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2 days ago myself, along with all U.S. AdWords Advertisers received a notice that Google was being sued for $20 MM (million) because it was alleged that AdWords advertisers were being charged just above their daily limits on their AdWords campaigns.

As an example, if you had set a daily budget of $20 for a Campaign, at the end of the day your total cost might be $20.73 or $21.12 instead of just $20 or a few cents below that figure.

Just pennies to one individual but overall a huge income earner for Google.

Consider this for a moment.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are 300,000 (and I’m being conservative here) campaigns running every day at a set budget of $20.

That grosses Google $6,000,000 dollars a day.  However, let’s say that each of these advertisers were only charged $.20 over their daily budget.  $.20 doesn’t seem like much does it?  Not to you or to me as an individual, but as a whole, that same $.20 on each advertisers accounts grosses Google $60,000 a day.

Now consider that same $60,000 over the course of 30 days.

$60,000 x 30 = $1,800,000.  Quite a little added “extra” in income isn’t it?

Google claims that regardless of what the minor fluctuations are each day on a campaign (and I’m paraphrasing here), will still only add up to the advertisers monthly budget.

So regardless of the pennies here and the pennies there, if you had set up a budget of only spending $400 in a month, then your cost would not go over that $400 regardless of what the daily minute charges were.

All this being said, it is interesting to note that literally the day after I received the lawsuit email, my daily budgets were pennies BELOW what I had set whereas prior to receiving the lawsuit information my budget was pennies ABOVE what I had set as my daily limit.

Coincidence?

Here’s the official gist of it:

“The Court has certified a Settlement Class defined as: all persons and entities residing in the United States who have paid Google for advertising pursuant to Google’s AdWords program who (a) became AdWords advertisers between June 1, 2005 and February 28, 2009, inclusive, and who were charged more than their per day Daily Budget on any day during that time period; or (b) paused their AdWords advertising campaigns on any day during the period from January 1, 2002 to February 28, 2009, inclusive, and during the same billing period when their AdWords advertising campaigns were paused, were charged more than the product of their per day Daily Budget times the number of days that such Class Members’ advertising campaigns were not paused during that billing period.”

Now, this has been going on for some time as many of you might know – it tends to move in and out of “buzz” since the time periods between what’s actually going on is very long.  However, Eric Goldman’s blog gives you all of the history you need to know regarding this case as well as all of the information on the most current Class Action Settlement.

So if you’ve been wondering what all the buzz and noise online is about, this would be it.

Talk soon!

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