What Is Accelerated Delivery & How Will Removing It Affect Marketers?

When running a Google AdWords campaign, the marketer can choose how ads are going to be delivered: standard or accelerated. These settings regulate how fast your client’s budget will be spent and how frequently ads will show. On October 7th, Google started the process of switching all campaigns to standard delivery. By the 14th, Adwords will no longer have accelerated delivery settings. This blog will provide a summary on what accelerated and standard delivery settings are and how removing accelerated delivery might affect marketers in the future.

Standard Vs Accelerated?

Google Adwords defaults the settings to a standard delivery method with the goal of dispersing ads evenly throughout the day to properly spend your client’s budget.
Alternatively, accelerated delivery shows ads more frequently throughout the day until your client’s budget is completely spent for the day.

Often times, marketers will choose to enable the accelerated Delivery setting when a campaign’s daily budget is not being spent. Enabling the accelerated delivery setting allows for a much higher chance of the entire budget being spent. This is due to Google entering ads into every eligible auction for as long as there is budget remaining. While this option can help with spending budget, it may also increase the Cost Per Click (CPC). Higher CPC can sometimes result in more competitive pricing. Google notes that “this method can increase CPCs due to increased competition early in the day, or unintentionally spend most of your budget in earlier time zones.”
While ads are being shown more frequently, marketers run the risk of running out of their daily budget early in the day, which means no ads are running for the remainder of the day. Traffic varies by the day of the week and time of day, among other factors. Marketers may lose out on more conversions and leads because of this.

Google’s Recommendations

Google recommends marketers to use standard delivery for campaigns. Rather than switching to accelerated delivery, marketers should rely keyword expansion and increasing bids if their campaign is having trouble spending its daily budget.

On October 7th, Google removed the accelerated delivery option from Adwords altogether. Their delivery help page has been updated to the following:

Starting October 14, 2019, accelerated budget delivery will no longer be available for use with Search campaigns, Shopping campaigns, or shared budgets. Campaigns using accelerated delivery with those campaign and budget types will be automatically migrated over to standard delivery, starting October 7, 2019.

Google seems to be pushing their Smart Bidding option on AdWords – which for certain industries or campaigns with small budgets is less than ideal.

How Will This Affect Marketers?

It’s hard to determine exactly what the effects will be on marketers from this change. It will probably take 2-3 months before any noticeable effects take place. Dana Athra, Sr. PPC Strategist, notes
It only expired yesterday so actual changes will be seen in the next few months. We can expect an increase in CPC’s because people will feel forced to switch to smart bidding or will increase their bids manually to spend their budget. This can lead to high costs per conversions as well.

Marketers will need to find new strategies to ensure they are spending budgets properly while maintaining low CPC and improving other KPIs.

Our strategists here at Aronson are continuously striving to create new strategies to help lower CPC, improve Click Thru Rates and raise ad positions. Make sure to check on your clients budgets daily as well as adjust bids and keywords to help you stay ahead of the curve as Google makes this change.

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