Monthly budgets in Adswave
Where the monthly budget is entered, how it carries forward, what pacing, alerts and reports do with it, and what Adswave never does with it.
The monthly budget is the one number in the pacing view that Adswave does not read from Google or Meta, because neither platform has a monthly budget field. You enter it for each linked ad account, and Adswave adds those amounts up per client.
Where to set it
Open Admin, then Clients, and edit the client. Every Google Ads and Meta account linked to the client has its own Monthly budget field. The setup checklist's "Set monthly budgets" step opens the same page. Owners, admins and members can all set budgets for clients in the workspaces they can see.
The Google accounts' budgets make up the client's Google budget and the Meta accounts' budgets its Meta budget. The pacing view shows both, and the total.
How a budget carries forward
- It applies from the current month. The dialog always saves for the month you are in. You cannot enter next month's figure in advance.
- It carries forward. A month with no amount of its own uses the most recently saved amount for that account, so you only touch it when the agreement changes.
- It cannot be cleared to zero. A blank or zero amount is not saved, and the previous figure stays in force.
- A change applies to the whole month. There is no proration for a budget changed part-way through, and every pacing window, the long ones included, is measured against the current month's figure.
What it is used for
- Budget pacing. Expected spend is the budget divided by 30.4, times the days in each window. How pacing is calculated shows the arithmetic and its limits.
- Pacing alerts. A pacing rule on a client or an ad account compares actual spend over its window with that account's budget divided by 30.4, times the days in the window. An account without a budget is skipped.
- Client reports. The report's pacing block sets spend against the client's budgets for the last one, two and three calendar months, counting the full monthly amount for each month.
What it is not
- Not a cap. Adswave is read-only. Reaching or passing the budget changes nothing on the platforms. Google's daily budgets and Meta's spending limits stay whatever you set there.
- Not a rollover. Unspent budget from one month does not carry into the next. If your agreement rolls budget over, enter the adjusted figure for the new month.
- Not a billing figure. Reported spend can be revised after it first appears. Reconcile invoices against the platform's own billing, never against a mid-month figure from any third-party tool, including this one.
Tips
- Enter budgets before opening the pacing view. Without one, expected spend is zero and the variance shows a green 0.0 per cent for the wrong reason.
- Keep each client's accounts in one currency. Budgets carry no currency of their own, and Adswave adds spend from different currencies without converting it.
- The budget pacing calculator runs the same 30.4 arithmetic for one client, if you want to check a figure by hand.