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:

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 ad platforms. For example, one budget can be made up of:

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.

Use Cases for Parent 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

Each Ad Account, or group of Ad Accounts, needs a Parent Budget as a first step. Once this is created, you can use the triple-dot menu options to create Child Budgets beneath it.

All budgets in Adpulse have the same settings; the only difference between Parent and Child budgets is;

Open the triple-dot menu on the budget that you want to create a child Budget for and select 'Create Child Budget'. This will open the 'create a budget' page.

The 'Create budget page' is the starting point for both Parent and Child Budgets, and the steps to create each are pretty much the same.

Selecting Ad Accounts

When you create a Budget, you can choose other new ad accounts that also don't have existing Parent Budgets to include in this budget (creating a Multi-Account Budget), or just the one.

When creating a Child Budget, you can only select from the Ad Accounts that are included in the Parent.

Selecting Campaigns / Shared Budgets / Ad Sets

When you create a Parent Budget, by default, it selects all the campaigns within the selected Ad Accounts. This cannot be changed while creating the budget, but can be edited after it has been created.

For Child Budgets, you will get a Campaign Selector to choose the campaigns you want to be included within the budget. You can select Campaigns statically or dynamically.

Example: Campaign Name contains 'Brand'.

If you added a new Campaign that contained the name 'Brand', then it would automatically be included in this Budget.

Read more on how to use the Campaign selector

Enter a name for the budget; for Parent Budgets, this defaults to the Ad Account name, but can be anything

Each KPI in Adpulse consists of three components: a metric, a time period, and a benchmark. The metric is the actual value you’re measuring, such as CPA, ROAS, or Click-Through Rate, calculated for the selected time range.

That value is then compared against your chosen benchmark (like a target, previous period, or account average) to show how performance is tracking over time.

For example:

Read more about KPI's

You define a KPI when creating a budget, but you can also edit a budget to define or update the KPI.

1. Choose a metric to track, eg, Cost Per Conversion

2. Select the date range you want to track as the 'compare' value

3. Then select a Benchmark time period that the above is compared to

From the two options, select the Open-Ended Budget option to create an Open-Ended budget.

Read about how to create a Fixed Budget

A budget schedule defines the start and end date for your budget - the time period Adpulse uses to track spend and apply automation.

For an Open-Ended Budget, they defined the start and end date, plus the minimum and maximum daily budget to use for that date range

You can also create multiple schedules in advance.

While you don't have to enable Automation for an Open-Ended budget, it's highly recommended, as without it, the budget will just be a view of the spend, and no adjustments will be made.

When enabled, AutoAdjust will increase or decrease the Daily Budgets of the included campaigns, based on performance as defined by the KPI thresholds.

To enable AutoAdjust and define the automation parameters, tick the AutoAdjust checkbox

The KPI type is dependent on the KPI chosen for the budget

Here, you define the lookback window for KPI measurement and whether there is any offset to this window. The offset is there as it can take a couple of days for conversions to show within some ad platforms, so you can offset the previous X days by a number of days to ensure you're using complete data.

You can select one or more days each week for the adjustment to run. In the example above, it's set to run on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Define the thresholds for the KPIs to either increase, decrease, or do nothing to the daily budgets. The default loads the below, but you can add and move more rules, ensuring none overlap.

The tooltip will display the current KPI for the chosen lookback window

This feature checks today’s spend every hour and compares it to your nominated daily limit. If the limit is exceeded, all campaigns in that budget group are automatically paused. Then, the next day, campaigns are re-enabled and spend tracking resumes.

Read more

When a budget has no current schedule (e.g., no schedule exists for a given period of time), AutoPause automatically pauses the associated campaigns. This ensures your ads don’t run outside of intended date ranges or windows.

Campaigns are resumed when the schedule becomes active again.

Read more

Once you've entered all the required fields, the save button in the bottom right will turn green, and click to create the budget.