i am trying to set my daily budget. i click recommended daily budget and it says $5,500. does that mean i will most likely spend that much a day?!?! do people really pay THAT much for advertising?
I had set a budget of 5$ and they recommanded 310$, I didn't had that much impression with this kind of money. Go for the recommanded amount, but make sure your keyword are at least a bit targeted otherwise you're losing some money. To answer your second question, some people are paying 1000+$ daily, but with more than 100000$ as daily budget. The daily budget rarely (if ever) get reached, so you shouldn't be afraid to go for that amount (if you feel comfortable doing so).
I'm a student too and I'm running the 310$/day budget and I'm quite fine. I've only received 2 hits (for a total of ~50¢). I'm nowhere near my daily budget as you can see. (I think I should review my ads...)
perhaps a 100k daily budget rarely gets reached, but normal budgets (under 1k) definately CAN and WILL get reached. Mine is met, and sometimes exceeded (go figure..) each and every day.
I set my daily budget between £4000 and £4500 and generally spend approximately £75/day - I have found that by decreasing by max CPC and significantly increasing the daily campaign budget I can achieve the same number of clicks at a far lower cost, and my ad is served more regularly throughout the course of the day. This may of course not apply to all campaigns...but definately worth a try as long as you keep an eye on it.
I've never paid attention to the recommended daily budget. The thing to monitor is your CTR and CR. If your daily spend is hitting your daily budget ceiling, make sure your campaigns are profitable before increase the limit. And yes, one of my clients is spending $900 per day currently... that's not $5000, but closer than $20.
I initially set mine to U$10000 p/m and then was watching it to see which keywords were eating the most money. I watched the adwords for about 3 days almost every hour to see what was happening (mostly impressions). After those 3 days I lowered the spending to a comfortable level. Two things to remember if you want to try it like this: - Set your daily limit so that an experiment like this wan't cost you through the nose. - Pause the ad campaign when you can not watch it closely as you will lose more money. Like I said, this is just an initial stage of keyword discovery, after that, well you'll figure it out.