CruiseControl Frequently Asked Questions

• CruiseControl must be turned on at the Budget and Campaign level in Shape to work properly!
• Campaign daily budget changes must be made in Shape. Changes made in advertising platforms will be overwritten.
• CruiseControl makes daily budget adjustments to campaigns on the campaign level. This means that it will automatically convert Facebook campaigns using ad set-level daily budgets to campaign-level daily budgets.

 

2. Should I apply CruiseControl to all my campaigns?

Only include the campaigns you are comfortable with allowing Shape to adjust daily budgets. NOTE: Shape will not make any daily budget changes on campaigns with CruiseControl activated but have a paused status.   

CruiseControl does not work for Pinterest Ads or TikTok Ads campaign types.

 

3. How does CruiseControl decide to adjust daily budgets and how often? 

The platform checks spend levels multiple times a day for every Budget.

Shape evaluates whether or not campaigns in a Budget with CruiseControl enabled are on pace and calculates an ideal daily spend value to achieve the target budget cap. If campaigns are not on pace that day, CruiseControl will adjust campaign daily budgets one (or multiple) times throughout the day.  

 

4. If I update daily budgets in the ad platforms, how does this affect the daily budget changes CruiseControl is making? 

When using CruiseControl, we do not suggest making daily budget changes in the ad platforms. We highly suggest making the changes to the daily budget in Shape (which will push to the ad platforms). 

This is because CruiseControl will automatically override whatever daily budget changes you make in the ad platform the next time the CruiseControl pacing algorithm is run (approximately every hour).

If you wish to make a daily budget change to a campaign, we suggest following the steps below:

1. In Shape, navigate to the budget that houses the campaigns you want to adjust
2. Set the new "daily budget" and "CruiseControl default daily budget" to the same number. 
3. Evaluate the CruiseControl min and maximum daily budgets.
   • Does your new daily budget/default budget fall within the min/max range?
   • Is the ideal spend Shape recommends within your min/max range?
   • Do you feel comfortable allowing Shape to spend down to your minimum or up to your maximum to achieve your target budget? 

It's useful to make daily budget changes from Shape not only to ensure your changes do not get overwritten, but also that when you make target budget amount or daily budget changes, that your CruiseControl mins, maxs, and default daily budgets are still within an acceptable range.

 

5. Will CruiseControl alert me when campaign daily budgets are changed?

CruiseControl is not set up to alert via email or in-app notification when a campaign's daily budget is changed. This is not possible due to the sheer volume of daily changes.

You can view daily budget changes made by CruiseControl in the change history. 

 

6. Will CruiseControl pause campaigns when my target Budget is hit? 

No. Like AutoPilot, CruiseControl's goal is to help you hit your target Budget. However, it does so by changing campaign daily budgets, not campaign statuses. To hit your target budget and also protect against overspending, we highly suggest utilizing CruiseControl with AutoPilot Pause Only or AutoPilot Pause/Enable. 

 

7. Does CruiseControl work with AutoPilot?

Yes, CruiseControl works with AutoPilot. Please, see below for more information and caveats. 

AutoPilot helps prevent overspend in your account by changing campaign statuses when your target Budget is hit.

CruiseControl works to prevent under and overspending by adjusting campaign daily budgets to keep them on pace. But CruiseControl doesn't change your campaigns' statuses if/when your target Budget is achieved. 

Therefore, we recommend using CruiseControl with AutoPilot Pause Only or AutoPilot Pause/Enable. Both of these AutoPilot modes turn campaign statuses to paused if the target Budget is hit during a Budget Cycle. (AutoPilot Pause/Enable will re-enable those campaigns at the start of the next Budget Cycle, AutoPilot Pause Only will not). 

 

8. Why Don't You Suggest Using CruiseControl with AutoPilot Daily?

 While CruiseControl can be used with AutoPilot Daily, we recommend against it.

AutoPilot Daily calculates the ideal daily spend a campaign should hit based on the Budget's target budget amount. It will pause campaigns if they exceed this ideal spend on a given day, and reenable them the next day. 

CruiseControl calculates the ideal daily spend campaigns should hit based on the Budget's target budget amount. It then adjusts campaign daily budgets up or down from a default amount to achieve the target budget amount. 

These two products achieve the same goal of helping a budget hit its target goal; however, AutoPilot Daily primarily works best for budgets with consistent overspending. It does not resolve underspend issues.

In this case, we suggest using CruiseControl to pace spend evenly toward your Budget target and AutoPilot Pause Only or AutoPilot Pause/Enable to ensure you hit your Budget target without going over.  

 

9. Does CruiseControl work with RollOver?

Yes. RollOver is the difference between a Budget's campaign spend and budget target. Shape users can "rollover" overspend or underspend to the next Budget Cycle. 

The RollOver amount is utilized to calculate the target Budget cap and the ideal daily spend at the start of a new cycle.

Any changes to RollOver or the target Budget amount will cause CruiseControl's algorithms to reevaluate the ideal daily spend. If you make these changes, we suggest you reevaluate your Default, Min, and Max daily Budget settings to ensure your thresholds make sense. 

 

10. Does CruiseControl work with SmartSync?

Yes. Budgets with SmartSync and CruiseControl enabled will have CruiseControl enabled on all new campaigns added by default. We highly recommend that you set the Default, Min, and Max settings for these campaigns once the campaign has been automatically added to your Budget.

 

11. Can CruiseControl use Custom Values to Make Daily Budget Adjustments?

CruiseControl calculates the ideal daily spend campaigns should hit based on the Budget's target budget amount. It then adjusts campaign daily budgets up or down from a default amount to achieve the target budget amount.

