So, you also got a couple of dollars back in your adwords account, right? So did I. Wondering why Google is being nice to you? Here is the answer. There are 4 main reasons for Google to give you a credit
- Service Adjustment – This is given when a promotional credit or a courtesy credit has been applied to your account. Some people have got it just out of the blue in their Adwords accounts like the person below who got 70 dollars in service adjustment from Google! Google does not give the reasons when, why or how you get it.
Then there are those people at the wrong end of the whip, who lost over a $100 in service adjustments.
Lesson: If you get credit, thank Larry and Sergey quietly and lay low! If you lose money from your adsense account, no need to pound the internet with comments like Google sucks, the reply on the product forums is never going to come!
2. Click Quality Adjustment – If Google thinks that you have been charged with Invalid clicks, they will refund it. I think it comes from their corporate motto, “don’t be evil”. Question is where these invalid clicks come from ? Google says it is from bots, automated clicking tools, and other deceptive software.
- Accidental clicks : It is also because of accidental clicks; like someone double-clicks your ad. The second click of the double click is not counted in this case.
- Competitors clicks – If your competitor thinks he is costing you money by clicking your ads, he is probably wrong. Google refunds that money to you.
- Agency bad ethos clicks – Agency which manages your ads clicking on their own ads to get a larger share of profits. This happens when agency is working on commission on spends model. An agency working on a transaction/goal based model would never touch its’ own ads.
- Malicious clicks – Non-human clicks by bots, automated tools or other tools
3. Account budget overrun – This is only for prepay accounts. If Google displays ads worth more than your balance, it will refund the extra amount back to you. This usually does not happen and hence these are rare cases of this being reported by any advertiser. I think below is the only image online for this section which I found in my old account. Usually this amount should very miniscule.
4. Over-delivery credit – If Google overdelivers your ad, it will refund that amount back into your account. In the below example, 8.24 is credited as the ads are overdelivered for 8.24 the previous day!
Overdelivery happens when Google thinks users are on a search rage on a particular day and not so active other days. Google shows your ads more on the days when users are searching more for your product, off-course the calculation cannot be precise. So when there is surplus spends, rest comes back to you as overdelivery credit. Overall, you are not charged more than 30.4 times of your budget.
Please leave your comments below. Thanks for reading!