Adwords Can Not Count !

[Standup Media]

Hmmm.. anyone else noticed Google can not count?

Right so i currently pay 20p for each click on all my keywords, all of them are 20p, when i run a report and view it says i owe them in total £9.48. Ok..... so where the hell did they get the 8 from if all my keyword prices are 20p. Another thing is i decided to add the total number of clicks up and then times 20p by the total number and it came to £12.40 with 62 clicks.

So how come google says its only £9.48 when infact i owe them £12.40. I don’t see how Google can not add up a simple sum.

Anyone else getting this sort of problem, not that im complaining as I’m happy google isn’t charging me what im supposed to owe me just seems stupid they cant add up.

[fizzbird]

The price per click you set is the maximum you are willing to pay. The actual cost of the click can be less than this.

[HarveyC]

^^Not sure how to expand on that answer, but it might be a good idea to familiarize youself with the bidding system before going on a spending spree!

If your max CPC is £0.20, it could average a much lower amount if there's no competition. Search Adwords help

[tbp]

Yes, basically, your CPC is the maximum price you are willing to bid per click, in your case 20p.

Lets say the other bids are 12p, 14p and 16p. That means that you would end up paying 17p a click to be top, as they go 1p over the previous bid. In very simplistic terms, this is how you end up paying funny odd amounts.

However, the adwords bid mechanism is extremely complex, and the bids are always changing. This is because they have things like the ad delivery mechanism, which spreads your ad appearances and positions out during the day to equally distribute your budget. Ad position preference is another factor, as it timed delivery which only shows ads at certain times of the day. Even if you don't use these, other people advertising will be, and this leads to their bid prices constantly changing, which also affect your bid prices.

This means that the prices you pay for your ad's are constantly changing, as the bid prices for other ads and positions fluctuate.

You can make your bid prices and position a bit more stable by turning on accelerated delivery, which doesn't spread your budget out over the day and keeps showing your ads constantly until your budget runs out. This means your ad should appear with every search, but if your budget is too small there could be a couple of hours at the end of the day where your ad isn't shown.

Also note that the costs and impressions data in the back end aren't in real time, and are usually a couple of hours behind. Looking at yesterdays data is fine and will display the true figures, but if you look at them the same day and see you've spent £5, you could of actually spend £8 but the figures aren't up to date yet for example.