AdWords Delivery Method Raises New Questions

While altering the daily budget for a paid search client the other day, I noticed a new setting that’s available in Google AdWords Campaign Settings. Not just any setting, but a new option that will likely impact the way most pay per click marketers manage campaigns.

Google recently made available an option on the campaign settings screen called Delivery Method.

Oh, it’s probably worth mentioning that what you’ll read by following the above link, is all you’re going to read from the good folks in Mountain View. Yup, that’s right. In true Google fashion, another new feature has been rolled out, unpublicized, and accompanied only by superficial, nebulous documentation to support its users. Extensive digging through Google’s own, terminally insipid Inside AdWords blog failed to turn up anything but a link back to that same Adwords help page.

In short, the Delivery Method feature toggles between two modes: Standard Delivery and Accelerated Delivery. Standard Delivery will spread your ad impressions evenly throughout the day. By contrast, Accelerated Delivery will display ads as often as possible during the day until the daily budget is exhausted. Of course, in either scenario, if the daily budget is too low, one runs the risk of not receiving all possible impressions.

Accelerated Delivery is pretty straight forward – Google will see to it your ads will be shown as often as possible, happily spending your money with abandon. Standard Delivery (the default), however, seems a bit more complex. The help documentation states that “With standard delivery, your ads would appear throughout the day, from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m.”

This poses a number of questions, to which Google does not offer answers:

• How does this new methodology compare to the previous delivery system?
• How does Standard Delivery mode affect existing day-parting schedules?
• What good will my PPC ads for “Bob the Builder” characters do while being shown at 2 a.m. when every school-aged kid in the nation should be sleeping?

So, it’s evidently up to us, PPC marketing professionals, to press on in the coming months, to examine results, compare historical data, and ultimately determine how Google’s latest curveball affects us.

New challenges are good, right? Sure they are. What’s tough to swallow is the seemingly intentional lack of practical information that would actually aid in the day-to-day management of a PPC campaign.