Lifetime Budgets

Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer advertisers the option to use two different types of budget durations: lifetime budgets and daily budgets. 

When you set a lifetime budget, you're telling the ad platforms the exact amount you're willing to spend over the entire run-time of your campaign or ad set. Lifetime budgets are useful if you don't want to exceed a specific overall spend number across your entire budget duration and are flexible about how much your campaign can spend per day.

Conversely, with daily budgets, you tell the ad platforms how much your want to spend each day.

Does Shape work with Lifetime Budgets?

Shape allows users to utilize both daily and lifetime budgets for budget monitoring purposes. However, it's important to note that some automation functionality does not work with lifetime budgets.

Lifetime Budgets - Details

When a campaign that utilizes a lifetime budget is added to Shape, the lifetime daily budget will be displayed in the "Daily Budget" column in the Decision Grid. There is no alternative "Lifetime Budget" column. 

Shape Decision Grid

Facebook Ads Platform

If you edit the lifetime budget--either by hovering over the daily budget and clicking the pencil icon to edit the daily budget in Shape, or edit it in the "Budget Details" screen by clicking the checkbox and then pencil--Shape will do nothing. Any changes to the daily budget made in Shape to a lifetime budget will immediately be overwritten back to the "lifetime budget" value found in the ad platforms. 

Lifetime Budgets - Budgeting & Automation Tools

For advertisers that want to utilize lifetime budgets for their campaigns, Shape works best for monitoring spend and performance. Some, but not all, of our budget automation tools work with lifetime campaigns. However, in order to get optimal performance out of Shape, we recommend utilizing daily budgets.

Lifetime Budget Spending

Because there is no daily budget associated with campaigns with lifetime budgets, any pacing of spend will be reliant on the ad platforms. Typically, the ad platforms will calculate the ideal spend needed to achieve the target lifetime budget by the end of the cycle duration. On certain days, the ad platforms may allow the campaigns to overspend and then adjust pacing lower further in the budget cycle.

AutoPilot

All modes of AutoPilot (Pause Only, Pause/Enable, and Daily) will work with lifetime budgets. This is because AutoPilot impacts the campaign status, not the daily budget or lifetime budget.

Pause Only and Pause/Enable

Depending on the budget duration you set and the target budget amount, Shape will pause the campaign when the target budget amount in Shape is achieved.

Ex: You have a campaign with a lifetime budget of $24,000 in a Shape Budget.

The Budget is a monthly, recurring budget set to start on the 1st. The target budget for the month is $2000. Shape will pause the campaign (if AutoPilot is enabled) when all campaigns in the budget together spend $2000.

Note: The ad platforms will pace the spend for campaigns with lifetime budgets on a day-to-day basis based off of the lifetime budget. Shape cannot impact this daily pacing.

If you have AutoPilot Pause/Enable activated, Shape will reactivate the campaign at the start of the next month (or if the target budget amount is increased). If you have Pause Only enabled, Shape will not reactivate the campaign and you will need to do so manually. 

Daily Pause/Enable

If you have Daily Pause/Enable set, Shape will calculate an ideal daily spend needed to achieve the target budget amount for the budget cycle. Shape will pause campaigns if the ideal daily spend is met. If it is not, Shape will allocate the underspend to the next day and allow the campaign to spend up to that amount. If a campaign is paused on a given day, it will reactivate the following day until the target budget amount is achieved. 

IMPORTANT

Shape will continue to change the campaign's status until the campaign's end date occurs or the entire lifetime budget is spent.

Once the end date occurs or the lifetime budget is met, any changes that Shape makes to campaign status will have no effect (until the end date is extended or the lifetime budget is increased).

CruiseControl

CruiseControl does not work with lifetime budgets.

CruiseControl makes changes to daily budgets, and cannot make changes to lifetime budgets. Any "changes" CruiseControl tries to make to the lifetime budget will not hold. 

SmartSync

SmartSync does work with campaigns with lifetime budgets.

After a budget has been created and SmartSync enabled, any new campaigns (with lifetime budgets) created on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn will automatically import into the linked budget.

However, please note that if any automation are enabled, these will be automatically applied to the new campaigns. Dependent on the automation type, some will work (ex: AutoPilot), while others will not (ex: CruiseControl)

RollOver

RollOver is a budget-level setting. If a campaign with a lifetime budget is being tracked in a budget with RollOver, any underspend or overspend will be calculated according to what the campaign spends during the budget cycle (the lifetime setting will not change this).

Any underspend or overspend that occurs will be "rolled over" to the target budget amount the following month.

Budget Pacer & Budget Booster

Budget Booster & Budget Pacer will make daily budget recommendations but any changes made from the tools will not hold.

BudgetBooster and BudgetPacer calculate spend opportunity and budget pacing recommendations based on impression share lost to budget, total daily spend, and other metrics. You may still see recommendations made in both BudgetBooster and BudgetPacer.

Any budget recommendations would be made specifically for daily budgets, however, not lifetime budgets.

Also, if you try to apply changes to campaigns in either tool, the changes will not work. Likewise, these tools cannot make suggestions to change the lifetime budget.