Google Ads Billing Settings

While Google Ads billing may not be the most exciting topic, we get a lot of questions regarding billing information. We actually had a couple of questions from clients last week, so we want to show you how you can review your advertising costs.

We want to make sure that you know where you can go to see how often you are billed, where you can update your payment information if you need to, and most importantly, who has access to your billing information to see what permissions you may or may want to change.

To get to the billing section within Google Ads, it’s really easy. First, head on up to Tools and Settings, and then after you open up this menu, the entire right-hand column, as of right now, is dedicated to billing. The best place to start will be where I am highlighted right now, and that will be the summary.

Since I am in an actual client account, there’s going to be a lot that is blurred out within this video. They do have this information box at the top. If you’ve been running Google Ads for a long time, you may not see this information, but it’s a good place to start to understand how you are going to get charged when running Google Ads.

The first part is talking about how this account will be charged. And I’m going to jump around a little bit because if you look at the second bullet point because it’s letting us know that this account is going to be charged when we hit our $500 threshold. This account spends thousands of dollars every single month.

So every time we hit $500 in ad spend, their credit card is charged. That’s because they never updated that setting. I will show you how to do that later. And let’s say, for whatever reason; we paused all of our campaigns. Maybe the website is getting redone, or you just don’t want to run Google Ads for a while.

The remaining balance that’s underneath your threshold will be charged like it says on the first bullet point on the first of each month. So if I go down to this last payment section, we see that this account was still charged $323 on February 1. We’re going to get charged on the first of the month, no matter what. It’s just whatever is underneath the $500 threshold.

And then, if I go a little bit more to the left, it’s letting you know that the next automatic payment will be charged on the next first of the month. Or if we hit $500 1st, which we will definitely hit $500 1st, for whatever reason, you can go and make early payments covering up their credit card numbers.

I know people are like, why would you want to give Google money ahead of time? We do have certain clients that need to use spend within a given window, especially during at the end of the year. So they want to make sure as many expenses as possible are used up within a certain calendar year. So you can look at paying ahead of time. Otherwise, like using the end of your example, they don’t want to be charged for December 1 amount on January 1 because then they’ll have to count towards the next year.

So we already have credit cards in a place where it’s blurred out. We can add more credit or debit cards, add a PayPal account, add a specific bank account, whichever your company prefers, and then pay out any outstanding balance. Don’t need to do that here.

Next, it’s good to know how ad spends is typically used because that’s what you’re going to be invoiced on. And here, they do mention average daily budgets and understanding how daily budgets work. And Google has the right to go 50% higher than your daily budget if they feel that they can capitalize on certain performance.

All depends on what you have set up as your campaign-setting goals. However, Google will maintain the average balance of your daily budget over the past 30 days. Now, if you’re really paranoid about going over, you have a set limit.

And we definitely have clients that say we cannot spend a cent over this amount every month. You can look at setting up account spending limits. If I click on this Manage Spend Limit link, I’m going to leave it off for this account.

But I’m still going to show you what we can do if I go and click on and let’s pretend we were uncomfortable that it was too close to seven K last month. I can just input a dollar amount and tell Google every single month you cannot go over $7,000 in ad spend. It’s pretty straightforward, as we can see, and everything it says to the side here takes effect immediately.

Campaigns will automatically stop when that cap is reached. It’s going to reset every month, and we can update this amount every time, but for now, I’m just going to cancel out of this. And it’s a pretty intro-level understanding of how you’re going to get charged within your account and how you can control the spend.

If you’re already familiar with that and you’re running ads for a couple of months, you may want to go back and review the information. So next, I want to talk about reviewing your invoices, and there are a couple of ways that we can do that. If I move down a little bit, they’re giving us a snapshot of the current month.

I am recording this at the very beginning of February 2023, and Google’s saying right here numbers aren’t updated in real-time. I’ve never really used this section because we’re not too concerned about the current month. Most of the time, when I’m looking up invoicing or billing activity, my clients want to understand previous months for the reconciliation.

So that’s when I scroll down, and we can look at the previous activity. Right now, Google shows us the previous twelve months, but I can go back and look at all the previous years since this company started advertising in Google Ads. I can then choose a certain month, expand upon that if I want to download the statements, tax documents. It’s all there.

We see this monthly activity is similar to the current month of above, but I can get more information on spend by specific campaigns showing me exactly what each campaign spent. We can look at specific adjustments, and that’s where we see credits. So as time goes on, we are seeing a lot more invalid click activity within Google Ads.

