An upcoming change to ad delivery has been announced by Google and will begin September 17. The accelerated delivery option is going to be removed, leaving standard delivery as the only option for Search and Shopping campaigns, as well as with campaigns with shared budgets.
If there is any Search or Shopping campaigns and shared budgets that uses accelerated delivery on October 1, it will automatically be switched over to standard delivery.
Display and Video campaigns will be the only ones that have access to the accelerated delivery option.
So why the change?
Typically, advertisers want to opt in to accelerated delivery so that they can get as many conversions as possible within a target cost per conversion. This is a common thing for e-commerce advertisers that want to spend as much as possible, so long as their margins make sense. The accelerated delivery option is chosen to ensure that ads are served as often as possible throughout the day. It has been quite a popular option for Shopping campaigns.
According to Google, the way that accelerated delivery works ends up making it an inefficient option. If you have to cap out your daily budget, choosing the accelerated option means that your ads stop serving well before the end of the day.
Google noted that “this method can increase CPCs due to increased competition early in the day, or unintentionally spend most of your budget in earlier time zones.”
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.”
By using standard ad delivery, your budget is paced throughout the day or the periods of time you have scheduled your ads to run. According to Google, it “optimizes 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.”
It is recommended that choosing the maximize conversions or maximize clicks bidding strategies to indicate your performance priority for campaigns that have been using accelerated delivery. Naturally, use ad scheduling to manage when your ad are displayed and bid adjustments to increase and decrease bids during certain times of day.