Solved: Google Ads Spending Entire Budget Too Quickly

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look at the situation you described, and it's a frustratingly common one. Seeing your budget vanish in minutes can feel like the platform is just taking your money for a ride. I'm happy to give you some of my thoughts on what's likely happening and how you should handle it. It's less about 'greed' and more about understanding the machine you're trying to control.

We'll need to look at what the algorithm is actually doing...

Right, first things first. Let's talk about what's happening under the bonnet when you set a budget. You're not telling the platform "spend my £100 evenly over 24 hours". You're telling it, "here's £100, go find me the best possible results you can for this money today".

The algorithm's job is to predict when and where those results are most likely to happen. If it thinks that a huge chunk of your target audience is online and active between 6am and 8am, it'll try to spend a large portion of your budget then. It's called 'pacing', but sometimes it feels more like a sprint. It's trying to be efficient by spending money when it predicts conversions are cheapest or most plentiful. The problem is, its predictions aren't always perfect, hence why you see one campaign in the green and another in the red.

I see so much advice online saying "never touch your campaigns, let the algorithm learn!". Tbh, that's a myth. It's dangerous advice that treats the system like some kind of magic box. Sometimes the machine gets it wrong, and you absolutely need to step in. The trick is knowing when. Your experience is a perfect example: one campaign was overspending but profitable, so you let it run. The other was overspending and unprofitable. That's the one that needs attention. You're the pilot, not a passenger. You gotta know when to take manual control.

This rapid spending isn't a new thing, and it's not a sign of 'greed' or a conspiracy to keep you from turning ads off. It's just the nature of automated bidding systems. We see this across all sorts of accounts, from a B2B SaaS client on LinkedIn spending £200 in the first hour to an e-commerce store on Meta spending its £50 daily budget before most people have had their breakfast. The platform's sole focus is hitting your campaign objective within the budget parameters, but its interpretation of 'how' can be a bit... aggressive.

I'd say you need to understand budget types properly...

You mentioned that you thought lifetime budgets were immune to this. That's a common misconception. Let's break down the two main types and what they actually do.

Daily Budgets: You give the platform a target amount to spend each day. It will try to hit this target, but it has the flexibility to spend up to 25% more on any given day if it sees a particularly good opportunity. It's supposed to balance this out over a week, so you don't spend more than 7x your daily budget in a calendar week. But on a day-to-day basis, it can be volatile.

Lifetime Budgets: You give the platform a total amount to spend over a defined period (e.g., £700 over 7 days). This gives the algorithm even MORE flexibility. It can spend £200 on Monday and £50 on Tuesday if it thinks Monday is a better day for results. So, a lifetime budget can actually lead to *more* erratic daily spending, not less. It won't protect you from the 'spend it all in 15 minutes' scenario. Its real advantage is allowing the system to capitalise on high-opportunity days (like weekends for a B2C product) without you having to manually adjust daily budgets.

Here’s a simple visualisation of how the spend might be distributed. Notice how Lifetime Budgeting is much more spiky day-to-day, even though the total is the same.

Neither is inherently 'better', they're just different tools. For campaigns that need consistent daily presence, I might lean towards a daily budget. For a short-term promotion or where performance varies heavily by day of the week, a lifetime budget is often a better choice. But neither will stop the algorithm having a moment of madness.

You probably should have a framework for when to act...

Okay, so this is the most important bit. How do you decide when to pull the plug versus when to trust the process? It comes down to a few simple questions. You need to stop reacting emotionally (which is easy to do when you see money flying out the door) and start acting strategically.

Here’s a flowchart that maps out the thought process I go through. This should help you make a logical decision instead of a panic-driven one.

Let's apply this to your situation. For the campaign that was "in the green", you went from Start -> Question 1 -> Yes -> Leave it alone. Perfect. You made the right call. The speed of spend doesn't matter if the results are good. For the campaign that was "in the red", you'd go from Start -> Question 1 -> No. Then you ask Question 2. Let's say your target cost per lead is £20. If the campaign has spent £30 without a single lead, you'd answer 'Yes' and turn it off. If it's only spent £15, you'd answer 'No' and give it a bit more time to reach your target CPA before making a final decision.

This simple framework removes the emotion. It's not about how you *feel* about the spend; it's about what the data is telling you about the performance.

You'll need to focus on what really matters: profitable growth...

This whole episode brings up a bigger point. Fretting over daily budget pacing is like a pilot staring at the fuel consumption gauge instead of the navigation system. It's an interesting metric, but it's not the one that tells you if you're going to reach your destination.

Your destination is profitable customer acquisition. The only two numbers that truly matter are your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). As long as your LTV is significantly higher than your CAC (a common benchmark is a 3:1 ratio), your business is growing healthily.

Most buisness owners I talk to have a vague idea of their CAC, but very few have properly calculated their LTV. Without knowing what a customer is truly worth to you, you're flying blind. You might be turning off campaigns that are actually profitable in the long run. Let's calculate it. It's simpler than you think.

When you know a single customer is worth £10,000 to you, does a £50 CPL from a campaign that spent its budget too fast still feel like a disaster? Or does it look like an incredible bargain? This is the mindset shift that's needed. Focus on the final destination (profitability), not the turbulence along the way (budget pacing).

To make your campaigns more resilient to these fluctuations, you need a solid structure. Most of the time, when I see accounts that are very sensitive to daily changes, it's because their strategy is fragile. They're relying on one or two audiences or ads. A robust account structure spreads the risk and provides more stable performance over time. You need to be testing audiences across the entire funnel.

I usually prioritise audiences like this for my clients:

When you have separate campaigns or ad sets targeting each of these funnel stages, you're not so reliant on a single cold audience performing well on any given day. If your ToFu campaign has a bad morning, your BoFu retargeting campaign might be having a great one, balancing things out. This is how you build a stable, scalable advertising machine that isn't derailed by the algorithm's daily quirks.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To wrap this all up, here is the main advice I have for you. This is the approach we take to manage the exact issues you're facing and it helps us focus on what really drives growth for our clients.

Navigating these platforms can feel like a full-time job, and the constant changes don't make it any easier. The issues you're facing are exactly why businesses often decide to bring in an expert. It's not just about pushing buttons; it's about having the experience to know which buttons to push and, more importantly, when to leave them alone. It's about building a robust strategy that can withstand the platform's volatility and consistently deliver results.

If you'd like to have a chat and go through your account together, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a proper look at your campaigns and give you some specific, actionable advice on how to get things back on track and scaling profitably.

Hope this helps clear things up!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh