Manage your spend in Google Ads

The following article explains how to manage how much you’re spending in your Google Ads account:

Set an average daily budget to manage how much you spend

Your average daily budget is the amount that you're willing to spend each day, on average, for each ad campaign in your account. The amount of your budget is entirely up to you and you can edit this amount whenever you like. Your average daily budget can help you manage how much you accrue in campaign costs from day to day.

Your actual spend on any given day may exceed your average daily budget by up to two times. This is called over-delivery. Over-delivery can help make up for days when traffic is slow and your ads don't get as much exposure. Bear in mind, you won’t be charged more than your monthly charging limit, which is the average number of days in a month (30.4) multiplied by your average daily budget.

Note: An overdelivery credit will be applied to your account if your ad is shown so much that you exceed your monthly charging limit.

Example

If the average daily budget for your ad campaign remains at £10 per day throughout an entire month, the maximum amount that you'd be charged for that campaign for that month is £304 (£10 x 30.4 average days per month). Remember that because of overdelivery, your daily cost might be more or less than your £10 average daily budget (never more than twice your average daily budget, in this example, £20) on days when traffic is higher or slow.

View your cost and payment history

Your Google Ads account's billing 'Summary' page provides easy access to your billing information. View current charges, payment details and much more. Learn more about how to access your billing information.

View Costs from Reports

Your billed cost report provides more detailed information about daily costs at the account or campaign level. You can also use this report to compare your served cost to your billed cost for each campaign.

The served cost is the cost of all the clicks or impressions that the campaign received.
The billed cost is the actual amount that you’re responsible for paying, after adjustments have been made to your account for items like overdelivery, invalid activity and more.

Learn more about the Billed cost report.

Optimise your spending

Use the strategies below to get the most for your money.

Understand your quality score

Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.

You can find your Quality Score (Quality Score is reported on a 1–10 scale) and its components (expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience) in your keywords’ 'Status' column.
The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you'll notice higher Quality Scores.
Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of your overall performance in ad auctions, and isn't used at auction time to determine Ad Rank.

Learn more about how quality affects your CPC

Google Ads essential
Relevance: How ad quality affects your costs and performance

Choosing a bidding strategy based on your goals

Every time someone searches on Google, Google Ads runs an auction to determine which ads will show on the search results page, their rank on the page and whether any ads will show at all. To place your ads in this auction, you first have to choose how you'd like to bid. Try choosing an automated bidding strategy based on your goals, like whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, conversions or conversion value. Learn more about best practices for Smart Bidding and about automated bidding.

	Focus on conversions If you want to optimise for conversions, like purchases or signups, you can use the Maximise conversions or Target Cost per Action (CPA) strategies that automatically set your bids to focus on increasing conversions with an optional target cost per action.
	Focus on conversion value, or when people take a specific action on your website after clicking on one of your ads. If you want to optimise for conversion values, like revenue or profit, you can use the Target Return on Ad Spend strategy (ROAS) strategy that automatically sets your bids to focus on increasing conversion value at your target return on ad spend.
	Focus on clicks on your ads. If you want to drive traffic to your website, use the Maximise clicks bid strategy to focus on increasing clicks for your campaigns while spending a target amount.
	(Display-only) Focus on viewable impressions, or the number of times that your ad shows in a viewable place. This is known as a cost-per-thousand viewable impressions, or vCPM bid. The vCPM bidding method is recommended if you want to increase awareness of your brand. Note that vCPM bidding is available for Display Network campaigns only. For Search, you can use the Target Impression Share bidding strategy.

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