Question

Is there a way to tell if your ads are no longer running for the day due to hitting your max daily budget? I thought that is what "Limited by budget" meant but my campaign is always showing limited by budget (which I figure is just because Google wants me to spend more money).  

Answer 1

Look at your impression share lost due to budget. You can do the math to calculate how many impressions you missing. Impression share(IS), plus IS lost due to budget plus IS lost due to rank will always equal 100% (+/- 1% due to rounding) Google doesn't tell you "limited by budget" unless it is. If you're smart, you'll use this scenario to your advantage. If you have good conversion tracking and you are getting at least 15 conversions a month, then going to a max conversion strategy is smart. If you don't have conversions, then use max clicks to get more traffic while you figure out who you're not conversions and what you need to fix so you can conversions.  

Answer 2

Increase it a little. Not the recommended amount. Let it run and see if it gets paused due to budget exhaustion. That’s the way you will know how much budget is getting exhausted and in what time. Limited by budget won’t serve ads as often as it should - you won’t fully realise and utilise your campaign if it is limited by budget. The other way would be to increase the budget after optimising your campaign, maybe reduce your cpc’s a bit, check demographics or keywords, and then increase.  

Answer 3

You can also segment by hour of day after adding the IS lost due to budget column. Definitely recommend it if you’re in a vertical where conversion rates vary during certain times of the day.