Google Ads Budget Report

At the end of September, Google Ads announced the budget report. This can help advertisers get a better understanding of what they are projected to pay at the end of the month.

So in this video, we’ll show you how to access the report; there are three different ways you can do it. We’ll then cover the differences between your average daily spend limit and your monthly spend limit. It’s not as concrete as you think; sometimes, it’s a little difficult to understand, so hopefully, we can clarify that for you. We’ll then go over the actual visualization of the chart. Then you can see how changes to your daily budget can affect your projections, so let’s jump in.

I’m in an account in Google Ads, and I want to clarify one thing that is not the budget report. That is, if you click on this graph icon in the budget column, you can see it’s called the campaign budget simulator. Yes, they’re showing budgets here, and we can get clicks and impression data off to the right-hand side as we look at selecting different budgets.

If you’ve been running campaigns within Google Ads for a while, you know that this isn’t a new tool. So I’m going to cancel out of this one, and then I can go over the three ways you can access the budget report.

The first way is in the view I currently am in right now, and that is the campaign view. You can see I have campaign selected and then the left-hand navigation, and close to the simulator, and even though the target simulator is not available for this campaign, the pencil edit icon has popped up.

So you can click on this in the budget column for any of your campaigns, and there we see the option to view the budget report. So that’s one way to do it. I’m going to cancel out of this, and then I’m going to click into one of the campaigns.

When you click on one of your campaigns, you are sent to the ad group level view. This campaign only has the one ad group, but when you are in this view, if you look towards the top, your campaign’s daily budget will also show up. So even just hovering over the daily budget has brought up this particular pop-up, and there, we see a big link that we can view the budget report. So that is the second way you can access this report.

The third and final way is to head over to your tools and settings; under the shared library column, we have shared budgets. This particular account is not using a shared budget for any other campaigns. If you’re interested in learning what a shared budget is, maybe it’s new to you, you can watch this video that we previously released on the channel right here. But if your account is using shared budgets, you would head over to the daily budget column.

Then there will also be that pencil edit icon, next to whatever the shared budget total would be, and then you would see the same view budget report link that we saw in the other two views. But since I clearly cannot access the budget report from this section, I got to head back. I’ll click on one of my campaigns, putting me back in the ad group view. So I’ll just hover over the campaign budget, and now we can head into the budget report.

The main purpose of the budget report is to help you understand how much you’re projected to pay at the end of the month. So there are a few things that have to be in place before you can use this report.

Since we’re projecting for the end of the month, the campaign must have a date range that includes the current month. I know it seems silly, but I have to say it because it’s hard to project the current month if you’re not looking at the current month.

Besides showing projected spend for the month, the budget tool can be helpful to show you how changes you’ve made to the average daily budget has affected those projections. So let’s go over each part of the report, and then I’ll highlight each area that I’m talking about.

The first is showing you your current average daily budget. In this case, it’s $1,151, and if I do hover over this edit button, I can choose to change my campaign’s daily budget within this view.

I don’t need to do that right now, so I’m going to cancel out of it. Right under the current average daily budget number, we get a little note saying when this budget was last changed. So the amount that I have right now was last updated exactly a week ago from when I’m recording this video. It’s a tiny little change history feature within this report.

Next, we’ll head down to the section for cumulative monthly spend. The first part that we see that I have highlighted is for monthly spending limit. This is the maximum amount that I would pay for this campaign over a month period. This number is calculated by taking the average daily budget number, that was the 1,151 up top, and then multiplying it by 30.4, that is Google taking the 365 days within a year and dividing it by the 12 months. So again, it’d be 1,151 times 30.4.

Now the monthly forecast section is going to look at the projected total cost, based upon the average daily budget. So yes, we do have an average daily budget set; that’s the first thing we went over with this budget report. But you have to remember that average daily budget in Google Ads can be kind of weird.

I still have to remind myself that we can’t think of your daily budget as being concrete. It’s not guaranteed that you’re only going to spend that amount every single day. Google has the right to optimize your campaign budget for particular days out of the month where they think you’re going to get more clicks and conversions; they’re trying to predict a better ROI for your account.

So some days, you may not even spend the daily budget. Other days, Google can go over your daily budget. So Google does have the right to spend two times the average daily budget amount in a given day.

However, Google will consider your monthly spending limit, that is the average daily budget times the 30.4 that we talked about. So within that past 30.4 days, Google will not go over your monthly spending limit, and that’s what we’re seeing right here, that is the 35.4K.

Just for clarification, sometimes what Google calls the served costs, what’s actually showing up in the spend reports, may exceed your monthly spending limit. If that happens, you will never have to pay for the serve cost that exceeded your daily or monthly spending limits; Google covers the difference.

If you think there’s a discrepancy, you can always look at what you billed, and you should see the difference between the two. So just because it’s reported in Google Ads as serving over your limit, you may not actually be billed for it, so confirm that first. But that is a pretty rare occasion.

