Doesn’t it seem like Google Ads is making a ton of changes this year?

Being in the industry for years now, I’ve noticed that this year in particular, we are seeing tons of small tweaks from the advertising giant. This is, of course, opposed to the bigger changes we’ve seen in years past – like the transition to Enhanced Campaigns or the ability to run YouTube and Search out of the same account. This year, we’ve noticed many changes, but all seem to be small adjustments, like the removal of Average Position, the addition of Seasonality Adjustments, and now the removal of Accelerated Delivery from our Campaign Settings.

So, what was Accelerated Delivery? In Google Ads, in your Campaign Settings, you always would have two options: Google could deliver ads via Accelerated Delivery or Standard Delivery.

Accelerated Delivery

With Accelerated Delivery, your ads would show on eligible keywords as often as searches came in. Depending on your keyword portfolio and your daily budget, some campaigns opted into Accelerated Delivery would stop serving throughout the day, which is one of the reasons Google is sunsetting the feature. However, Accelerated Delivery was a great option for Brand campaigns with large budgets, where we wanted to show on every brand search possible, or in times where we were instructed to spend budget in full.

Standard Delivery

With Standard Delivery, Google would work to help your pace your budget more evenly throughout the day and wouldn’t show on all searches matching your keyword portfolio. Instead, they would use contextual signals and their machine learning capabilities to decide when to serve an ad, so that your budget could last longer throughout the day. This setting came before Bid Strategies were ever available and I sometimes consider it the first real stab at machine learning from Google Ads. The problem is, none of us PPC marketers really knew all the signals that went into Standard Delivery. We just knew that Google was able to serve, or not serve, your ad when they decided to in order to help your ads stay live longer.

What’s Changing?

Since Accelerated Delivery was being misused by advertisers likely unintentionally pushing campaign budgets to cap out earlier in the day, Google has decided to remove the option altogether for Search and Shopping campaigns, as well as for Shared Budgets. On October 7, 2019, all Accelerated Budgets were switched to Standard Budgets for Search and Shopping, automatically. Display and Video campaigns are still eligible for Accelerated Delivery.

While Google has spoken a bit about why they made the change, they still haven’t openly discussed all of the exact (and I’m sure ever-changing) signals that go into the Standard Delivery algorithm, but they do mention that Bid Strategies like “maximize clicks” or “maximize conversions” can provide some of the same results we were originally after by using Accelerated Delivery to being with.

From Google:

Your ad delivery method determines how long your daily budget lasts within a day. While Accelerated delivery attempts to spend your budget faster than Standard delivery, it isn’t effective for campaigns that aren’t limited by budget. And for campaigns that are limited by budget, this method can increase CPCs due to increased competition early in the day, or unintentionally spend most of your budget in earlier time zones. Alternatively, Standard delivery takes into account expected ad performance throughout the day and is better at maximizing performance within your daily budget.

To manage how your ads are delivered within a day, we recommend using ad scheduling. You can use ad scheduling to increase or decrease bids during certain times of the day. If your goal is to maximize performance, we recommend using Maximize conversion value, Maximize conversions, or Maximize clicks bidding for your campaign to stay within your daily budget.  

What Do You Need to Do?

For most advertisers, you don’t need to do anything. Everything will switch over automatically. You may consider implementing a bid strategy on your campaign if you see performance changes due to the updated delivery method. For others, with more complex accounts, you may be using APIs or Scripts to create campaigns that set any newly created campaigns to Accelerated Delivery. If you are an advertiser doing that, you will need to adjust any logic or Scripts in place, because as of October 14, 2019 – even selecting Accelerated Delivery will no longer be an option.