Budget Pacer Warnings

If you utilize Budget Pacer to review and implement budget corrections, you may receive notifications warning you about how certain changes will or will not affect your campaigns. 

These warnings will appear in an orange pop-out menu from the right-hand side of the screen. We've outlined all the warnings you may see while using Budget Pacer and their meanings. 

1. Impending Status Change

This means that one or more of the corrections recommended by Budget Pacer will change the status of a campaign. A campaign may be flipped to active or paused.  

2. Autopilot To Standby

If you implement a Budget Pacer correction that recommends a campaign be paused, the campaign will be placed into a "standby" state. On standby, the campaign will be paused for the budget cycle but reactivated at the start of the next cycle.

When Budget Pacer recommends that AutoPilot be put on standby, it will display a grey pause icon and an orange plane icon in the "Status Correction column."

3. Zero Qualified Campaigns

Budget Pacer may be unable to recommend changes for certain ineligible campaigns. The most common reason why campaigns are ineligible is that campaigns are not currently eligible for 2-way changes (ex: Youtube campaign status changes, Google Ads Express campaigns). 

The other reason a campaign would display this warning is that the campaigns have achieved the highest impression share possible (display and search) or reached its maximum budget opportunity incrementally (social). No additional budget opportunity can be identified.  

4. Campaigns Overspending

You may receive a "Campaigns Overspending" alert if one campaign's daily spend outpaces the target recommended spend (for example). In this case, Budget Pacer cannot accurately recommend pacing changes.

In the example above, there may be 3 campaigns. The first campaign is spending $9.70, but Budget Pacer recommends you spend $6.43 for all three campaigns. Unless you lower your first campaign's daily spend, your total spend will exceed your budget cap.

5. Campaigns Underspending

You may see a 'Campaigns Underspending’ warning for two reasons. 

The first reason is that all campaigns in a budget are achieving the highest budget possible given your current strategy and are likely maxing out their possible spend. We recommend adjusting targeting (geographic, keyword, display targeting, etc.) as long as doing so helps you achieve your target performance goals.

The second reason is that corrections have already been made, but campaigns are still underspending. This occurs when you've already made corrections via Budget Pacer or elsewhere. But, even with these adjustments, the campaigns still do not have the potential to spend to the target budget cap.

6. High CPC

This occurs when some or all of the CPCs in a budget's campaigns exceed the recommended target daily budget.

Ex: Pacer recommends spending $3.50 daily in May to hit your target budget of $108. But, you target expensive keywords with average CPCs of $5. This may cause Pacer to be inaccurate because the actual CPC is higher than the target daily budget.

7. Unreachable Target Spend/Day

This means you have set a Target Spend/Day that is not reachable given your current target strategy.

You can adjust the target spend/day by using the cog found in the corrections section. This is also where you adjust your correction to weighted, balanced, or optimized instead of using Shape’s recommendation. Manually setting a target spend/day will update all the recommended corrections to help you achieve your target if feasible.

If it’s not feasible to hit the manual target spend/day you set in the app, you will receive the error above. You can either broaden your targeting strategy or set a more realistic target spend/day.