A budget in Adpulse is a way to track and manage advertising spend across one or more campaigns. It defines how much you want to spend over a set period; daily, weekly, monthly, or custom, and allows you to group campaigns from one or more ad accounts under a single spend target.

A Budget in Adpulse is made up of several components:

Budgets help ensure your total spend stays on track, alert you when things are over- or under-pacing, and unlock automation features like AutoPacing, AutoProtect, and Rollovers.

Budget pacing refers to the process of managing and distributing a campaign's budget evenly or strategically over a specified time period to ensure optimal performance and avoid overspending or underspending. It involves monitoring daily spend rates and adjusting bids, budgets, or campaign delivery settings to align with the campaign's goals and timeline.

It is represented as a percentage where you want your Budget Pacing to be as close to 100% throughout the entire month - this indicates you’ll spend all of your budget by the end of the period and spend it evenly throughout that period.

Read more

Adpulse budgets aren’t just about spend tracking—they also give you visibility into performance. By linking a KPI, you can see how effectively each budget is contributing to your goals, whether that’s conversions, revenue, ROAS, or something else.

Performance metrics are displayed directly alongside pacing and spend, making it easy to spot which budgets are delivering value and which ones may need attention. This helps you move beyond spend management and make more informed optimisation decisions across accounts and campaigns.

Read more

Whether you're managing a single account or a whole portfolio, budgets give you centralised control and visibility over how your ad spend is being used.

A budget can be made up of one or more ad accounts from the same or different platforms. For example, one budget can be made up of:

1. One budget for each ad account

2. Multiple Ad Accounts in the Parent Budget, and Child Budgets for each platform

3. Multiple Ad Accounts in the Parent Budget, with cross-platform Child Budgets for different objectives

4. Multiple Child Budgets within a Parent Budget - great for managing the spend of multiple locations

There are three types of Budgets:

A Parent budget can have up to two tiers of Child Budgets ’beneath’ it, and there is no limit on the number of Child Budgets that can be created.

Some examples of Parent/Child Budget structures:

Parent budgets are the top level of the budgets and can include one or more ad accounts. Typically, they track budgets, spend, and performance at the ad account or client level.

Depending on the size and structure of the account, they may or may not have Child Budgets

When you create a Parent Budget, it defaults to include all the campaigns within the included ad accounts.

Use Cases for Account Budget:

You can have as many Child Budgets as you like; they are a collection of campaigns/shared budgets/ad sets within a single Ad Account.

You can select the campaigns/shared budgets within a Child Budget in a number of ways - How to use the Campaign Selector when creating a Child Budget.

Use Cases for Child Budget:

You want to set Budget Targets and KPIs at a more granular level. Examples where you might use a Child Budget:

You can create Adpulse budgets using the date ranges and budgets from a Google Account budget you have set up. If an ad Account has a Google Account Budget, it will be selected by default.

"Account budgets, formerly known as budget orders, are used by advertisers who pay by monthly invoicing. When you create an account budget, you choose a certain amount of money that you'd like to spend over a period of time. This can help you control your costs in addition to your average daily campaign budgets."

Read more about Google Account Budgets

Setting a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) in your Adpulse budget transforms it from simple spend tracking into true performance management. Instead of just asking “Are we spending the right amount?”, you can now ask “Are we getting the right results?”

You can see ROI at a glance. Adpulse shows how well your spend is converting into your chosen goal, like CPA, ROAS, or Conversions.

Read more

A budget schedule defines the start and end date for your budget - the time period Adpulse uses to track spend and apply automation. You can set a schedule to run daily, weekly, monthly, or over a custom timeframe, and these schedules can be either recurring or one-time.

You can also create multiple schedules in advance, consisting of recurring or custom time periods, allowing you to plan budget changes well in advance.

Most budget features operate on a per-period basis, where the budget schedule defines the period. For example, with a recurring monthly schedule, one period = one month.

Budget Automation is a cohesive suite of tools designed to help you manage ad spend more efficiently across multiple campaigns and platforms. Instead of juggling spreadsheets and checking/setting budgets manually, Adpulse can automatically pace, adjust, and safeguard your campaigns based on your chosen rules.

These automations give you greater control, prevent overspend, and reduce the time spent monitoring budgets daily.

The available Budget Automation settings are:

Read more

You can create Custom Budget Alerts, with your own thresholds, and can create multiple alerts for various selections of accounts - essentially setting Spend and/or Pacing thresholds for all of your accounts in one Alert.

The Custom Budget Alert types are:

You can apply an alert to a static list of Ad Accounts, or you can include Ad Accounts dynamically, for example:

When selecting accounts dynamically, the included budgets will update according to the specified criteria. For example, if the criteria is 'All Budgets tagged 'Sunita'' then any new Budgets that match this criterion will be included, conversely any that have the tag 'Sunita' removed will be removed.

Read more