Budget Protector

Budget Protector is a spreadsheet-based Google Ads script to help ensure that Google Ads daily budgets are set wisely. Every day, it adjusts the daily budget in response to the previous day's spend, with the aim of ensuring that a campaign's total budget (e.g. the amount allocated to spend over the course of a month) is completely spent without going over.

It protects budgets from the client/agency's perspective by preventing overspend; and it protects budgets from Google's perspective by preventing underspend. So everyone's happy :-)

How to set-up

Create a Google Ads script
Set it to run every day early morning
Copy all .gs files
Modify configuration in config.gs
Create a copy of this spreadsheet then follow How it Works section

How it Works

You fill out the spreadsheet with one row per campaign (or shared budget; see below). The important fields that you need to enter are:

Campaign - This is the name of the campaign you wish to manage.
Total Budget - The total amount the client wishes to spend over the full time period.
Start Date - The start of the time period during which to manage the campaign.
End Date - The last day the campaign should run.

Based on what you enter in these fields, Budget Protector will look up the campaign and see how much it has spent so far, and enter this in the Spent To-Date column. It will set the end date of the campaign in the account to match what you entered in the spreadsheet. It will calculate how much remains from the Total Budget, and enter this in the Budget Remaining column. Finally, it will divide that amount by the number of days left until the End Date, possibly adjusted if yesterday's daily budget overspent (see below), and write that to the Est. Daily Budget column.

If any errors occurred (for example, if no campaign with the specified name was found in the account) or if something strange was noticed in the account (e.g. the campaign severely underspent yesterday's budget, or it's currently paused even though the end date has not passed), then a message will be written to the Status column.

See this screenshot for some example values:

Pausing Campaigns

Budget Protector errs on the side of preventing spending. After the end date of a campaign passes, Budget Protector will pause the campaign to ensure that it doesn't spend, even if the end date of the campaign is manually extended (we have had clients/agencies surprised that campaigns automatically resumed spending in this case). It will also pause a campaign if the total budget is spent before the end date is reached. But it will never unpause a campaign.

IMPORTANT: If a campaign is paused, you must unpause it in order to make it spend; Budget Protector will never unpause it for you.

Overspend Adjustment

If yesterday's budget was overspent (see Google Ads Help for details on why this can happen often), Budget Protector will decrease today's daily budget an extra amount to compensate.

Specifically, if yesterday overspent by 10%, today's budget will be decreased by about 9% extra (yes, 9%) so that if today overspends by 10% again, the budget will actually be spent right on track.

Why 9%? Because (100% - 9%) * 110% ≈ 100%.

Underspend

IMPORTANT: If campaigns are consistently underspending, then Budget Protector cannot fix the problem. It requires manual intervention.

Budget Protector can only adjust the daily budget; it can't adjust targeting, which is the most common solution to underspending. But it will highlight underspending campaigns in the Status column so you can take action. By default, it calls out campaigns that are spending less than half of their daily budget. If you'd like a higher or lower threshold, you have to modify UNDERSPEND_THRESHOLD in the config.

Shared Budgets

In the Campaign column, you can also enter the names of shared budgets. Budget Protector will then adjust the daily budget of the shared budget, and it will set the end dates of (and, when appropriate, pause) all the campaigns that use that shared budget.

Always On Campaigns

Budget Protector was originally designed for tactical campaigns, which have clear start- and end dates. However, it does have special support for Always On campaigns as well (with some caveats).

Test Mode

Whenever the DRY_RUN config is set to true, Budget Protector is in Test Mode. In Test Mode, Budget Protector will show its recommended daily budget in the spreadsheet, but it won't actually change the budget in the account. It also won't set the end dates of or pause any campaigns. With the help of the logger, you can check the "Dry runs".

Daily Run

Assuming Budget Protector has been set to run daily, it is only at that time that Budget Protector will notice that an account has fully spent its total budget or not, and decide to pause a campaign. It will not notice that the total budget was spent after that (in the afternoon or evening if it runs on mornings).

IMPORTANT: If you are very concerned about even slight overspend on the last day of a campaign, you will need to monitor the campaign on that day yourself.

Note that such overspend is usually extremely small. Since Budget Protector already decreased the daily budget if previous days overspent, the amount of total budget overspent over the entire campaign time period when using Budget Protector is just a fraction of a single day's spend, not a fraction of the total budget.

To be concrete: for a 30-day campaign with a total budget of $30k, without Budget Protector, Google Ads could overspend $6,000 (20% of $30k) without recompense for you; with Budget Protector, it should be limited to $200 (20% of $1k). That's less than 0.7% of the total budget!

Manual Account Changes

Note that Budget Protector adjusts the daily budget and end date of all campaigns that you enter in the spreadsheet daily. If you change the end date of a campaign using the Google Ads website, Budget Protector will change it back tomorrow unless you also set it in the spreadsheet! Similarly, if you change the daily budget yourself, Budget Protector will reset it tomorrow as well.

IMPORTANT: Budget Protector takes the values in the spreadsheet as the ground truth, and any difference in the account will be overwritten.

The 'Start Date' Column

Budget Protector uses this column only to calculate the amount spent so far. (It is mostly important for Always On accounts, that may have different budgets for different time periods).

IMPORTANT: Budget Protector does not set the start date of campaigns in the account; you must do so when you create the campaigns.

The 'Verified' Column

This column is not used by Budget Protector. It is for your reference only. It was designed to allow multiple client teams to collaborate while filling out the spreadsheet (one team would enter campaign information, and another team would confirm that they verified/approved the information).

The 'Status' Column

This column usually says OK but may contain one or more of the following messages instead:

Some warnings:

Campaign ... has an end date in the future, but it's paused

This is pretty self-explanatory. It warns against leaving a campaign paused for too long so that it won't be able to spend its budget.
Only spent ...% of yesterday's budget

Also straightforward. If a campaign consistently underspends, it won't be able to finish spending the total budget.

Some errors:

Budget not found

There is no budget with that name. The two most common reasons for this are (1) there is a typo in the name (so you need to fix it in the spreadsheet), and (2) the campaign uses a shared budget, so you must enter the name of the shared budget instead of the campaign.
No date given

You did not enter the start or end date.
Invalid date

The date you entered is not a real date (e.g. December 32) or is not in a valid date format. Note that the expected format differs according to locale – in the US, mm/dd/yyyy is used; in Japan, yyyy/mm/dd; and elsewhere, dd/mm/yyyy.
Can't set end date of campaign ... to ... because it's in the past

The end date in the spreadsheet is different from the end date set on the campaign in Google Ads; but the value in the spreadsheet is a date in the past, so it cannot be set in Google Ads (only future dates can be set).

NOTE: that if you try to set today's date as the end date, it won't work because Budget Protector won't run until the next day, at which point it will fail because the date will be in the past.
Total budget must be a number

The total budget value is not a number; most likely it's being treated as text, so try changing the cell formatting to Number.
Total budget must be positive

You entered zero or a negative number. Please increase your budget 😊
Start date lies on or before previous end date

If you see this error, you have 2 or more lines in the spreadsheet with the same budget name, which activates Always On Mode for that campaign. The rows in the spreadsheet for an Always On campaign must contain non-overlapping date ranges. For example, one row could be for 1 Jan to 31 Jan, and another row for 1 Feb to 28 Feb. This error indicates that the date ranges of two rows overlap; for example, 1 Jan to 7 Jan and 7 Jan to 14 Jan overlap on 7 Jan.

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