AutoPilot has traditionally worked one way. It monitors PPC campaign spend against your budget target. When your campaigns hit their spend goal, they’re paused automatically until the next budget cycle begins (or the budget target is increased mid-cycle).

But we worried that AutoPilot wasn't meeting all of our clients' automated budgeting needs, specifically around daily budget pacing. So we added two new AutoPilot Modes to provide more flexibility and renamed our "classic AutoPilot" mode to "AutoPilot Pause/Enable.

AutoPilot monitors your campaign spend against a budget target. When you’ve hit your budget target, Shape sets your campaign statuses to paused and alerts you. This prevents your campaigns from overspending by stopping your campaigns from spending any additional dollars once you’ve hit the budget target.

In AutoPilot Pause Only mode, your campaign statuses can only be paused. Campaigns will never be reactivated automatically.

For your campaigns to accumulate additional spend and metrics, you must reactivate your campaigns manually in Shape.

If you use this mode, it’s extremely important that you carve out time to reactivate campaigns at the start of your new budget cycle. Shape won’t automatically reactivate campaigns in Pause Only mode. If you forget to re-enable campaigns no additional performance metrics or spend will accumulate until you manually enable the campaigns in Shape.

In this mode, AutoPilot Pause/Enable tracks PPC campaign spend against your budget target. When your campaigns hit their spend goal, they’re paused automatically until the next budget cycle begins (or the budget target is increased mid-cycle).

AutoPilot Pause/Enable tracks campaign spend against a budget target. When campaign spend hits that target, campaigns are paused. They remain paused until the start of the next budget cycle or until the current budget is increased.

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AutoPilot Pause/Enable tracks campaign spend against a budget target. When campaign spend hits that target, campaigns are paused. They remain paused until the start of the next budget cycle or until the current budget is increased.

"AutoPilot Pause/Enable provides a hands-off way to ensure your budgets don't overspend their budget target.

AutoPilot is great at preventing campaigns from overspending. But until now, it couldn’t help reduce over-pacing. For example, it wouldn’t stop high-traffic campaigns from spending their entire budget in two or three days and then remaining paused for the rest of the budget cycle.

AutoPilot Daily Pause/Enable addresses over-pacing issues by spreading spend more evenly across the entirety of a budget cycle.

AutoPilot Daily Pause/Enable uses your budget target to calculate an ideal daily spend. If you exceed that threshold, campaigns are paused for the rest of the day and reenabled the next.

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AutoPilot calculates your ideal daily spend each day of a cycle. If you hit that threshold during the day, AutoPilot Daily pauses your campaigns and won’t reactivate them until the following day. Didn’t hit the ideal daily threshold? Don’t worry! Shape will pass the unused spend onto the next day.