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Our Google Ads budget doubled overnight and I almost missed it
Checked the dashboard Tuesday morning and our daily spend jumped from $120 to $240 with zero new clicks to show for it. Some automated bidding experiment I'd forgotten to turn off kept widening the audience every hour. I killed it within 20 minutes but we still burned through $800 before I caught it. Has anyone else had their settings change by itself after an update or am I the only one who trusted that toggle too much?
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thea85721d ago
Did you also notice how these "smart" campaigns love to reset your device targeting and location settings too? I had one where I set it to desktop only in the US, and two weeks later it was serving ads to mobile users in Canada because the system decided that was "better." The real kicker is the change log usually just says "performance improvements" with no details, so you have no clue what actually got flipped. I started taking screenshots of every setting page now, and I check the change history every Monday. Takes five minutes but it saved me from another surprise bill last month.
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simons2821d ago
That "performance improvements" line is the biggest red flag because it means the system changed something and nobody wants to admit what. What worked for me was setting up a weekly calendar reminder to export my campaign settings to a spreadsheet, then diff it against last week's version so the changes jump out instead of hiding in the change log. Screenshots work too but a spreadsheet makes it way easier to spot patterns, like if it keeps quietly expanding your geo targeting every time you touch the budget.
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