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Penalties for drop in spend
Posted by on February 23, 2023 at 2:16 pmObviously this wouldn’t be documented by Google. But does anyone have credible data showing that if you drop your spend after increasing it significantly it results in what feels like a penalty. I’ve seen this many times and I know that every change results in new processes and re-entering algorithm but I’m looking for more on this.
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1 Reply
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Well, Google doesn’t like unstable accounts as that translates into unreliable sources of income for them, among other things. That being said, in the case of lowering budgets, I think the problem comes from training your campaign at $XXX and then expecting it to perform proportionally at $XX, that’s not how it works.
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Interestingly we had been raising the budget on a P-Max campaign a few times a month, no issues. At the beginning of February, we lowered the budget by around 7% noting that we were only spending about half the budget due to tROAS limitations. We wanted to remove the extra cap room a bit at a time to avoid potential future issues.
Spending all but stopped and took 5 days to recover. Google support said the campaign went into learning due to a major budget change, 7% is a major budget change? Why would it go into learning with so much unused cap space… just doesn’t make any sense.
We hadn’t made any other changes to that campaign at that time or for a week prior.
I don’t think this is a penalty but the client sure wasn’t happy about Google’s explanation.
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