What are they?
Budget Groups let you apply an overall budget to a group of Ad Set Groups to control your total daily spend. You can use one Budget Group for the entire account for account-wide spend, or use many Budget Groups to segment by genre or strategy, SKUs, etc.
How It Works
- Recommendation: set budget groups 10-15% below your goal to protect from surges in spend. See our technical description below for more information.
- Select the Budget Group and from the Actions menu, click Settings.
- By default, when the Budget Group has spent 85% of its daily budget, a "soft-cutoff" kicks in to pause the bottom 30% of Ad Sets ranked by performance. This is to the spend gradually, let your best Ad Sets run for the remaining 15% of budget and to increase accuracy of the Budget Control feature.
- A second option of "Automate Max Spend" is provided if you wish to "push" for a desired spend amount per day. This will manipulate your soft cutoff at all times of the day to increase or decrease depending on pacing toward a 7PM account time budget reach. Additionally, you can opt to override individual Ad Set Group budgets to better allow the spend goal to be achieved. This could mean there is no soft-cutoff at all if your Budget Group is pacing slow for the day.
- Hard-Cutoff at 95% spend
- Soft-Cutoff at 85% spend - pause bottom 30% of spend (ranked by CPA/CPI)
- NO SOFT-CUTOFF
- Hard-Cutoff at 95% spend only. No spend "slow down" of lower-performing Ad Sets. Has higher risk of going over budget.
- AUTOMATE MAX SPEND TO HIT DAILY BUDGET
- Maximum spend will be achieved while maintaining most efficient CPA/CPI possible
- Variable Soft-Cutoff based on projected overage at 7pm account time
- A variable percent of your lowest-performing ads will be paused throughout the day according to a predicted budget-reached time of 7pm
- If your spending pace dictates that you will not reach your spending goal by 7pm, no ads will be paused
- Ads that are paused will be reactivated if spending pace decreases
- You can let selected Ad Set Groups run over their budget to achieve a spend goal
- Technically, how does the system work?
- Predicted spend rate over the NEXT 15 minutes by averaging the last 7 days, same time of day
- Current day spend rate over the PAST 15 minutes
- Using the higher rate, AdRules predicts what the spend will be 15 minutes from now, and issues pauses to all the Ad Sets at around 90% of daily budget (90% is used to account for tail spend).
- Additionally, AdRules slows the rate of spend down by pausing the bottom-performing ads when your percent of budget reaches a certain threshold (80% for CPA and 70% for non-CPA types). This is known as "Soft-Cutoff" and can be disabled in your settings if you would like a more aggressive approach (though this may be more prone to overages).
- Warning: Even with these checks in place, budgets can be breached because:
- Facebook data sometimes has internal latency and thus can be incorrectly reported to AdRules via the Facebook API, which can cause a perceived surge in spend when that data does finally come in.
- Market conditions can also cause an unprecedented surge in spend (such as a large competitor suddenly dropping out of the market).
- When you have large budgets and automatic bidding or high bids, the above factors will make the surges more extreme.
You can further configure your Budget Group’s soft cutoff to use mature ROAS vs CPA as the driving metric behind what ads get paused first:
