Budget Management: Track Spend Progress and Control Your Budget

Latest update: 2026/3/10

 

Overview

Budget Management helps you manage budgets in one place, track spending progress, and keep your monthly budget on pace. With Budget Management, you can:

• Plan your monthly budget in advance
• Monitor whether spend is tracking against plan
• Set special budgets for key dates, such as promotions or campaign events
• Let the system adjust pacing for upcoming dates
• Allocate budget across a group of campaigns or managed groups

There are two types of budget groups:

• Campaign-level budget groups: Best for managing a specific group of campaigns or managed groups.
• Profile-level budget groups: Best for managing budget at the overall store level.

Within the same profile, these two budget types cannot be enabled simultaneously.

 

Where to find it

Advanced Ads Settings > Budget Management

 

Campaign-level budget groups

Campaign-level budget groups are recommended when you:

• Want to manage a specific group of campaigns or managed groups
• Want to assign special budgets for key dates such as promotions or holidays
• Want to allocate budget across items within the group
• Do not want to adjust budgets manually every day and prefer the system to optimize pacing

When creating a budget group, you can select campaigns or managed groups as managed items. The system excludes archived campaigns and Sponsored Brands campaigns that use lifetime budgets.

 

1. Monthly budget

The monthly budget controls the overall spending limit of the budget group for the current month. If Daily scheduling or Auto pacing is enabled, the system calculates the daily budgets for the remaining dates based on the amount already spent and the number of days left in the month.

 

2. Daily scheduling

If you want to use different budgets on different dates, enable Daily Scheduling.

If you manually set budgets for specific dates, those dates will follow your settings. The system will automatically allocate the budget for the remaining dates.

The system runs one allocation at 00:00 each day. If you update the monthly or today’s budget, the system immediately refreshes the budget for the current date.

When Daily Scheduling is set up for the first time, the system calculates daily budgets based on the remaining budget and the number of remaining allocatable days.

After setup is complete:

• If Auto Pacing is not enabled, the system no longer recalculates based on actual monthly spend. Instead, it delivers budgets according to the values shown on the calendar.

• If you want to recalculate based on the latest spend, click Recalculate daily allocation.

 

3. Allocate budget within the group by percentage

If you want to control how much budget each campaign or managed group receives, enable Allocate budget by %.

After this setting is enabled, the system generates a default ratio based on the daily budgets of the campaigns. You can also adjust the ratio manually.

The daily budget calculated at the budget-group level is then distributed to each campaign and managed group according to the allocation ratio.

The system uses the allocation ratios shown on the page in the following situations:

• When you edit and submit settings on the budget group page

  • If only Allocate by % is enabled, the system distributes the budget based on the average daily budget calculated from the group allocation ratio.

  • If both Daily Scheduling and Allocate by % are enabled, the system distributes the budget based on Today’s budget × the current allocation ratio.

• On the first day of each month, the system also runs a distribution based on the current group allocation ratio.

If a campaign's daily budget is changed outside Budget Management, the next time Budget Management edits, recalculates, or distributes the budget, it uses the latest campaign budget as the new baseline.

In other words, the allocation ratio in Budget Management is not permanently fixed. It is recalculated based on the current campaign budgets.

 

4. Auto Pacing

If you want the system to optimize budget pacing automatically, enable Auto Pacing.

When enabled, the system dynamically adjusts daily budget allocation based on spend progress and performance, helping the budget group stay on track toward the monthly budget goal. Allocation ratios within the group may also be adjusted dynamically.

If both Daily Scheduling and Auto Pacing are enabled:

• Dates you set manually will follow your settings
• Other dates will be optimized automatically by the system

What happens when Auto Pacing is enabled

Auto Pacing works by first calculating timing, then reallocating across the group, and enabling Budget utilization mode for managed groups.

Time dimension: daily pacing

The system breaks down the remaining monthly budget of the group into daily budgets from today through the end of the month.

Allocation dimension: within-group reallocation

After determining the group’s total budget for the day, the system redistributes that budget across all items in the group, including managed groups and manual campaigns, while keeping the total group budget unchanged.

Budget utilization mode

When Auto Pacing is enabled, all AI-enabled managed groups in the budget group automatically enter Budget utilization mode.

This mode is designed to improve pacing capability and budget utilization when spend is falling behind plan.

 

Profile-level budget groups

If you are more concerned with budget execution at the overall store level, rather than managing a specific set of campaigns, you can use a Profile-level budget group.

Profile-level budget groups support two modes.

1. Monitoring only mode

Use this mode if you only want to monitor overall store budget progress and do not want to modify campaign budgets.

 

2. Dynamic allocation mode

Use this mode if you want the system to dynamically allocate the store’s remaining monthly budget based on spend performance during the current month.

The logic works as follows:

• When the monthly budget is updated, the system first calculates the remaining monthly budget for the profile
• It then allocates the remaining budget across the remaining dates in the month
• If today’s budget is updated directly, the system immediately delivers the budget using the value you set
• Campaign budgets in the store are scaled up or down proportionally based on their current budget share, so the total matches the store-level daily budget
• If any calculated value exceeds the platform’s maximum or minimum limit, the budget is delivered using the allowed limit instead

Profile-level budget groups do not support Auto Pacing.

They only distribute the store’s remaining monthly budget dynamically based on historical spend. They do not support dynamic reallocation across campaigns or managed groups, and they do not enable Budget utilization mode for AI managed groups.

 

How to choose

Use a Campaign-level budget group if you:

• Want to manage a specific group of campaigns or managed groups
• Want to set budgets for key dates
• Want to allocate budget within the group
• Want to use Auto Pacing

Use a Profile-level budget group if you:

• Only want to monitor whether the store budget is being spent as planned
• Only need budget control at the overall store level
• Do not need group-level allocation ratios or detailed campaign-level management

 

Additional settings

1. Notifications

If the current month's time spend progress differs from the ideal progress by more than 50%, Xnurta will send a message to the user, notifying you of the current budget risk.

Actual progress: Spend to date / Monthly budget set for the current month.

Ideal progress: Ideal spend / Monthly budget: If you have set daily budget tracking, the ideal spend is calculated based on the sum of daily budgets to date; if you have not enabled daily budget tracking, it is calculated based on the sum of average daily budgets to date.

 

2. Monthly Budget Accumulation

If there is remaining budget in the current month and a budget value is also set for the next month for budget management, then the remaining budget from the current month will be added to the next month.

 

3. Monthly Overspending Stop & Automatic Start

If the ad campaigns and management groups under the current budget group spend close to 95% of the set budget, then all ad campaigns in that budget group will be paused; if the budget is sufficient and overspending stop has been triggered, the ad campaigns under the budget group will start automatically.

 

Q&A

I only want to monitor budget progress and do not want to change campaign budgets. What should I use?

For campaign-level budget groups: Keep all three setting switches turned off.

For profile-level budget groups: Use Monitoring only mode.

 

I have promotion days and want to increase the budget on specific dates. What should I use?

Use a Campaign-level budget group and enable Daily Scheduling.

Dates you configure manually will follow your settings. The remaining dates will be allocated or optimized automatically.

 

I do not want to adjust budgets manually every day. What should I use?

If you are managing a specific group of advertising objects, use Auto Pacing in a campaign-level budget group.

If you want dynamic budget adjustment at the overall store level, use Dynamic allocation mode in a store-level budget group.

 

Why can’t some campaigns be added to a budget group?

The system excludes:

• Archived campaigns
• Campaigns or managed groups that already belong to another budget group
• Sponsored Brands campaigns that use lifetime budgets