Therefore, CruiseControl cannot utilize custom values to adjust campaign daily budgets at this time.

 

12. Why can't I use CruiseControl with my campaigns that use Ad Set Level Daily Budgets on Facebook? 

CruiseControl is set up to make automated changes to the campaign's daily budgets on the campaign level. It is not set up to make changes at the ad group or ad set level. This means that if you use ad set-level daily budgets for your Facebook campaigns, the first time that CruiseControl adjusts that campaign's daily budget, it will convert it to campaign-level daily budgets. 

You can revert this change, and return your campaigns to ad set-level daily budgets by following the steps below: 

• Navigate to Facebook and select the campaign you'd like to edit.
• While on the campaigns tab, click the Edit icon (pencil) to change campaign settings.
• Scroll down to the "Advantage Campaign Budget" section and toggle this setting off. 
  • NOTE: You may need to remove ad set limits on the "Ad Set" level before doing so
• Publish your changes

IMPORTANT: If you want to continue using Ad Set level daily budgets, you cannot use CruiseControl to adjust daily budgets automatically. Disable CruiseControl immediately to prevent Shape from converting your campaigns to using campaign-level daily budgets.

 

13. Does CruiseControl work with experiment campaigns?

We typically don't recommend utilizing CruiseControl on ad campaigns that you are simultaneously running experiments on; however, should you choose to utilize CruiseControl, the platform will make adjustments to your daily budgets to keep the campaigns on track with some caveats/limitations. 

Activating & Using CruiseControl

When you create an experiment in Google Ads, you generate two variations of a campaign (the control and the experiment) and implement a change that you'd like to test on the experiment campaign. Google splits the daily budget 50/50 across the two campaigns (unless you tell it otherwise) for testing. 

Shape will allow you to sync the experiment campaign to your Budget for tracking purposes. It will have the same daily budget as the control campaign, and it will treat it as a separate campaign. 

To utilize CruiseControl and maintain the 50/50 budget split, you need to ensure that the CruiseControl mins, maxs, and defaults are identical for the control and experiment campaigns. 

Why?

Every time CruiseControl makes a change to the daily budget of the control or experiment campaign, Google Ads will update the daily budget for both of them. NOTE: This will not reflect in Shape automatically, you'll need to hit the refresh button in the upper-right-hand corner "Tools" section to see it accurately reflected.

CruiseControl mins, maxs, and defaults are wildly different from the control to the experiment campaigns then Shape will continually try to make conflicting changes to the daily budgets. 

14. If I do use CruiseControl on experiment campaigns, what impacts might it have on pacing?

CruiseControl evaluates where to set a campaign's daily budget by analyzing campaign spend, impression share lost due to the budget of a campaign, and historical performance data. It adjusts the daily budget upwards or downwards based on how closely the total spend of all the campaigns in a budget compares to the ideal daily spend needed to hit the target budget amount by the end of the budget cycle. 

Control and experiment campaigns will likely have similar (if not identical) impression shares lost due to budget (unless your experiment directly impacts this metric), but will have differing spend and other historical performance data. Therefore, CruiseControl may try to set different daily budgets between the control and experiment campaigns based on what it believes each campaign can/should spend. This is why it's important that both the control and experiment campaigns have identical mins, maxs, and defaults. 

Similarly, as noted above, daily budgets are shared/split evenly between the experiment campaign and the control campaign. But, Shape shows them as having the same daily budget. Shape cannot currently display this differently to show the experiment/control split. Similarly, this will have impacts on the daily budgets that CruiseControl sets.

For example, let's say a budget has a target budget of $330, and the ideal daily spend is $30. There is a control and experiment campaign in the budget that initially each have a daily budget of $30. This is shown as $30 in Shape for each campaign, but in reality, Google will spend $15 for each campaign.

In the case that the campaigns spend $10 a piece on day 1 and day 2, which totals $20/day or $40 in spend by the end of day 2. The ideal daily spend the campaigns should be achieve is $15/day or $60 by the end of day 2. 

CruiseControl will determine the daily budget needs to be increased for both campaigns to try to counteract the underspend and get the campaigns back on track. It may try to set the daily budgets for the two campaigns to $50 in total but split it unevenly between the two (ex: Campaign A at $35 and Campaign B at $15).

One of the two daily budget changes will succeed, and both will be set to that amount (ex: both to $35). Shape will see that spend is only $35 on day 3 (still underspending) and continue to raise the daily budgets subsequent days until the CruiseControl maximum is achieved. However, this may cause artificial underspending over time. The same would likely be true if a budget with CruiseControl enabled was understanding versus overspending. 

For this reason, we do not suggest utilizing CruiseContol with Experiment and Control campaigns, or if you choose to use it, to test using it on a few budgets to ensure it performs to your expectations.

 

15. Will my Facebook and Google campaigns be put back into a "learning phase" if CruiseControl makes daily budget adjustments?

Changes to daily budgets made by CruiseControl can cause Google and Facebook campaigns to be placed back into the Learning Phase.

For Google, this applies to campaigns that utilize automated bidding strategies, while it applies to all types of Facebook campaigns.

While budget changes can impact learning, Google and Facebook have evolved their products to the point where potential impacts aren't too drastic and the learning periods have become both less volatile and shorter. It's recommended to keep daily budget changes to 20% to minimize the likelihood that a campaign will be placed back into the learning period. This can be achieved using CruiseControl's Min, Max, and Default setting.

During our initial testing period, we found that the impact posed by campaigns defaulting to a learning phase was minimal. For Budgets with severe budget pacing challenges, we believe that the value of CruiseControl's automation outweighs performance fluctuations caused by the learning period.