When creating a campaign, advertisers have had the option of setting their campaigns to either standard delivery method or accelerated delivery method. Starting in early October 2019, Google Ads is removing the option of accelerated delivery method for all Search campaigns, Shopping campaigns and shared budgets.
Search campaigns, Shopping campaigns and shared budgets that previously used accelerated delivery method will be converted to standard delivery method.
Delivery Method Options
The delivery method setting refers to the pace that ads are shown within a campaign.
When you create a campaign, you select an average daily budget. Based on this budget Google can charge you up to twice as much as your average daily budget amount on a given day, but the monthly spend should match your daily budget averaged across the month.
Example, if you set your budget to $25 per day, your total monthly spend will not exceed $750 ($25 x 30 days). However, the daily spend can be up to twice your daily budget (up to $50 a day in this example).
Standard delivery method works to spread out a campaign’s budget showing impressions evenly throughout the day.
Accelerated delivery works to show impressions as quickly as possible. Using accelerated delivery would typically show ads more often to earlier time zones for USA meaning more east coast ads shown vs. west coats ads. Accelerated delivery also would typically have a higher average CPC (cost-per-click) as bids would have to be higher in early hours in order to serve ads due to the auction style bidding system of Google.
Why the Change?
Google has been recommending that advertisers use the standard delivery method for most advertisers. Removing the option of accelerated delivery is a case of protecting advertisers from themselves.
The only benefit for accelerated delivery was for advertisers who wanted to serve ads more often in the morning hours. This same result can be achieved by using an ad schedule and bidding more in morning hours, which is what was in general being done with accelerated delivery.
For all advertisers, removing the option of accelerated delivery protects advertisers from choosing an option that most likely would be detrimental to their results.
What This Means for Advertisers
Starting October 7, 2019, Google will automatically change existing campaigns and budgets that have an accelerated delivery method to a standard delivery method.
In addition, when creating a new campaign or shared budget advertisers will no longer have an option to select their delivery method preference. All new campaigns and budgets selected after that date will be set to a standard delivery method.
Making the Change Manually
If you would like to make the change before October 7th manually based on the reasons above; because you are either tired of seeing Google’s yellow warning on your account or because you want to make sure all campaigns are migrated properly to the new format and not leave it up to Google’s automated system, then here are the instructions:
Switching Campaigns from Accelerated Delivery to Standard Delivery
- Sign into your Google Ads account.
- On the “Overview page,” click Settings from the page menu on the left.
- Filter to only search campaigns by clicking Search campaigns on the left tab.
- Select all search campaigns by checking the box next to the column header labelled “Campaign.”
- Click Edit, then select Change delivery method.
- Select Standard to change all filtered campaigns to the standard delivery method.
- Click Apply.
Switching Shared Budgets from Accelerated Delivery to Standard Delivery
- Sign into your Google Ads account.
- Click the tools icon, and under “Shared library,” click Shared budgets.
- Hover your cursor over Accelerated budget and click the pencil icon.
- Select Standard and click Save.
Last bit of advice
For most advertisers removing the option for accelerated delivery is a non-issue. In fact, for most advertisers if they are currently using accelerated delivery it has more than likely been a detriment to their campaign results.
After changing the option on campaigns using accelerated delivery, most advertisers should see a decreased in their average CPC (cost per click) and their average CPA (cost per acquisition).
By removing the option to choose the delivery method, Google is helping the 99% of advertisers that should not be using accelerated delivery by making it impossible to select that option.
For the 1% of advertisers that could benefit through accelerated delivery, those advertisers will now need to use ad scheduling to serve ads more frequently in morning hours or location scheduling to serve ads more frequently based on location.
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Andy Splichal
Andy Splichal is an online marketing strategist with more than a decade and a half of experience helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. Although this blog focuses on driving profitable traffic through Google AdWords, True Online Presence offers additional services for lead generation as well as other proven marketing strategies customized for each client.