This feature is designed to protect your account from spending more than your desired monthly budget. It works by pausing all campaigns when monthly spend hits a limit you set, then automatically re-enabling them at the start of the next month.

For example, if you promised your client that you'd spend $10,000 this month, as a safety net, you may want Opteo to pause all campaigns when the spend this month reaches $10,000. Otherwise, you risk having an uncomfortable conversation explaining why you spent more than what was agreed!

This is notoriously difficult to manage. Google Ads doesn't have a notion of a total monthly budget. Instead, Google Ads works with daily budgets per campaign, and to add to this complexity, it isn't strict with its interpretation of daily budgets -- the rules are quite complex.

You'll notice 2 new fields in your account's settings:

Here, we're telling Opteo that we want this account to aim for £200/month and that we want to pause all campaigns when spend surpasses £220.

Once you click “Update Settings”, Opteo will monitor the account and pause all campaigns if and when the monthly spend surpasses £220.

Opteo will keep you informed through various new alerts (in-app, over email, and over slack if connected):

The first alert will notify you when campaign spend is likely to be paused:

The second alert when Opteo automatically pauses campaigns:

A final alert when Opteo automatically re-enables the paused campaigns:

Every hour, Opteo queries the total account spend for this month from the Google Ads API. For example, if the current day/time is the 12th of August and it’s 4pm, when Opteo asks the Google Ads API for spend this month, the API will return the total spend of the account between the 1st of August and the 12th of August (12th of August so far ie. 00:00 - 16:00).

Opteo then compares this spend to the allowable budget. What I'm calling allowable budget here is: account budget * (1 + variance). So in the example above, that's £200 * (1+0.1) = £220.

The account has overspent and Opteo pauses all enabled campaigns. Note that we are unable to edit YouTube campaigns – this is a limitation of the Google Ads API. We are also unable to change the status of experiment campaigns, which is also a limitation of Google Ads.

Opteo also applies a campaign label to these freshly paused campaigns. In the Google Ads UI, the campaign label will look like this:

Opteo re-enables all campaigns with the Paused temporarily to prevent budget overspend label. There are 2 ways this happens: