This article will help you understand and resolve the "Limited by budget" status that can appear when bid adjustments are applied to your campaigns.
On this page
- How to know if these problem solving tips apply to you
- Considerations before troubleshooting
- Resolve common issues
- FAQs
How to know if these problem solving tips apply to you
“Limited by budget” is a bid strategy status that's used when your average daily budget is lower than the recommended amount. If you set a bid adjustment that increases your bids, then your resulting bid may increase the number of auctions your ad is eligible for. In turn, a higher resulting bid can lead to your campaign becoming "limited by budget". In that case, your budget may prevent you from getting all the new traffic available for your campaign.
Considerations before troubleshooting
- A campaign that's "limited by budget" can still be successful and help you meet your advertising goals. However, if your campaign becomes "limited by budget" after setting a bid adjustment, consider increasing your budget to increase clicks, or lowering your bid adjustments to get more clicks within your budget.
- Some bid adjustments may be ignored when using select automated bidding strategies. Location, time, audience, call and demographic bid adjustments are all ignored by most automated bidding strategies, with the exception of Maximize clicks.
Resolve common issues
When your bid strategy is "limited by budget,” ads aren't regularly showing as often as they could. Here’s what you can do to resolve these issues:
- Click the budget simulator
in the campaigns table to review how much exposure your campaign might receive if you use a different budget. You can consider lowering your Target CPA or raising your Target ROAS in the limited campaign. You can also lower your bid adjustment to try to fit more clicks or video views within your budget.
Example
Let's say you set a bid of $1 and an average daily budget of US$100, and your campaign is getting about 200 clicks and spending US$95 per day (it isn't “limited by budget”). Then, you set a bid adjustment that results in a +100% increase for searches in Chicago on mobile devices for a resulting bid of US$2.00.
Since your increased resulting bid causes your ad to be eligible for more auctions, you would need to spend US$150 to acquire all the possible clicks for your newly available traffic. But if your average daily budget remains US$100, your traffic will be "limited by budget." If you don’t change your average daily budget, your ads might get fewer clicks.