Help - this is very frustrating.

It’s sounding like you really want to find out exactly from which
campaigns you received charges every time your credit card is charged.
I’ll be honest in saying that it’s not the first time I’ve heard of an
advertiser’s inability to do this with our new Billing Summary page.

That being said, the monthly campaign activity view that we do provide
that breaks down all of the accrued clicks and costs associated with
each campaign and month is probably your best bet for approximating
the type of report that you seem to need. It would seem to me that for
the sake of billing clients, this view should accurately separate your
charges by campaign in the way you’d need.

More long-term, if you have multiple billable clients, it probably
makes sense to utilize a separate account per client and a My Client
Center to manage these accounts. This will best allow you to separate
your billings and should provide more consistent cost reporting.

To your second question, it’s quite rare that we’ll collect on the
full outstanding balance of an active campaign due to reporting
delays, our need to analyze the quality of every click that you
receive and general system constraints that prevent the perfect
synchronicity you’re describing.

Beyond the above, is there any other reason you’d need to know the
dates and campaigns comprised by a particular charge on your credit
card? How do others like the new Billing Summary page?

AdWordsPro.Jordan

On Aug 22, 12:30 pm, dei wrote:

I still don't understand why the old way of presenting the more
detailed payment information can not be presented (or at least be
presented as an option for those who want it if Google's concerned
with the speed of the page loading; I'd GLADLY sacrifice load speed on
the billing page for accurate and detailed numbers.)

On Aug 27, 11:00 am, dei wrote:

dei

On Aug 28, 3:40 pm, Grogck wrote:

Sorry for my delay in responding but I’ve been out of the office and
unable to post back. To answer your questions about why we’ve shifted
to the new Billing Summary page, this move was largely based on user
feedback that the way that billing information was presented
previously created confusion when comparing their Billing Summary to
their Campaign Summary statistics.

The old model matched a payment to a specific period of advertising
activity, as you’ve both noted. However, there is no one-to-one
mapping of payments to advertising activity in our system, as we have
reporting delays, account credits and other factors that may adjust
your advertising activity over time. In addition, we created the new
page to better match other statements that work on a credit/debit
basis.

I am curious to know how/why the ‘Campaign Activity’ view is
insufficient for providing you with the information necessary to
properly bill your clients. This ‘report’ will display exactly the
costs that each campaign has received over the course of any given
period of time. Thus, you should know exactly the amount of each
client’s accrued costs during any period from which you can then bill
them.

Additionally, when I said that this report would be ‘your best bet for
approximating the type of report…’ I did not mean to indicate that the
numbers included within are estimates. Rather, I meant that this
report was the best way to see your billing broken out as it was in
the old format, though as you’ve clearly noticed, the information is
not presented in exactly the same way.

In any regard, I have passed your feedback directly to our team that
works on the Billing Summary page and although I can’t guarantee that
the feature requests that you’ve both put forth will be implemented,
they will be heard and considered by the right people. I am truly
sorry that this change has caused so much friction for both of you and
others out there but it was made only with our advertisers’ best
interests in mind.

AdWordsPro.Jordan

On Sep 3, 10:34 am, dei wrote:

Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately, the Campaign Activity is only approximate.  While I
know it's exact for the period it covers, it doesn't match up 100%
with the actual charge billed to a credit card.  And in financial
matters where people have to be billed based on the charges coming
through on a credit card invoice, approximate isn't good enough.

For example on one of my clients I have a 'Campaign Activity' entry
for one day showing the following:

Campaign A = $503.52
Campaign B = $53.29
TOTAL COST = $556.81

But the 'Payment Requested' and charge to my credit card issued for
the same period is $561.66 (because additional charges apparently
rolled through during the time that 'Campaign Activity' entry was
posted and the 'Payment Requested' was made.)

While the example above is a relatively minor difference and you could
use the data from that one $556.81 'Campaign Activity' entry to
approximate how much of that $561.66 should be invoiced out to
Campaign A and how much should be invoiced to Campaign B, it's still
only a guess.  And that's only for one day of a month.  Multiply that
by an entire month (and with periods where there are multiple
'Campaign Activity' statements in between 'Payment Requested'
statements) and it's a nightmare - especially if you're managing
multiple accounts/clients with multiple campaigns per account.

I guess it wouldn't be so frustrating if the old system couldn't do it
and if similar systems (like Facebook's Social Ads platform) didn't
already easily allow for this exact functionality.  It just makes
sense for anybody who needs to be able to invoice individual campaigns
separately, but doesn't need the division of entirely separate
accounts due to overlap, etc.

I agree with Grogck -- give US the choice of which way to do things. I
still haven't figured out how a ledger-based accounting system can
reconcile payments taken for advertising, and that need to be split
against multiple accounts / campaigns, where the dollar amounts taken
don't EXACTLY match the amounts in the summary. Accounting is an exact
science and one side of the ledger has to balance perfectly with the
other side.

I bet you a lot of the power users would be extremely happy (almost to
the point of ecstasy) to be able to choose the new way vs. the old way
and swap back and forth. Even if it meant that clicking on the
"PAYMENT" amounts as they pop up would produce a receipt that broke
out where the total amount taken out came from. This way you don't
have to create a new tab or menu item. This amount has to come from
somewhere in the Adwords system (it isn't just a fictitious number),
so give that to us.

While I'm on this topic, it would be great if there was an additional
filter level added to the Billing Summary that would allow you to
filter by single / multiple campaigns. This way you could select a
date range and campaign(s) and see the day-by-day costs. The Campaign
Summary shows a summary of all of the campaigns over a given period,
but not a daily one (that could also use with a filter to select the
campaign you want to summarize).

Thanks.

On Sep 4, 3:10 pm, Grogck wrote:

With the new method of billing, I get charged some amount each month.
The amount occasionally matches my ending balance for a few days
prior, but often times it does not. I used to receive an invoice that
indicated a cutoff date and the number of clicks for which I was
paying. Now, the best I can do is to manually add up the clicks for
each day and, if it
does not match a day-end balance, prorate the clicks for the last
day.

This is crazy! I pay several hundred dollars on Google per month and
am wasting my time on clerical make-work. It is only a few cents or
dollars, but I still want to 1) compare my ROI for each billing period
and 2) see that I am not paying over or short in a given period. This
does not seem to be too much to ask. I have been in business for over
30 years (and around longer than that) and have never had a vendor not
be able to quantify what it is that I am paying for. I have tried
several times to get this resolved through e-mail support, including
asking to be transferred to a supervisor, but have not had resolution
yet.

If you are processing billing at a give time on a given day, you
should be able to either cut off the activity count or generate a mid-
day count and balance that we can see on your biling summary report.
It is bad enough on the months when the invoice happens to match the
end-of-day balance from a few days earlier. Then I just waste fifteen
or so minutes manually adding up the clicks (since your programmers
did  not think to total those for me). On those months that the
invoice does not match any particular day-end balance, it goes from
minor iritation to major frustration and long discussions/arguments
with my accounting department.

This seems to be another case of programmers being able to do "cool"
stuff, but having no clue as to accounting and business needs.

Another obvious concern would be, is there someone in Google who can
benefit by every account being off a few cents or dollars on each
invoice?

On Sep 23, 6:06 pm, dumguy65 wrote: