Your Daily Budget

If your ad is clicked on enough times in a 24 hour period then you will have used your daily budget. Your ad will stop showing until the next 24 hour period begins.

Here is an example:

1 - You set a Daily Budget of $25.00
2 - Your cost per click is $1.00
3 - Between midnight and 10 AM you have 25 click throughs on your ad.
4 - Your ad is taken out of the results at 10 AM and does not show again until midnight – or the start of the next day.

Think about this for a moment.

What action are you asking your visitor to take when they come to your page? Can they do everything they need to without calling you on the phone?

If the page your ad sends people to is designed to get those visitors to call you, do you want the ad to run when no one is at the phone to answer the call.

Ideally your online business will allow your visitors to become customers completely by actions they can take on your web pages. For insurance this would be get a quote, complete the application and pay you. If this is not yet true for you, then you will probably want to control the timing of the ad displays.

As of this writing you can only control this manually. But at least that is very easy. You can log on to your AdWords account anytime and “Pause” or “Unpause” your campaigns. The action you indicate becomes effective within minutes of your checking the box in your AdWords account.

Most beginner advertisers on AdWords have a natural fear of the cost. I suggest you start with a higher Daily Budget limit than the amount on which you first settle. Remember, you can pause your ad anytime and that stops all cost.

I think the most important thing for you to learn from your ads is whether they are paying off or not. I track these statistics on a daily basis in a spreadsheet:

1 - Page visits for the page to which I am sending the AdWords click throughs
2 - Number of Click Throughs
3 - Number of sales
4 - Value of sales
5 - Value of each click through. This is the value of sales divided by the number of click throughs. This will eventually become the maximum average cost per click.

Next to these daily numbers I make notes about any changes I made to the ads or the landing pages. I also note changes in the position my ads take and changes in who the other advertisers are that show for the same AdWords I am using.

This information lets me see what effect even small changes can have. But if I do not get enough visits, these numbers will not make a true sampling or provide useful averages. So I think that getting this information as fast as possible is actually more valuable in the beginning than the amount you spend per day.

The goal of your AdWords campaign is to make more money from sales than you pay for the ads. The sooner you learn the right combination of wording in your ads and wording on your landing page, the sooner you can begin making money – or decide that for you this will not work.

Once you can prove to your self that the revenue is greater than the cost of the ads, your daily budget becomes totally irrelevant. In my mind if I am making $2 for every $1 I spend on ads, my first goal is to figure out how to spend as much on ads as possible, not how to spend less.