The invalid click activity should be reimbursed within the account. And most of my clients are tied into strict budgets because we work on a lot of lead gen accounts where rose isn’t always immediate. Just last month, I had a client that had $2,500 in invalid click activity.

These reimbursements are not going to show up in your main reporting columns in the main Google Ads home interface. So it still looks like we spent the budget per month, but we’re going to be getting thousands of dollars back.

I will use this information to go back to the client, saying, hey, we got all this money back. We need to put it back within our ad spend and maybe increase the monthly budget one month to make up for all those differences.

So it’s becoming more of a constant activity with my lead gen clients as invalid click activity keeps increasing. To check on this because while we may have a certain amount of budget per month per year with all this invalid click activity, we’re not using it.

And technically, our budget is lower than it is because we’re getting all this money back, and we’re not reinvesting it to try to get in front of the right user again. For new advertisers out there, hopefully, you received a promo code to test out Google Ads. It’s typically around $100. We’ve seen it be a little bit more, sometimes less, when your promo code is applied. We’ll show you how to do that later too.

That will also show up in your adjustments section, and then you can expand payments. Not going to go around too much further because there’s no point in me really expanding on this because it’s just going to have to be blurred out like this as well. It’s just showing me the date when we were charged, the credit card that was charged, and then the amount that was charged.

See all those 500 within a given month? That’s this account’s threshold. And in the intro, I said we get a lot of questions from clients about how to adjust the billing settings, and just last week, one of my clients asked if we can make the threshold larger so their credit card isn’t getting dinged as frequently. So let me show you how to do that.

To increase your threshold, you can go up to settings. And then, when you go to how you pay, click the pencil edit button, and there we can change our threshold. In this account, Google is letting us go up to $5,000, which that is exactly what I’m going to do. If your account spends a lot more than this one, your threshold will be a lot higher.

And if you have a good history of paying on time, you’re updating your credit cards when they expire. So you’re not leaving Google hanging to dry. Google will give you higher threshold amounts that you’ll be allowed to use. So that’s something you’ll just have to go back frequently and check on to see if you can keep increasing your threshold.

So I’m going to help this client out, make it easier for them to manage the credit card, and I’m going to save this setting. Sounds good, but then we can look at other things within the setting portion. I know within the Summary section, we talked about adjusting the monthly spend limit.

But if I come up here, the account Spend limit section within your Settings is the exact same thing. So if you don’t see it on your summary, here’s where you can control your monthly spend limit within the Settings section. I’m going to jump to the bottom of this page. Skip this payments account info if you need to update any of your information.

If you’re a nonprofit using Google Ads and you need to enter tax exemption information, here’s the place where you can do it. Here’s where you can update the name of the organization and the address I’m going to get to Managing users. At the very end, we will come back to it because there are a few ways that we can do it at different levels.

We’ll have different abilities to change certain things that we haven’t talked about yet. So hold on tight. We’ll close on that one. We jump down to Settings, but I do want to go back up and show you billing activity by default. It’s going to look at the last three months, and if you click on it, you can only extend it to three months. If you try to do anything greater than that, you’re going to get denied.

And that’s even if you do a custom amount. But this gives a more detailed view of what we were looking at in the monthly breakdown at the summary page. Notice how this goes by day instead of the entire month. If you want to go up and expand by all, see everything, you can do that. I’m not going to do it because the whole screen is going to get blurred out.

And if you want more information than the columns you see on the screen right now, you’ll be able to see how you are charged, whether it’s ad engagements, clicking on the ad, watching certain videos, audio plays for your YouTube audio ads, which we have a video on that here too. But go ahead and add the columns that you need.

If anyone in your organization is looking for specific information on where the spend is going to within the campaigns, next, we’re going to look at documents. It says clearly on the top the previous month’s activity is not going to be available until the fifth business day of the next month.

Yes, on the summary page, when we first started, you could download these invoices, but on the Summary section, you have to do it month by month. If you go to the documents section, I can just go down, start clicking as many months as I want. Let’s say these five, and I can go and download selected.

Now we see in a separate window I have a zip, get the invoices for a month, and then send it to whomever may need it. If I go back into the account, let’s unselect these, and then we can just look at one statement. Let’s open this, and there we see a basic summary statement.

If I go to click on the next page, there’s the campaign breakdown for this particular month. And then the final page, the exact line items of when we were charged within that month. Now, from here on out, since I changed the threshold, their statements are going to be a lot smaller.

