Introduction to user acquisition budgets
Learn about how budgets control your advertising campaigns.
Read time 3 minutesLast updated 2 days ago
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
Note
Use the Reporting dashboard 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 choose between a campaign-level budget or country-level budgets. Country-level budgets can be individual or grouped:- Campaign-level daily budget: A single daily limit that applies across all countries.
- Per-country daily budget: Individual daily limits for each targeted country.
- Multi-country daily budget: A shared daily budget pooled across a group of countries, with Unity's algorithm automatically distributing spend within the group based on performance.
Multi-country daily budgets
Multi-country daily budgets allow you to share a campaign's daily spending limit across multiple grouped budgets. Each budget group can contain multiple countries. You define groups of countries and set one shared budget per group. Unity's optimization system then distributes spend across the countries in each group in real time, prioritizing where bids win and conversions happen.Tip
Multi-country budgets work simultaneously with per-country daily budgets in the same campaign.
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.
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. |