Ad Set Budget

Budget Control

When an ad set has a daily_budget, you can expect relatively even spending from day to day while the ad set is live, but there can be some variance between days.

On each day, your actual spending could be up to 125% of the average daily budget. However you will not spend more than 7 times the average daily budget over a calendar week. A calendar week is Saturday, at midnight, which is also known as the start of Sunday, to the next Saturday at 11:59 in the ad account's time zone. For example, for an ad set with daily_budget $100.00, you may see spending on a certain day to be as high as $125.00, but weekly spending will not exceed $700.00. If the ad set does not start on Saturday, the first week's spending limit is prorated based on the day and time the ad starts.

When the budget is updated, the spending limit for the remainder of the day and week would be prorated. For example, if the daily_budget is changed from $100.00 to $200.00 at noon, you would not see about $50.00 spent in the first half of the day, and $150.00 in the second half. Instead, you would see about $50.00 spent in the first half, and $100.00 in the second half. This updated mechanism allows for smoother pacing and better optimization of ads throughout the duration of an ad set.

With Marketing APIs v2.6 or earlier, daily_budget is not exceeded per day by default, but you can set recurring_budget_semantics of ad set to true to adopt the budget control described above. With v2.7 or later, the budget control described above will always be turned on and cannot be changed.

When you use a lifetime_budget, the spending upper limit of each day is controlled by calculation based on the remaining budget and remaining period. Therecurring_budget_semantics setting has no effect. The total spend of the whole period may not be more than lifetime_budget.

If a lifetime_budget is updated to a lower value, the new value must be at least 10% greater than the current amount spent already. For example: if an ad set has a $1000 lifetime budget and has spent $300 so far, the new lifetime budget cannot be set lower than $330."

An ad set with a daily_budget cannot be updated to have lifetime_budget later, and vice versa.

Limits

The limits for your ad sets are dependent on the currency defined in your Ad Account Settings.

Daily Budget Limits

The following limits apply to both daily and maximum lifetime budgets.