Mate, $104k overspend is a whole different ballgame. That's not a 'sometimes happens' level slip - that's going to trigger a serious conversation with the client's finance team and probably their legal counsel. The agency's PI insurance will get involved if the client pushes back. Your main priority right now is documenting everything: the campaign settings at the time of the overspend, any automated rules or budget caps that should have caught it, and the exact timestamps. Then start modelling the ROI recovery path. If the extra spend was on high-intent, bottom-funnel queries, you can potentially claw back the value within 30-60 days by optimising toward conversion value rather than just conversion count. Pull a segment of the overspend and calculate the blended CPA against historical CLV - if it's within 1.5x of normal, the client might accept a revised forecast. But if it was broad match on non-branded terms, you're going to need a solid attribution story.
The 25+ client load is the real elephant in the room. No one can manage manual PPC properly at that volume. I've built internal scripts that flag any budget pacing anomalies in near real-time - for example, a simple Google Ads Script that checks daily spend against the prorated daily budget and emails you if it exceeds 110%. Here's a stripped-down version I keep in my toolkit:
function dailyBudgetCheck() {
var account = AdsApp.currentAccount(),
var budget = account.getBudget(),
var today = Utilities.formatDate(new Date(), 'GMT', 'yyyy-MM-dd'),
var report = AdsApp.report(
'SELECT CampaignName, Amount, Date ' +
'FROM ACCOUNT_PERFORMANCE_REPORT ' +
'WHERE Date = \'' + today + '\''
),
var rows = report.rows(),
var totalSpend = 0.0,
while (rows.hasNext()) {
var row = rows.next(),
totalSpend += parseFloat(row['Amount']),
}
var dailyAllocation = budget.getAmount() / 30.4, // average days per month
if (totalSpend > dailyAllocation * 1.1) {
MailApp.sendEmail('your-team@agency.com', 'Overspend alert',
'Spent ' + totalSpend + ' vs daily budget of ' + dailyAllocation),
}
}
Run that daily and you'll sleep better. The agency should have had something like this in place - the fact they didn't is why you're in this mess. Take care of yourself first, then use data to negotiate the fallout.
