Differences between Budget and Spend
When creating a Campaign, you must enter an average Daily Budget. This Daily Budget tells AdRoll how much, on average, you are willing to spend on all ad impressions each day.
Spend accounts for how much of your budget we use to auction for your ad impressions to reach your target audience. Spend is influenced by the following factors:
- Your audience size: Targeting large audiences increases your advertising reach and helps you get in front of more potential customers.
- The variety of ad sizes you add to your campaign: Uploading multiple ad sizes to your campaigns will secure premium inventory space.
- The amount you bid for each ad placement: AdRoll uses our proprietary BidIQ algorithm to evaluate each person based on their level of intent, the inventory available, and seasonal factors.
The minimum daily budget is $10
In order to properly optimize your campaign, the minimum daily budget for a campaign is $10.
Discrepancies between Budget and Spend
If you notice that Daily Spend is more than your specified Daily Budget, that means your campaign is spending more on days with more opportunities and less on other days. Factors like weekends, seasonality, and holidays can all impact how many opportunities are available each day.
When you set your Daily Budget you are setting an average. On days when your campaign sees an increased opportunity to drive results, you may spend up to 20% more, then there may be days that your entire budget is not spent in order to maintain your set average daily budget.
This flexibility allows your campaigns to drive the best results on busy days. We do this to spend your budget as effectively and efficiently as possible. With the daily budget fluctuation, you provide us the ability to be flexible and to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. However, you do not have to worry about overspending.
Prevent Budget Overspending
Even though your Daily Budget and Daily Spend can vary on any given day AdRoll will prevent overspending. As long as your budget is consistent for an entire month, you won’t be charged more than your daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month, which is 30.4 (365 days in a year ÷ 12 months).
If you change your daily budget throughout the month, your daily spend will reflect your latest specifications. Your existing monthly charging limit will be removed and a new one is created each time you change your Daily Budget for a campaign.
Adjust your Campaign Daily Budget
When creating a new Campaign in AdRoll you will be prompted to enter your desired Daily budget as part of the campaign setup.
To edit the budget of an existing Campaign:
- Go to this page or navigate to Campaigns > Ads.
- Click the Ads tab.
- Find the campaign that you want to adjust and click on the campaign name.
- Click Edit.
- Scroll down to Campaign Budget and enter an amount under the Daily Budget box.
- Click Done and Save the campaign.
Changing your daily budget will reset your temporary hold limit.
If you change your daily budget mid-month, your existing temporary hold limit will be removed and a new one is created. This occurs each time you change your daily budget.
If you are unable to edit the Daily Budget for your campaigns, please contact the AdRoll Customer Support team or reach out to your Account Manager directly.
Campaign Budget Best Practices
Adjust your budget based on the Audience Size
When setting up a new campaign, you should keep in mind the targeted audience size to ensure campaigns are successful and reach their full potential. We suggest starting with the following ranges depending on the size of the audience being targeted.
| Audience Size | Monthly Budget |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | $1,000- $2,000 |
| 25,000 | $2,500 - $5,000 |
| 50,000 | $5,000 - $10,000 |
| 100,000+ | $10,000+ |
For these budget recommendations to effectively enhance your campaign's reach and performance, a complete suite of ad creatives is also essential. These ranges assume full inventory reach, which is attained by using all Recommended Ad Sizes, thereby improving scale, efficiency, and performance.
Take advantage of events
Big promotions, such as product launches and releases can increase interest in your brand and visitors to your site. Your audiences will stay larger for longer than the promotion time period. You should take this into account when forecasting the costs and impact of the big event.
Adjust budgets for seasonality
B2C businesses often see seasonal changes in how customers shop. For example, during big holidays, there's usually more website traffic and sales, so it's a key time to spend more on ads. In slower periods like early Q2, like just after the holidays or before things get busy again, you can try out new marketing ideas or work on brand awareness without spending as much.