should be analyzing data, especially if you're judging smart bidding, if you're judging the performance of campaigns that have been running at least to the parameters you set within a 30 day time period. Because what's going to happen is Google is going to get conversions that are higher than what your goal is. And Google's going to also get conversions lower than what your goal is. Right. So in that 900% Troas campaign I showed you earlier, There will be days where our ROAS is 1100%. There will be days where the ROAS may be 600%. It's, it's trading, you know, expensive conversions and cheap conversions and over time. So in this visual that should be on the screen, there's a blue line. That blue line is the average, right? And that is what Google's operating at. It's not like it can just perfectly get you your goal conversion and individual conversion at your goal each and every time. So on an individual conversion basis it's going to look like, you know, one of these plot charts where you've got a bunch of dots all over. But when you average all of those conversion plots out, it usually, if the campaign's performing well, will equate to the average of the campaign goal that you have. So this visual, I just wanted to show you why you, if you're looking at daily metrics, you're going to some days be like, well, we did really well, let's crank it up. Or we did really bad, we got to change this. You do not want to make daily adjustments. That's why any of my training videos where I go into like structuring campaigns or bid strategies and I'll have some of those videos in the description below if you haven't seen any of those or you're new to the channel. I don't, I talk about like how you have to give lots of time, right? You've got to work within these time frames if you make a change, especially with dealing with smart bidding. And this is one of the reasons why you can't make daily changes off of something where it's literally working off basically a 30 day average. And again, it's trading more high conversions on some days with low conversions. And why could that be? Well, every auction is going to be unique, right? Some auctions, maybe your competitors blown their budget by noon and then later in the afternoon you're able to enter auctions on a cheaper CPC basis and get conversions. Google thinks it can get conversions cheaper during those time frames. A other timeframes, maybe a competitor's really aggressive or someone shows intent but then high intent to purchase from you based off of your historical conversion data points. But the competition is very, very high then. So it may say, look, we're still going to bid really high. Yes, we're going to go above what the goal is, but we're going to be able to get a conversion during this time period and we're just also going to have to average it out during some lower time periods for lower conversions. And this again is a parameter constraint that you've set a ceiling for Google to operate within. So this is why when you're on a bid strategy that is not TCPA or troas, so let's say you're on max clicks, for instance, or you're on max conversions with no goal set. Usually you can spend budget, right? Because you're not really setting a ceiling in those cases. And in those cases, if it's not spending budget, it's more than likely due to the fact you're actually getting most of the available impressions and how you would be able to check that is going and looking at those search impression metrics again. So, okay, so I'm, I'm brought up a, a campaign and it'll be blurred, but I want to show you something. So here's last 14 days, right? We have a 97 impression share. 0% is lost due to budget, 3% loss to rank, right? So this campaign is not spending the daily budget either. So if I look at my cost here, it spends like, you know, 100 bucks to 50 bucks a day. Well, the reason isn't due to rank or budget. It's literally because that is like all of the available impressions we can even get somehow we lost out on 3%. And I can verify that due to these two metrics. I, I didn't lose basically anything due to rank and I lost nothing due to budget. So I am also getting a extremely high search impression share there. That means that's just like all of the available people in the last 14 days literally searching for these keywords right? Now in this case, it is a brand campaign. So you'll usually find really, really high impression share metrics like this one on a brand campaign. And you know, that's the amount of people literally searching for your brand. And you're available to show an ad impression too. Okay, so when you have a campaign that will not spend the daily budget, go check the search impression share metrics. What have you lost due to rank? Is rank, is it, is it truly the bidding, your bidding parameter that you set, whether it's a TROAS or TCPA that's limiting you and if it is, and depending on the performance of the campaign, if you want more volume and it's not Google's not spending the daily budget you're giving, then now you need to reevaluate. Am I willing to be more aggressive on bidding? Because now I have to in order to spend more in order to enter more auctions. Otherwise you have now capped yourself with a ceiling that I visualized earlier in this video and you simply will not be able to enter more auctions due to that bid cap. So this is now a strategic decision you have to make. Are you willing or can you financially afford to bid more aggressively to enter more auctions, or do you have to live with kind of what you're getting now? Knowing it's not tactically anything that you screwed up, it's just you have now capped yourself due to the performance request on your bid strategy that you're asking from Google to get, which is now limiting the the amount it can spend per day in order for it to average over a 30 day period. The goal that you've set, whether it's CPA, whether it's Troas. Okay, I hope that made sense. I like to use visuals when I can to explain some of these concepts and sometimes I'm like, man, I really hope this makes sense to people. So hopefully this video helped provide some value. If you are struggling with this question as to why Google is not spending your daily budget, there's two ways I can help you if you are running Google Ads. One, I have a group where I do Q and A calls and threads and training and courses and my team's in there answering questions. That is called PPC Copilot. The link to that group will be in the description below. You can get access to me and my team and this is more learning Google Ads yourself. So go check that out if that's what you're interested in. Or if you spend money on ads now and you're like, I just need a experienced team to come in and manage it for me. Then go get a free audit. The link to go get that audit will be in the description below. It's a free audit. It'll take you like 10 seconds to fill the form out. If you qualify, we will actually do a complete analysis of your account, tell you what you should be doing or what we think you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing, how to make more money, how to save money, etc. It's totally practical. You can use it yourself, you can give it to your team, your current agency, whatever. We actually don't really care. Obviously a lot of people will hire us after that audit process because they like what we tell them to do and they're like, hey, we just want you guys to do it. So if you spend money on ads and you need a team, an elite team of Google Ads strategists, then go fill out that free audit form again. That will be in the description below. And if you qualify, we will absolutely give you a free audit. And if you don't want any of that, that is cool, too. I'll see you on the next video.