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Why it matters
A run rate answers the question a client asks around the 10th: where will this month end? It takes what has happened so far and stretches it to the whole period. Finance teams use the same idea to annualise revenue, a month's sales times twelve.
It is the fastest projection there is, and often wrong in a predictable way. It assumes every day left looks like the average day gone. In Google Ads that is rarely true. Weekends spend differently from weekdays, and a sale or a holiday moves demand. The latest days of conversions are also still filling in, because of conversion lag.
Run rate = spent so far ÷ days gone × days in the month
Count only finished days. Today's spend is partial until midnight and drags the projection down.
Where to find it in Google Ads
- Google Ads has no run rate column. Set the date range from the 1st of the month to yesterday.
- Read Cost in the campaigns table, or the account total at the bottom of it.
- Divide by the days in the range and multiply by the days in the month.
- Segment by Day of the week first: if weekends differ a lot from weekdays, a plain run rate will miss.
- Run conversions the same way only once their lag has played out, or the projection reads low.
An example
A B2B software company has a monthly Google Ads budget of €10,000. On the morning of 10 September it has spent €3,180 over nine days. Its weekdays cost about €420 and its weekend days about €120, because its buyers rarely search on Saturdays.
The plain run rate gives €3,180 ÷ 9 × 30 = €10,600, 6% over budget, and the manager is about to cut daily budgets. But those nine days held only two weekend days, and the 21 days left hold six. Day by day, the rest of the month adds 15 × €420 + 6 × €120 = €7,020, for a month end of €10,200: 2% over, close enough to leave alone.
In Optizads
The This month card on the Overview shows a projected month end that is not a plain run rate. It adds Oppy's forecast for the days left to what was spent, shows a likely range, and never goes past what the live daily budgets let Google charge. The goal projections beside it count the conversions Google is still adding to recent days. The free Google Ads forecast calculator runs a weekday-aware projection on your own daily figures.
Common mistakes
- Including today's partial spend, which pulls the projection down every morning.
- Projecting conversions at run rate in the first days of the month, before a week of lag has arrived.
- Using it right after a budget change: the days before the change no longer describe the days after.
- Trusting a run rate above the cap: Google never charges more than 30.4 times the average daily budget in a month.
Checks that look at it
The audit checks Oppy runs on this, each with its own page.
Related terms
- Budget pacing: Budget pacing is tracking whether spend is on course to land on the month's budget, and correcting the daily budgets when it is not.
- WAPE: WAPE (weighted absolute percentage error) is the sum of a forecast's misses, ignoring their sign, divided by the sum of what really happened.
- Conversion lag: The time between a click and the conversion it leads to.
- Limited by budget: A campaign status meaning the daily budget holds the ads back.
