Budgets#

There are three types of budgets:

• Organization budget
• Campaign budget
• Daily budget

This topic explains how budget settings dictate how much marketing spend your user acquisition campaigns could consume.

Organization budgets#

The overall marketing budget your organization has available to spend with Unity’s ad platform is called an Organization budget. If the organization budget reaches zero, all activity with the organization’s ad campaigns will pause until there is an available organization budget to spend from.

Manage your Organization's budget#

Add or edit your Organization budget from the Advertise dashboard at the bottom of the secondary navigation panel:

1. Budget remaining shows the active balance of your Organization’s total budget.
2. Click the Add link to add funds to your Organization’s budget.
3. Click the Edit budget link to add or remove funds from your Organization’s budget.
4. Click the View historylink to review a transaction history for your Organization’s budget.

Add funds#

To add budget to your advertising account from the Advertise dashboard:

1. Locate the Organization budget text at the bottom of the secondary navigation menu and click Add.
2. In the Add funds to your advertising account modal, enter your billing information, then click Next.
3. Enter the amount you want to add, then click PayPal Checkout and follow the instructions to complete the transaction.

You can also add funds using the Edit organization budget modal (refer to Edit Funds for more information).

Edit funds#

To manage the balance in your Organization’s account from the Advertise dashboard, click Edit budget at the bottom of the secondary navigation panel. The Edit organization budget modal allows you to add or remove funds, and preview the new balance of the resulting transaction.

Set email alerts#

To receive an email alert when your Organization budget is running low:

1. From the Advertise dashboard, in the secondary navigation menu, select Settings.
2. Scroll to the Organization section, and enable the Budget alert setting.

Create a campaign budget and daily budget#

Your active ad campaigns consume your organization budget. To limit how much of your organization budget an individual campaign can spend, you can set two kinds of campaign-level budgets:

• Campaign budget: the overall budget for an individual campaign
• Daily budget: the target spending for a single day in an individual campaign

Both the campaign budget and the daily budget are optional campaign settings. If you leave these budget settings empty, the campaign will spend an unlimited amount until the organization budget is consumed or the campaign ends.

Campaign budgets#

To limit how much of your Organization budget a specific campaign can spend, set a Campaign budget in the Budget section of your campaign details by doing the following:

1. Select Set budget to display the budget fields.
2. In the Campaign budget field, enter the maximum amount you want your campaign to spend.
3. Select Save to keep your changes.

Daily budget#

Use Daily budgets to set a target for how much of the campaign budget you would like the campaign to spend each day. Think of the daily budget as an average daily spend of your campaign budget. The Unity Advertise system will use the target budget to throttle your campaign as you reach the limit.

However, successful campaigns with low budgets might occassionally overspend the daily budget. Daily budgets reset at midnight, UTC. When you set a daily budget, you can set one daily limit that applies to all countries or individual limits for each country.

To set a daily budget that applies to all countries in the campaign, do the following in the Budget section of your campaign details:

1. Select All countries to display the budget field.
2. In the budget field, enter the daily limit you want to apply to all countries in your campaign.
3. Select Save to keep your changes.

To set individual daily budgets for each of the countries in your campaign, do the following in the Budget section of your campaign details:

1. Select Per country to display the individual country budget fields.
2. Enter a daily limit for each country in your campaign in the field next to the country’s name.
3. Select Save to keep your changes.

Optimize budgets#

Automated bidding is one option for controlling your daily campaign spend. Automated bidding dynamically adjusts your bids throughout the day to optimize how your budget is used. You can use both CPM and CPI billing with Automated bidding.

When you use cost per install (CPI) billing without Automated bidding, successful campaigns will occasionally spend their campaign budget too quickly when they have several successful days in one week. Automated bidding can help you maintain budget limits on a weekly basis. If your campaign overspends one day, Automated bidding adjusts your budget for the next day to compensate. This ensures your campaign stays within budget on a weekly basis.

When you set your daily budget with Automated bidding, aim for one-seventh of the amount you want your campaign to spend in a week. Use this calculation for both CPI-billed and CPM-billed campaigns.

Automated bidding also optimizes your bids so your budget is used more efficiently. By adjusting your bids based on campaign performance, Automated bidding maximizes the number of installs your campaign can achieve in a day.

Optimize budgets with ROAS campaigns#

ROAS (return on ad spend) campaigns also benefit from Automated bidding. When you run a ROAS campaign, with CPI billing, the campaign automatically uses Automated bidding. This bidding strategy helps improve campaign performance for campaigns that are constrained by their daily cap. By optimizing how your bids are placed, using CPI billing in these campaigns can increase your observed return on ad spend (ROAS).

For more information about Automated bids, refer to the Bids documentation.

Recommendations and strategy#

When you start adding budgets to your campaign, Unity offers recommendations for your minimum campaign budget and minimum daily budget. These recommendations are based on the billing type, the number of creatives assigned, and the countries the campaign is targeting.

Before the Unity algorithm can deliver your first campaign results, it needs to explore your campaign and creatives. To ensure that the algorithm has sufficient funds for the exploration process, set a campaign budget that is at least five times the value of your daily budget.

For campaigns billed on impressions (CPM), Unity recommends you start with the minimum budget recommendations offered in the dashboard. These recommendations are designed to mitigate the risk of overspending during the exploration phase with tCPI bidding. After the exploration phase, you can increase or remove the daily budget limit to enable higher impression volumes.

Consider the following approaches to fit your user acquisition strategy as needed:

Edit campaign budgets#

Campaign budgets can be edited for both live and paused ad campaigns. To edit the campaign budgets, navigate to the configuration details of your campaign and select the edit icon in the Budget section. Enter the desired value for your daily budget or campaign budget. You can choose to increase or decrease your campaign budget amount. Select Save to apply your changes.

Edit live campaigns#

Budget changes to live campaigns will be taken into account immediately. However, there can be a delay of a couple of minutes before the impressions of your campaign will reflect the applied budgets changes.

• If you increase the budget significantly it may begin scaling.
• If you decrease the budget significantly the campaign may be serving less ads or stop serving completely if the budget has run out.

Daily Cap status#

The Daily Cap is a set of campaign statuses that notify you when a live campaign has already spent its daily budget. Campaigns with the Daily Capped and Geo Capped statuses are not currently spending, even though they are set as live.

The following table details the Daily Cap statuses and their corresponding daily budgets:

Geo Capped status details#

For more information on how your campaign meets its country-level budgets, hover your mouse over the Geo Capped status. The tooltip shows the first three countries that met their respective budgets and the three countries with the least amount of budget remaining.

Continue campaign delivery#

If you notice a campaign that has a Daily Cap status, but you want the campaign to continue delivering ads for the rest of the day, you can adjust your daily budget.

To adjust the budget, select the Daily Cap status to go to the budget settings for the campaign.

Next steps: Configure attribution tracking links for your campaign.