About account budgets
Account budgets, formerly known as budget orders, are used by advertisers who pay by monthly invoicing. When you create an account budget, you choose a certain amount of money you'd like to spend over a period of time. This can help you control your costs in addition to your average daily campaign budgets.
For example, an agency may want to allocate a fixed amount each month to a client's account. In addition to a campaign's average daily budget, they can use an account budget to make sure monthly costs won't exceed that amount for the entire account.
On this page
An account budget acts as a spend cap across all your campaigns. If your total campaign costs reach the designated amount in the account budget before your set end date, all ads in the account will stop running. An account budget won't distribute your costs across your campaigns or across your specified time span. For that, you need campaign average daily budgets.
Example
Let's say you have a Google Ads account with 2 campaigns. You create an account budget for $1,000 USD for the period of April 1 to April 30. If your account accrues $1,000 USD in costs after April 1st and before April 30th, your ads will stop running until your next account budget starts.
To make sure this $1,000 USD lasts the entire 30-day month, you turn to your campaign average daily budgets. First, you decide how much you want to spend on each campaign. In this case, you want to dedicate $750 USD to campaign #1 and $250 USD to campaign #2. Then, you divide each amount by 30 (days in the month) to find your average daily budget:
- $750/30 USD = $25 USD
- $250/30 USD = $8.33 USD
You assign campaign #1 an average daily budget of $25 USD and campaign #2 an average daily budget of $8.33 USD.
Keep in mind
- The "Account budget" column shows you the total amount that has been requested or approved for a budget. If the budget is unlimited, you’ll find “Unlimited”. This means your Google Ads campaigns aren't limited to a particular amount, but rather the average daily budgets that you've set for each campaign.
- The "% spent" column shows you the total amount spent so far for a budget. This number can be higher than the amount listed in the budget column if, for example, a credit was added to your budget. Below the spend amount, you'll find the percentage that the spend amount represents out of the effective budget.
Sometimes, your account budget can appear with a green + (plus sign) or a red - (minus sign) preceding it. Here’s what they mean.
Green + (plus sign)
An amount can appear with a green + (plus sign) in 2 situations: This occurs when a credit adjustment was applied to your account or we detected invalid clicks for which you won't be charged. In both cases, the amount shown after the green + is your additional budget available to spend, which offsets the credit adjustments.
Our system calculates the amount of your budget that was taken up by invalid clicks. Since you won't be charged for the invalid clicks, the system then adds that amount back to your budget so that you spend the amount you originally intended.
Red - (minus sign)
An amount preceded by a red - (minus sign) is an amount that's not yet available for use. Usually, this happens when you've just increased your existing budget and the increase hasn't been fully processed yet. This budget status is temporary, and you should soon find that the notation disappear when the additional budget is added to the available budget line.
To streamline your experience, you'll soon be able to view other advertising services, such as time-based YouTube reservation campaigns, which includes but isn't limited to CPH (cost per hour) and CPD (cost per day), within Google Ads.
These advertising services are not associated with or charged to your Google Ads account budget. They'll be charged over your account budgets limits and these charges will be displayed on a separate page on your invoice not associated with any account budgets. The account summary page will have an additional row(s) for these costs without any account budget name.
Although these charges are separate from your account budget, you'll receive a single, simplified invoice for your Google Ads campaigns and these other advertising services.
👁 This image represents an example of a consolidated Google invoice.