It’s a BIG week for GOOGLE ADS.

Accelerated Delivery is being eradicated!

As of Monday 7th October, Google will be removing, indefinitely, the ‘Accelerated’ Delivery feature from Search & Shopping campaign settings, leaving only ‘Standard’ Delivery as the automatic, predefined option. GDN campaigns will be unaffected for the meantime.

Those familiar with ‘Accelerated Delivery’ will know that this option has been part of the Google Ads platform for many years, and is historically a very popular & important campaign setting. The removal of which will affect millions of advertisers across the globe that are capitalising on this feature.

Let’s unpack accelerated bidding for those that are unfamiliar…

Accelerated Delivery VS Standard delivery

When setting up Google Search or Shopping Campaigns, advertisers can choose either the ‘Standard Delivery’ or ‘Accelerated Delivery’ option.

The Delivery option determines how Google will deliver your ad, conservatively or aggressively.

With Standard Delivery -

Google aims to deliver your ads in a way that distributes ad budget evenly throughout the day or based on the advertisers ad schedule.
For example: If you had a $100 daily budget and Google estimates there is $500 worth of search traffic in a day, they may only deliver your ad 1 in every 5 searches.

It’s a conservative approach with the upside being that it helps ensure an even spread of impressions and clicks across all the entire day. This can be insightful when it comes to optimising Ad Scheduling and identifying the highest conversion rate hours of the day. The downside is, occasionally, the daily budget is not reached, and as a result the max amount of clicks are not received.

With Accelerated Delivery -

Google take this as an indication that you want your ads to appear as much as possible from the moment the ad schedule starts. So instead of showing your Ad 1 out of every 5 possible times, they will show the ad every single possible time, until the budget is exhausted. The benefit of this method is that budget is spent quicker (often ensuring no left overs) and therefore receiving the max amount of clicks each and every day. This method is also popular for businesses that have an early morning objective or demographic.

Will this removal affect campaign performance?

Do not underestimate the elimination of this feature/setting. A lot is going to change. Whether negatively or positively, expect changes in: CPCs, Traffic Levels, Impression Share, Average Positions, CTR’s, Conversions, Daily Spends & More.

“I’m not using Accelerated Delivery…”

Even if you aren’t using the ‘accelerated’ option yourself, you should still expect changes. Many other advertisers will now be pulled into your ad schedule and become direct competition. Their ads could very well start appearing alongside you, unlike before. There is likely to be much more competition in the latter parts of the day, now that certain advertisers aren’t using the accelerated bidding option.

How has Farsiight utilized Accelerated Delivery -

Taking advantage of accelerated delivery in Google Ads has been a key tactic for Farsiight to boost search impression share for our clients. Our strategy was to switch campaigns to accelerated, lower the bids and increase the budget — past what the client is willing to spend on a daily basis. These campaigns would ultimately receive the “limited by budget” status, and this meant we could continue lowering bids until the spend was roughly were it needed to be each day. The result? More traffic at a cheaper cost which generally led to move conversions.

What can I do to ensure success moving forwards?

The positive side of this upcoming change is that Google has at least given us ‘the advertiser’ some prior notice to the removal occuring. Google made the subtle announcement in late August, and clarified more in September, allowing users some time to prepare, test, and adjust campaigns before the AUTOMATIC changeover takes place on Monday 7th October 2019.

If you haven’t already done so, it is advisable to investigate how your campaigns are currently set up and how this change could impact your specific industry or business model moving forward.

Research, Analysis & Strategy

As a leading PPC agency with clients in Global markets we thought it prudent and important to get our heads around this adjustment and devise a proactive strategy, long before it takes place. We’re always keen to stay one step ahead when it comes to feature adjustments in the ads platform, and this is certainly no exception.

We’ve taken the shrewd move to perform some extensive testing & research into what happens when campaigns are switched from ‘Accelerated’ to ‘Standard’ Delivery.

On the 25th August 2019 we switched 15 Google Search campaigns from ‘Accelerated’ to ‘Standard’ Delivery.

Note: To ensure a fair analysis, with no Bias to location or industry, we selected 15 very different campaigns, from a range of industry verticals (Marketplaces, E-Commerce, SaaS, and Service Based) and targeted a variety of different locations (US, Canada, UK & Australia).

These were our findings:

BEFORE vs AFTER

Google says, “Standard delivery has been improved to be more predictive: “Standard delivery takes into account expected ad performance throughout the day and is better at maximizing performance within your daily budget.” — SearchEngineLand

They’ve also stated that standard delivery, “optimises your spend to be more reflective of targeted inventory user search (eg.user searches for your product/service),” as opposed to accelerated delivery, which Google says is “less optimized.”

Based on our findings above this appears to be quite accurate. Despite CPC’s going up nearly 35%, we saw an improvement in conversion rate of 27% which only led to a 6% increase in CPA. We now know that decreasing bids when switching to standard delivery may be a good move so we don’t have blow outs in CPA.

There are many other tactics which will ensure CPC’s don’t increase, and CPA doesn’t skyrocket. THINK:

• Ad Scheduling & Bid Adjustments
• Demographic Analysis
• Shared Budget Strategies
• Google Analytics Exploration
• Search Query Reports
• Device Segmentation

We at Farsiight have now devised proactive strategies for each of our clients, putting them one-step ahead of the competition and ensuring no disruption to their high-yielding campaigns. Being proactive like this, could actually increase performance and improve ROI, especially for some of our larger e-commerce and SaaS clients.

If you’re concerned about this upcoming change, or just wish to discuss the general performance of your Google Ad campaigns, feel free to get in contact with PPC Professional Stuart Donaghy, who works at Farsiight — An Agency For Growth .