I have inherited a campaign budgeted at $15 per day, which has all the keywords bundled together. Despite having the most relevant site keywords, yesterday, it only used up less than $9 of the budget. I've set up a second campaign, with one-ad-per-keyword, which I had been planning to transition everything over to, and I've budgeted $9 while I'm "testing things out". Yesterday, it only used up about $2 of the budget. Meanwhile, a third campaign, which is more "category generic", is easily burning through $30 a day - mostly on content network. I'm not selling anything, but I'm measuring good results as low bounce rate, high page views, long time on site. AdWords keeps telling me to throw more money at the generic campaign which is high impressions/low CTR on content. (but still hitting budget...). These are high bounce, low page view, short time on site clicks - not worthless, but not ideal. If the clicks I want are reflecting real relevance, any clues as why I can't even hit my budget on those ads? Do I need to bid up then slowly scale back down? I could "write more eye-catching ads" but again.... the people who stick come thru' the most "honest, descriptive" ads, not the gimmicky ones. Have I simply hit the ceiling for what's available in my category?
Have you checked your placement report? I had one arcade site burning up clicks at a faster rate than anything else for variations of "games to learn spanish". The quality sites were making the time on site and other stats look good, while the arcade stole my money.
Man, there are so many factors that could be involved here. I do know that for a large number of my campaigns on Adwords, by actually increasing my daily budget (although having no intention to reach that number) brought me more traffic. I think that Google has some automatic mexhanism in place to slow down advertising for any campaign that gets close to its daily budget. The trouble is no one really knows the calculation they make or when it IS made. This kept me from getting a lot of the traffic I needed for a good converting but low traffic campaign. If raising the budget does not increase the traffic you may have hit a ceiling for the time being, but that is not permanent either. I have campaigns that barely bring me 20 clicks per day with a total spend of no more than $10, yet my daily budget is set at $500. When I set the daily budget to a number that seemed reasonable to me I barely even got 5 clicks. Just make sure if you do this you turn off the content network for the test.
One of two things is happening. Either: A lot of people are searching for the specific terms that you are bidding on, but not clicking on your advert (what's your clickthrough rate on Search?) Or: There aren't many searches for those terms in the first place (how many impressions did you get on Search yesterday?), in which case, you need to be a little more generic with your search terms. You should always group your keywords, and target your adverts at the people that are searching (difficult to give an example without knowing what you're doing). Google won't slow down your keyword delivery if you change the settings in your campaign to Accelerated. There's certainly no benefit in increasing your budget if you aren't spending the current amount.
2.39 CTR on the most "relevant" keyword Impressions per day? less than 100 on search (about 14k on content). This is on a single keyword campaign I just set up. On a pre-existing campaign, a little over 100 impressions. The campaign pulls 100K impressions a day on content (but you can't disect content stats by keyword unless you run keyword specific campaigns..... right?) It's a fairly mainstream entertainment site, with a reasonable amount of competition, and keywords around/below ten cents.
If you're only getting 100 impressions per day on search, you'll never spend a lot of money there. The content network is very hit and miss, particularly with the ctr. If your adverts are appearing on irrelevant sites, or are shoved down at the bottom where nobody goes, your ctr will suffer. There's not much you can do about it except look at the placement performance report, and remove any sites with huge impressions but no clicks, that are irrelevant to what you do. But to spend your budget, you'd need to look at more generic terms - the question is whether or not you can be profitable...
For the search side, Google has a nice keyword tool to tell you whether your keywords are popular vs. other similar keywords. See if maybe your keywords are just not the ones you should be using (example: atlanta software programmer isn't as popular as atlanta software development, so which one do I want to show as #1?). For content side, I just blogged on this very topic at Freelance[Local]Blog. The placement report is VERY instructive on all the wrong places that Google will show your ads. My ads for FreelanceLocalTech were showing up on rapper music sites, a Megan Mullally fan site, 100,000 times a day on mySpace and mySpace graphics sites, etc. And I was wasting HUGE amounts of money on it. With a little work, we're down to around 40 sites that see the ad on the content network and our conversion rate went up 50%. Go figure.