About daily budgets

The daily budget is the average amount that you indicated you are willing to spend on a specific ad set per day. Each ad set will have its own separate budget, so bear this in mind if you have more than one active ad set in your account.

You can stop running an ad (and stop it from accruing additional charges) at any time by pausing it in Ads Manager. Note that you may still receive a bill after pausing the ad. However, this bill is only for charges that you accrued before your ad stopped running. The bill doesn’t mean that your ad is running again. 

There are two types of budget durations: lifetime budgets and daily budgets. When you set a daily budget, you’re telling facebook the average amount that you want to spend each day. You can set a daily budget for your overall campaign with campaign budget optimisation (СBO) or for individual ad sets.

How daily budgets work

When you set your daily budget, you’re setting an average daily spend over the course of a week. This means that every day, we’ll strive to get roughly your daily budget’s worth of the result that you optimised for. However, there may be certain days when better opportunities are available. On those days, we may spend up to 25% over your daily budget. For example, if your daily budget is £10, we may spend up to £12.50 on a given day. However, your charges will average out over a calendar week (Sunday to Saturday). That means that for every week ending on Saturday at midnight, you won’t spend more than seven times your daily budget.

We do this to deliver your ads and spend your budget as efficiently and effectively as possible. By allowing ourselves some flexibility, we can more easily take advantage of opportunities when they arise in our dynamic ad auction marketplace.

Example

If your daily budget is £10, we wouldn’t go over £70 in one calendar week. Some of those days we may spend up to £12.50, and some days we may spend less than £10. This chart gives a simplified example of how we might spend the £70. The blue curving line shows the overall trend of spending from day to day. The green hexagons represent what is actually spent on a given day, which adds up to £70 and averages out to £10 per day.

The Benefits:

First, I want to revisit the “spending the whole budget everyday” thing. This pattern of spending allows for much easier pacing of spend.

Each day you can count on Facebook spending the same amount, making it much easier to control your budgets and plan ahead financially.

Additionally, if your ad set is performing well and you’re getting the returns you want, then there’s no harm in scaling into your full daily budget to get those results as soon as you can since future performance is never guaranteed.

Second, Facebook daily budgets are the simplest option if you’re setting up an always on, evergreen campaign. This allows you to keep your ads on at all times without needing to adjust end dates to keep them active.

Additionally, if you work with weekly, monthly, or quarterly budgets and they change from time to time, daily budgets are a great option. Lifetime budgets, as we’ll discuss, are best when a budget is set and then left in place until the end date is reached.

If you’re anticipating regular changes to your budget, daily budgets are likely the better choice.

When changing daily budgets, there is a best practice to keep in mind: limit budget adjustments to 20% of their original level for each day. Any change larger than this will have too great of an impact on the Facebook algorithm and performance can be negatively impacted.

If you’re needing to double your spend or cut it in half, ideally, you would make changes every day in 20% increments until you reached the level you needed. (I realize this isn’t always doable, but if it is, this is the right way to go.)