Introduction to user acquisition budgets
There are three types of budgets:
This topic explains how budget settings dictate how much marketing spend your user acquisition campaigns could consume.
Important: Campaign budget limits are estimates. Because actual spend depends on many factors including campaign performance, Unity does not guarantee that you will be invoiced according to the budget limit amount.
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.
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.
Tip: Use Report Builder or the Advertiser Statistics API to understand how your organization consumes its budget.
Budget remaining
You can view the balance of your organization budget in the bottom of the Unity Ads User Acquisition dashboard secondary navigation menu. You can also select Budget remaining > Add funds to make payments to your organization budget. For more information, refer to the Budgets and payments documentation.
Note: If you have set up post payments with a client partner, the Budget remaining section will display Credit line in use instead of a balance amount. Refer to the Post payments documentation for more information.
Campaign budgets
Campaign budgets determine how much of your organization budget can be consumed by an individual campaign. Campaign budgets are optional; if you do not set a campaign budget, your campaign will spend an unlimited amount of your overall organization budget.
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 User Acquisition system will use the target budget to throttle your campaign as you reach the limit.
However, successful campaigns with low budgets might occasionally 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.
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.
Note: Daily Cap statuses are only visible for live campaigns. For more information, review the documentation on how to set campaigns live.
The following table details the Daily Cap statuses and their corresponding daily budgets:
| Status | Daily budget | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Capped | All countries | The campaign is live but is unable to deliver ads because it has met its daily budget. |
| Geo Capped | Per country | The campaign is live but is unable to deliver ads (or is partially delivering ads) because one or more country has met its daily budget. |
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.