So hopefully, they appreciate that. Let me X out of these files, and then we can head back within the account. As promised earlier, if you have a promo code if you’re launching a new account, here’s the promotion section. This account got the first introductory credit back in 2018. It’s showing you how much was applied. And then all the way over to the right, it’s showing you how much was spent from the promotion.

The same thing happened during COVID when Google gave out free ad spend credit. That’s where it’s applied. So if you’re new to the account, you need to add your promo credit. This is where you will do it. Click on the Blue Plus button under Promotions. Add in the code that was given to you in the card in the email, and then you would click Submit.

Next is billing transfers, which I admit I never use, but this will show you the current payment profile and then any previous payment profiles that were used within this particular Google Ads account.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a client that have had multiple payment profiles, but if you need to update that information, that’s where it goes. But most likely, if you’re looking at changing payment methods, you probably mean this section right here, which says Payment methods.

I apologize, have to blur out a lot on the screen. But here is where you can add another credit card, debit card, as we saw earlier, PayPal account, bank account to Google Ads. It’s going to be the main funding source for your ads. So we have the main credit card that’s set up on the primary account. The thing that’s not ideal is that we don’t have a backup source.

So for whatever reason, if the bank closes this one because they see some weird activity on it, or next year when it expires, if we don’t update the card ourselves or have a backup in place, our ads will be paused, and they’ll stop running.

If you want to prevent that from happening, click on it. To add a backup payment method, we can choose the other card that we have on file, add a different one, whichever one you prefer. Now, within that screen, you saw that it only let us use a credit card like you said we could use PayPal or a bank account.

First, you have to set it up under the other payment methods. So you would want to go here first, choose whichever option is right, save it. I’m not going to do that. And then, you would have to go up to your backup plan and then add the one that’s already on file. I’m glad this example is here. They’re going to store all expired card information.

You can remove it, which makes sense because you’re never going to use it again if it’s past the date. But I do know some accounts like to leave it in here, so when they reconcile and go back and review old billing activity. They can confirm. It’s okay. This was our card number. It’s just expired.

Now, just as a way to double-check to make sure that everything matches up, one thing you may see under this other payment method, this little other drop-down, it will show up under acceptable payment methods. If you want to change this card to be the primary option, make it the new backup option or leave it as we had it, just another option. So within this video, we showed you how to change the account limit settings.

We showed you how to review statements as well as download them so you can send them to the proper teammates who manage accounts. Payable showed you how to apply promotions. What we see on the screen right now change your payment methods or remove payment information.

It’s pretty sensitive stuff. And when we’re in the Settings section, jumping all the way to the bottom, here’s where you can manage payment users. We can do it down below by clicking on the link. And this is one way where you can manage users who have access to the payment information. But if you need to invite somebody else, like someone in your Accounts Payable team, you can go up to your Tools and Settings again.

And then, under Setup, you want to go to Access and Security. To add a new user, click on the Blue Plus button, go down to the email field, enter in that user’s email address. Yes, even if it is a company email, it has to be tied into a Google account. If you want to give someone just billing access, they will be able to view all the information we looked at in the video, as well as edit all the information that we looked at within the video.

That means update credit card information, remove credit card information, update thresholds like we just did. But if you look at the two rows I have highlighted right here, these are the settings strictly for the billing section that we’ve looked at in this entire video.

So if someone just wants to view billing information, they need to have billing, read-only, standard, or admin access. To edit the billing information, it’s just billing, standard, and admin. Read-only access doesn’t give you too much permissions within Google Ads. So understand, if you’re inviting a new user to review and edit billing information, what permissions that they actually do have?

So this is a good chance for you to review who has access to your billing information and who can edit it. If I cancel out of this, it’s another reminder to look at who is still tied to this account, whether it’s a new employee or a former employee, and what access level they still have. Do you want them going around digging into billing information and previous statements?

And then, one more thing you may have noticed advertiser verification. You see the Your Status section that we have within advertiser verification, we’re not required to do it, and there’s a good chance that you’re going to get the same message within your account. Advertiser verification is mostly for certain industries that have a higher chance of being involved with fraud or scams.

Google has examples of industries like travel, financial services, other industries where Google restricts which search, queries, and keywords they can go after. If you’re in one of those industries, you may have to verify, you may already have it done, but to get information on there, for whatever reason, it lives under the billing section.

The billing section is pretty straightforward. Very easy to update your information, download the entire history of when and how you are charged so you can share it with the proper team members within your organization. But as always, there’s a chance I didn’t answer your question about something related to the billing section, so if you do have any other questions about information you want to find about billing, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez