About budgets

A budget is the amount of money that you want to spend on showing people your ads. It's also a cost control tool. It helps control your overall spend for a campaign or ad set, the same way a bid strategy helps control your cost per result.

You can set an overall budget for your campaign with Meta Advantage campaign budget (previously known as campaign budget optimisation), or set individual budgets for your ad sets.

• Campaign budgets: All campaign budgets use Advantage campaign budget. This lets you set one overarching campaign budget that continuously distributes in real time to ad sets with the best opportunities. Campaign budgets can simplify campaign setup and reduce the number of budgets that you have to manage manually. They help you get the most results possible from your campaign at the lowest cost, and work best if you're flexible with how budget is spent across ad sets.
• Ad set budgets: You may choose to set individual budgets for your ad sets if you want more control over delivery within specific ad sets. This can be useful if you have mixed optimisation goals and bid strategies, or large differences in audience size between ad sets.

Learn more about how to choose between campaign budgets and ad set budgets.

For both campaign budgets and ad set budgets, you can choose whether your budget applies to each day, or over the entire lifetime of the campaign or ad set.

• Daily budgets: The average amount that you want to spend on an ad set or campaign each day. Daily budgets are not a hard cap. When you set your daily budget, you're setting an average daily spend over the course of a week. They can work well if you want to spend roughly the same amount each day to achieve consistent daily results for your campaign or ad set.
• Lifetime budgets: The total amount that you're willing to spend over the entire runtime of your campaign or ad set. Lifetime budgets are a hard cap, not an average. They can be useful if you don't want to exceed a certain spend amount, and work best if you have flexibility on how much you want to spend each day.

Note: It is usually normal to see some fluctuations in spend. For example, daily budgets are an average daily spend over the course of a week, and may fluctuate up to 25% above your budget on some days and less on others. Also, there may be some hours of the day where we spend more or less depending on available opportunities. Your charges will average out over a calendar week (Sunday to Saturday). That means that for every week ending on Saturday at midnight, you won't spend more than seven times your daily budget.

• Change your budget
• About bid and budget pacing
• About minimum budgets