Bidding, budgets and caps

What you're actually bidding for

Your maximum bid is the most you're willing to pay for a single glance at your billboard. You never pay more than that ceiling, and the real cost is often lower through dynamic pricing underneath.

On the pay-per-glance kind, you bid per glance. On the pay-per-walk-in kind, you bid per actual walk-in.

You're buying attention, not walk-ins. Turning that attention into an actual walk-in is on you, which is exactly what connects work on your own page to how efficiently your paid spending performs.

Working out a sensible bid

The centre's own worked example: decide what you can genuinely afford to pay per customer, estimate what share of glances actually turn into a walk-in, and set your maximum bid to that same share of the amount you can afford.

So: your maximum bid equals your target cost per customer, multiplied by your expected rate of turning a glance into a walk-in.

Two things follow from that:

Your bid depends entirely on your own conversion rate, so it should genuinely differ by word. A brand word converting extremely well supports a much higher bid than a generic category word converting poorly, for the exact same target cost. One single bid across your whole account is leaving money on both sides of that gap.

Improving how well your own page converts raises the bid you can actually afford, which in turn lets you win auctions you couldn't before. Work on conversion is a paid-efficiency lever, not only an unpaid one.

The two ways of bidding

One mode uses an automatic bidder, so you never add or adjust your own maximum bids yourself. The other requires you to set them by hand, at whatever level you choose.

Set your own bids where you genuinely have a clear view: your own brand and rival names, with known conversion behaviour, where you actually want the ceiling you deliberately calculated.

Let it bid automatically where you don't have that clear view, or where your list is simply too large to tune by hand. You give up your own ceiling and gain automation in exchange.

Don't run both modes side by side in one structure and compare their resulting costs as if they were competing strategies; they're being optimised toward genuinely different goals.

Your spending ceiling is a bid ceiling, and the centre says so plainly

A cost-per-result ceiling can be set at the group level, for orders next to the desk's own answer. The centre's own system uses that amount to work out a bid ceiling across every word in that group, aiming to get walk-ins near or below the figure you set.

The ceiling can only ever push your own bids down, never up. The centre states this plainly: the ceiling applies to every word in your group, even ones where you'd set a higher maximum bid yourself, and this ceiling will never actually exceed your own maximum bid.

The ceiling isn't a target the system actually hits. The centre says clearly that it isn't guaranteed, and your actual result may end up exceeding the figure you entered anyway.

So this ceiling is a throttle, not an optimiser. The centre's own name for it reflects exactly that, and older material still describing it as a "goal" predates a rename and wrongly implies the system is actively working toward that figure. It isn't. Setting one below your own maximum bid doesn't make the system try harder for a cheaper walk-in; it simply lowers the price you're even allowed to bid.

The consequence people miss: the ceiling is worked out across every single word in the group at once. It throttles your best-performing words right alongside your worst-performing ones, so one genuinely bad word in a large group holds all the others down too. That's a real argument for smaller, more focused groups.

Removing a ceiling, especially one set below your own maximum bid, can actually raise your maximum bid automatically, and the centre advises waiting a full day for any change to actually take effect.

You'll hear a specific formula for working out the resulting ceiling going around. The centre publishes nothing of the kind. It's a plausible reading of the behaviour the centre describes, and it isn't a documented rule. Don't plan your actual bids around it.

What your daily spending limit actually caps

Your daily limit is really a monthly cap wearing a disguise. The centre calculates your real monthly spend based on the average number of days in a month, multiplied by your daily limit. A daily limit that looks like a round number therefore produces a monthly total that isn't quite the round number you might expect.

Individual days are allowed to run over that daily figure. On days with genuinely more opportunity to bring in customers, your spending may exceed your stated daily limit.

Setting an end date changes the arithmetic. With an end date, you'll never spend more than the total number of days in that stretch, multiplied by your daily limit. Without one, your spending automatically rolls into each new month at the same daily figure, forever.

Three things follow, and they're exactly what people get wrong:

To budget for a real month, divide by the true average number of days in a month, not by a round number. Getting this slightly wrong compounds into a real, unplanned amount of extra spending over a full year.

A single day running over isn't a fault at all. It's documented, deliberate pacing. The number to actually reconcile against your own finance team is the monthly total, not any single day.

An order with no end date never stops asking for money on its own. It simply rolls into each new month at the same daily figure forever. Pausing it is an action someone has to actually take themselves.

A new bid amount has to be smaller than your daily spending limit.

On the pay-per-glance kind, you set an average daily spend, and actual spending is automatically shifted toward days with more real opportunity. On the pay-per-walk-in kind, there's a hard monthly ceiling per shop instead.

Changing your bids

Wait a full day. The centre says this explicitly for removing a ceiling, and the same patience applies generally, the system reacts with a real delay, and adjusting again before it settles just makes the whole result impossible to interpret.

Change one single thing at a time. Changing your bid, your spending limit and your audience all together produces a result you can never properly credit to any one of them.

What tends to go wrong

One single bid across every word. Bids should follow each word's own conversion rate, and those genuinely differ.

Reading your daily limit as a hard daily cap. It's really an average with deliberate pacing, capped over the whole month instead.

Setting a cost ceiling purely to chase a cheaper walk-in. It only lowers what you're allowed to bid; it doesn't guarantee the actual result.

Adjusting your bids every single day. The system lags behind you; you end up just measuring your own fidgeting.

Forgetting you're actually buying attention. A rising cost with a steady bid is a conversion problem on your own page, not a bidding problem at all.

Comparing an automatically-bid order against a manually-bid one as if they were rival strategies. Genuinely different goals entirely.