AutoPacing normally adjusts budgets daily so your overall period spend ends up as close as possible to the target you set. There are some situations in which AutoPacing cannot make adjustments however, so this article explains why this could be a problem, what causes it to happen, how you would know about it and what to do about it once you know.
Why is this a problem?
If you are expecting adpulse to change budgets to hit a spend target, and Adpulse cannot make those changes, then it's likely that you will either over or under-spend against your target because your budgets will remain unchanged.
What causes it?
There are four main scenarios under which AutoPacing won't be able to make a change to your budgets:
Expired or failed credentials - your connection to the ad platform fails or has expired, which can happen through a change in password, or sometimes the credentials are just expired by the ad platform itself and need to be refreshed.
Disconnected client - your credentials no longer have access to the client (they left, or were moved to a different credential)
Upper budget limit reached - Adpulse places an upper limit on the calculated daily budget to prevent budgets from being excessively increased. The upper limit calculation is: (Budget/Scheduled Days In Period) x 2. For example, if you set a monthly budget of $2,000 in a month where you have 20 scheduled days, your expected daily budget would be $100 per day. Therefore the upper limit that Adpulse would set your budget to would be ($2,000/20) x 2 = $200/day. This generally happens when you're pacing is well below 100% for a sustained period of time and Adpulse has been increasing your budgets to try and catch you up.
Lower budget limit reached - one of your campaigns in an Adpulse budget has dropped to the minimum daily budget allowed by the ad platform, which means no further reductions on any campaign budgets are possible because doing so would change the budget ratios between your campaigns. This usually happens when a budget has been reduced, and Adpulse has been trying to decrease budgets to prevent over-pacing.
What is a budget ratio?
Budget ratios are defined as the daily budget of a campaign (or ad set) compared to the aggregated value of all daily budgets in the campaigns (or ad set) being assessed within a single Adpulse Budget.
For example:
Campaign 1 daily budget = $20
Campaign 2 daily budget = $80
Budget ratios are therefore:
Campaign 1 budget ratio = 20/100 = 20%
Campaign 2 budget ratio = 80/100 = 80%
These ratios are automatically defined within Adpulse when the Adpulse Budget is initially created and can be updated by you at any time by either changing daily budgets directly in the ad platform itself or by using the Adpulse Budget Allocation page within each Budget.
What is a Minimum Daily Budget
Each ad platform (eg Google, Facebook, etc) stipulates a minimum daily budget amount that can be applied for a campaign, shared budget, or ad set. For example, a Google Ads campaign can have a daily budget set as low as $0.01 whereas a Facebook campaign might have a minimum daily budget of $40 or more (Facebook minimums are based on the number of Ad Sets inside the campaign).
Adpulse considers any daily budgets that are set to the ad platform minimum as being paused for AutoPacing purposes (for example, it’s common to set up a new Google Ads campaign with a $0.01 daily budget until you are ready to launch it). To allow AutoPacing to consider a campaign as active (and therefore able to be adjusted when AutoPacing runs), Adpulse adds $0.01 to the ad platform minimum.
For example, this means that the minimum daily budget you can set in Adpulse for a Google Ads campaign would be $0.02.
How do ratios and minimums work together?
When AutoPacing tries to reduce daily budgets and one of those budgets is already set to the Adpulse minimum, Adpulse cannot reduce budgets any further because doing so would change the budget ratios between your campaigns.
How you would know about it
Expired or failed credentials - Adpulse will email you to let you know that the credential needs to be refreshed (clickable link included).
Disconnected client - Adpulse will email you to let you know that the client is no longer accessible using the supplied credentials
Upper budget limit reached - Adpulse will flag this as a Critical alert (and if you have configured the "Alerts" section in Adpulse to send you emails on Critical Alerts, you will also receive an email)
Lower budget limit reached - Adpulse will flag this as a Critical alert (and if you have configured the "Alerts" section in Adpulse to send you emails on Critical Alerts, you will also receive an email)
What to do about it
Expired or failed credentials:
Head to Settings > Connections
Cick the triple dot menu to the right of the connection that's been flagged as expired.
Click Reconnect and follow through the connection process.
Disconnected client:
If the client has been disconnected from your manager account, you can un-import them from Adpulse in Settings > Import Accounts
Upper budget limit reached:
Check your budget ratios and adjust them to ensure that big budgets don't exist on campaigns where there is a limited possibility of spending that amount.
Click the triple dot menu on right of the budget in question (on the Budgets/KPI screen) and go to Edit Budget Allocation.
From there, sort by Current (Budget) to see your largest existing budgets at the top of the list.
Look down the Max Spend column to find budgets that have a large Current budget but a much smaller Max Spend, and reduce those budgets down closer to the Max Spend figure.
Lower budget limit reached:
Reduce your budgets so that your daily budget total roughly equals your ideal daily spend for the remainder of the period.
Start by checking your Ideal Daily Spend in the Budget/KPI page, then click the triple dot menu on right of the budget in question and go to Edit Budget Allocation.
From there, adjust your campaign budgets to be closer to (or equal to) the Min Daily Budget figure.
You could also pause campaigns or ad sets to reduce the platform minimum budgets.