Then the last section under cumulative monthly spend is the cost to date. I’m recording this video on December 10th, and while our monthly spending limit is the 35.4K, we’ve only spent 10.2K this month for this one campaign. Underneath the numbers, you’ll see a visualization chart.

If I hover over today, we see a dotted line pops up, we got a little pop-up to the left of this dotted line or all the days within the past, and then to the right of that line, we see the chart is shaded gray within the background, that is the rest of our projected spend. If you go into this report more often, as the days go on, that today line will keep moving over to the right. Then, of course, everything else to the left will be updated to what your cost-to-date numbers actually were.

If I move over to the left to this triangle, every little triangle that you see within this report will note when a change to the daily budget occurred. So we see in the box that popped up, the average daily budget was changed to the $1,151. We can see that happened on December 3rd, which is just confirming this section that we went over earlier. It’s just visually shown within the chart. When we did that, it changed the visualization for the monthly spending limit, and that is done by the gray solid blinds.

So if I move it back to December 2nd before we made the change, our monthly spending limit was 25.5k. But we changed our budget; we increased it. When we increased the budget, then the monthly spending limit also increased, and that’s where we see the 35.4k, that’s what matches this number up above.

So what we see in this total when you first open up your budget report is what the monthly spending limit currently is. It’s not the average of what it will be for the month; it’s what it’s currently set at right now.

Heading back down, the blue solid line is reflecting our cost to date.  We see every day that we go, we can see how much we spent every day. If we move over into the future, it sounds corny to say, but whatever, the blue dotted line is the spend forecast for any future date, and then we see surrounding the blue dotted line is a shaded blue area.

That is showing the potential range for what the actual spend could be. Remember, I talked about the daily spending limits. Sometimes, Google could spend more than your daily budget; sometimes, it could spend less. So they are going off of averages.

This dotted blue line; the monthly forecast is not set in stone. They’re not telling you what you’re going to pay; there’s no way they could really predict that; that’s why we get pretty accurate ranges based upon historic search volume, as well as the budgets you have put in place.

Below this chart, we get another graph for daily spend. We can see that the blue color will be for your daily cost, so the blue part of this graph will be what you did spend. Then the gray portion which is labeled as the daily spending limit, showing the amount that you were willing to spend.

So pretty much between these two colors. The blue is what you did spend, and the gray is the maximum that you could have spent, but you didn’t. So we pretty much see the difference between those two numbers. In this visualization, we don’t see when there were any budget changes.

So we can see after the first two days of December, the gray line our daily spending limit was fairly the same. December 3rd is when we made that change, so the daily spending limit increased. For now, it’s the same for the rest of the month. With the holidays coming up, most likely, we’ll pull back budgets a little bit.

So we’ll see another little triangle icon noting the change; the gray solid bar for our monthly spending limit will decrease. Our monthly forecast will change, and then the daily spending limit under this visualization will go down to whatever we have the new daily budget set at.

Now under the daily spend portion, you may see this notification or recommendation from Google. This notification is also popping up under this campaign’s recommendation page, and not a shocker; it’s Google looking for us to raise our budgets.

From this screen, we can look at viewing it. As I said, it took me to the recommendations page. Weekly estimates here do not really look that appealing, so you definitely don’t have to do it.

If I go back, now I know I’m not fully hitting my limit just due to the automatic bid strategies I have in place. But I also don’t need to raise my budget when we’re clearly not spending my daily limit every day. So, just like you can in the recommendation section, I can click on these dots, choose to hide this recommendation, and then I don’t have to implement it.

One thing to note is that if you are using ad schedules, ad schedules won’t be reflected in the forecasting for the budget report. You may see notifications showing up, but in this particular account, our campaigns are running 24 hours, seven days a week, so we don’t have that issue, but you may see that.

For now, that is what’s available within the budget report. It isn’t the most robust tool, and that’s okay. But it can be helpful to give your boss or your client projected spend numbers for Google Ads if they’re constantly asking what our budget may be.

Now we understand certain changes within your account can affect how the budget report will work; we’ll peek into this report randomly, just to get an overall idea of what we may spend for the month. We understand there are many other factors that will affect the projection.

The bid strategy that you’re using changes to your ads, which may affect your click-through rates. Adding new keywords to the account, pausing lower performing keywords or ad groups. But for the most part, the range will be fairly on track.

As we said in the beginning, the main benefit of this report is to see where your projected spend could be by the end of the month, and most importantly, how your budget changes are affecting those projections.

Google has been adding more tools, more reports within the Google Ads platform, and that’s something we’ve actually been pretty happy about. So hopefully, that trend continues, and as time goes on, we’ll get more features and more insights within this report.

As always, if you have any questions on how we may use this report or how to access it, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez