Google Is Killing Accelerated Ad Delivery – What Now?!

Google will be eliminating the accelerated delivery option in Google Ads on September 17, 2019 and switch over any remaining accelerated delivery campaigns to standard delivery on October 7. Accelerated delivery will remain available for display and video ad campaigns. Will My PPC Campaign Be Affected by the Sunset of Accelerated Delivery? The majority of PPC campaigns are likely set to standard delivery already, not accelerated delivery. Accelerated delivery was primarily valuable for:

• Those with large budgets who weren’t afraid of saturating the ad landscape, oftentimes retailers and ecommerce businesses
• Businesses that were going after clicks in the early morning hours
• Campaigns that were underspending and not meeting their daily budget limits

Google’s rationale, at least publicly, is that accelerated delivery was inefficient for advertisers, which was true in some sense due to accelerated delivery’s tendency to drive up costs per click (CPC). That doesn’t mean accelerated delivery had no place in the grand scheme of campaign strategies. You wouldn’t want to run accelerated delivery if your budget was moderate, the keywords and placements you were chasing were pricey and you were scheduling your ads during normal business hours. The campaign would simply blow through your budget before you reached the end of the day. Google has also announced that they’ve made changes to standard delivery settings so you can, in theory, more effectively maximize daily budgets. These settings will allegedly allow for smoother, more even performance during your scheduled campaign runtime. How You Can Replicate Accelerated Delivery With New Standard Delivery Settings According to Google, you should be able to get similar performance out of standard delivery by choosing either the:

• Maximizing Conversion Setting
• Maximize Click Bidding Strategies Setting

They also recommend doing what you should always be doing anyways – properly scheduling your ads to run during the optimal hours for your target audience and adjust your bids to correspond to your ideal schedule. However, REV77 uses manual bidding to retain maximum control of client spend and bid strategy, even when running accelerated delivery campaigns. Using either maximizing conversion or maximize click bidding strategies settings can essentially put your clients’ campaigns into the hands of Google auto pilot, which makes things a little bit riskier. Google isn’t transparent with their automatic bidding algorithms, which is a tough pill to swallow for agencies that are worried about accountability and wisely spending their client’s marketing dollars. Among many digital marketers, the removal of accelerated delivery does eliminate a powerful tool, albeit one that is less commonly used to course correct under-pacing campaigns. How Will Google’s Decision to Get Rid of Accelerated Ad Delivery Affect My PPC Campaign? If you are running your own campaign or you are looking for a digital marketing partner to manage your clients’ campaigns, REV77 can help. We will develop a detailed, data- and performance-driven campaign strategy that is properly scheduled and bid adjusted to maximize performance and make your money go as far as possible, whether the budget is massive or moderate. We would be happy to assist advertisers relying on accelerated ad delivery to spend out their daily budget. Our PPC specialists can show you a better way to optimize campaign performance. Please feel free to contact us for additional information regarding our digital marketing and PPC services.