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.
To activate this feature:
Go to your Account Centre
Find the account you want to opt in
Click the grey cogwheel icon
Enter your target monthly budget in the Account Budget field
Enter any acceptable variance in the Acceptable Variance field (for example, if you're happy to spill over your budget by 10%)
Tick the Pause spend when over budget box
In the grey text below, you can verify exactly when Opteo will pause your campaigns
Click Update Settings to save
Alerts
You can't always be watching your spend 24/7, but Opteo can. We’ll send you alerts via email, Slack, and in-app notifications to keep you informed on your budget pacing—plus, we’ll let you know if we forecast you'll run out of funds.
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:
How this works technically
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.
If the total account spend for this month > budget
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:
If total account spend for this month < budget
Opteo re-enables all campaigns with the Paused temporarily to prevent budget overspend label. There are 2 ways this happens:
You have increased the budget or acceptable variance in Opteo.
this monthspend is now < budget, meaning there is now more room to spend, so Opteo re-enables all labelled paused campaigns.It’s the first of the month and
this monthspend resets because it now refers to a new month. For example, on the 28th of Augustthis monthspend (ie. spend for Aug 1st - Aug 28th) is $1,502. On September 1st at 1am,this monthspend might be $4.
Further technical notes
We are unable to pause Video campaigns.
The maximum variance you can set is 30%.
If you manually remove/rename a label, Opteo won't re-enable the campaign.
If you cancel your Opteo subscription, Opteo will no longer monitor the campaigns, so they'll remain in the state they were in at the time of cancellation.
If you unlink an account, Opteo will no longer monitor the campaigns, so they'll remain in the state they were in at the time of unlinking.