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Setting Your Campaign Budget
Setting Your Campaign Budget
Taylor Dunne avatar
Written by Taylor Dunne
Updated over 3 weeks ago

Whether you choose to allocate funds on a daily basis or for the entire campaign, the MNTN Budget Tool allows for strategic control over your budget and ensures that your advertising efforts align with your fiscal calendar.


Best Practices and Considerations for the Budget Tool

Leverage The Budget Tool to set daily spend targets or total budget targets.

Use the Budget Tool to set either a daily target or a total budget depending on how your team manages your advertising budgets.

💡Note: Fluctuations in daily spend are expected and always within a reasonable range to spend the budget against the flight dates. This is a result of our technology targeting your most engaged audiences precisely when and where they interact with their content. More details on budget pacing seen here.

Your defined budgets are applied at the campaign level.

Your customized budgets and timeframes are defined at the campaign level rather than the audience or ad creative level.

Utilize budget flights of 3 days minimum.

Our technology requires at least a 3 day flight to identify and engage the best-performing households within your audience composition. Allow for this duration to enhance the tech's ability to deliver results.

The Budget Tool does not allow for day-parting.

Adopting an audience-first approach, our technology identifies peak times for engagement. While the Budget Tool does not support day-parting, this restriction is intentional to maintain accurate pacing and align with the audience-centric approach.

Do not edit Active Budgets.

To maintain accurate pacing and performance, we don't recommend editing active budgets. Instead, leverage the tool's Replace and Boost functionalities for adjustments without compromising the tool's ability to effectively allocate your desired budget.

Budget "gaps" are expected!

Any time between defined budgets without a spend allocation appears as a $0 budget line item, serving as a safeguard during periods with no active ad serving. As such, these cannot be deleted.


Navigating the Budget Tool

The Budget Tool can be found in your campaign shell on the Budget & Goal step.

Budget Tool Columns

Each of your campaign's defined budgets and timeframes will live as line items within the Budget Tool. The line items are then categorized as follow:

Feature

Description

Status Column

The Status column reflects the state of that specific budget line item:

  • Active: budget input that is currently live

  • Scheduled: budget input with a Start Time scheduled in future

  • Ended: budget input that now living in the past

Start Time Column

The Start Time column reflects the start time of the associated budget line item

End Time Column

The End Time column reflects the defined end time of the associated budget line item

Type

The Type column reflects the budget type of the associated budget line item:

Budget

The Budget column reflects the customized, defined budget spend of the associated line item

Spend Column

The Spend column reflects the line item's total spend when your campaign is live

💡 Note: The displayed times in this tool will correspond to the timezone set at the time of creating the MNTN account. You can view your account's set timezone under the General tab of the My Account section.

Budget Tool Filters

You can filter your budget line items by leveraging the tool's Filter feature. You can clear these appended filters at any point.

Name

Functionality

Status Filter

Filter your campaign's budgets by:

  • Active

  • Scheduled

  • Ended

Type Filter

Filter your campaign's budgets by:


Adding New Budget

Depending on your team's needs and fiscal calendar, you have the option of setting monthly or flighted budgets when assigning new budgets to your campaign, even allowing you to schedule heavy-ups in advance.

[screenshot]

Monthly Budget Type

The monthly budget type is best utilized for an evergreen budget or a budget you know you want to spend towards this channel every month.

Things to Know

Why

Budget Resets the 1st of Every Month

When selecting the Monthly budget type, the allocated budget resets on the first day of each calendar month and continues to do so until the specified end date, or if set to Ongoing, until manually paused

Monthly budgets can have a defined end date, or can be set up as ongoing, resetting budget until the campaign is manually paused or until the budget is replaced

Launching Monthly Budgets Mid-Month

You have the option to set your budget as "monthly" even if the start or end dates do not fall on the 1st and last of the month respectively

  • If the start or end dates intersect the month, budgets will automatically be pro-rated for that time period based on the defined "Pacing per day" amount, and budget type will be changed to "flighted" only for that month.

The UI will automatically prorate your monthly budget based on the days left in the month to ensure you spend on track. This does not apply to the "flighted" budget set-up.

Resuming You Monthly Budget after being Paused

If you push your campaigns live after being paused and are utilizing an existing monthly recurring budget, the UI will not prorate the monthly budget

  • the budget tool will not recognize that you were paused earlier in the month since the budget flight was still considered "active" even though it was not spending.

  • What this means is the UI will spend your budget in full for the month upon relaunch, so you need to manually prorate budgets by setting up a new budget as "flighted" and utilizing the "Replace" function, calculating daily spend as provided in the UI * days left in month = flighted budget.


Example: If you have a recurring monthly budget set up of $10,000 and you relaunch on the 25th of the month, the system will spend that full $10,000 over that 5 day period. It is imperative that you create a new flighted budget type, in this case it would equal $333.33 [daily spend] * 5 [days left in the month] = $1,667 [budget input for your new flighted budget through EOM]

To set up a monthly budget input, complete the following steps:

1️⃣ Navigate to the Budget & Goal step of your campaign shell.

2️⃣ Select the blue + New Budget button in the top-right corner of the screen.

3️⃣ A drawer will appear asking you to define the budget type, start time, end time, and the budget or desired daily pacing. Select the Monthly budget type.

💡 Note: You'll notice the Audience Reach feature within this drawer. More on the feature can be seen here.

4️⃣ Select your budget Start Time, or the time you want your ads to begin to serve. Select the End Time if desired, or leave this option set to Ongoing.

💡 Note: You can always adjust the budget's End Time once live.

5️⃣ Enter your total budget in the Budget field or your daily pacing goal in the Pacing field. The other field will then dynamically populate. Hit the blue Next button when complete.

6️⃣ A new drawer named Review Changes will appear. Ensure everything listed is to your team's liking, then hit the green Save button in the bottom-right corner.

Flighted Budget Type

Your team may operate on a weekly fiscal calendar or have a pre-determined budget across a specific period of time. If that's the case, leverage the Flighted budget type.

The inputted budget will then be paced across the defined period of time and does not refresh as the Monthly budget type does.

To set up a flighted budget input, complete the following steps:

1️⃣ Navigate to the Budget & Goal step of your campaign shell.

2️⃣ Select the blue + New Budget button in the top-right corner of the screen.

3️⃣ A drawer will appear asking you to define the budget type, start time, end time, and the budget or desired daily pacing. Select the Flighted budget type.

4️⃣ Select your budget Start Time, or the time you want your ads to begin to serve. Select your team's desired End Time.

5️⃣ Enter your total budget in the Budget field or your daily pacing goal in the Pacing field. The other field will then dynamically populate. Hit the blue Next button when complete.

6️⃣ A new drawer named Review Changes will appear. Ensure everything listed is to your team's liking, then hit the green Save button in the bottom-right corner.

Inputting a Daily Pacing Goal

If you prefer setting budgets with daily spending goals, you have the option to input a per-day pacing target.

If you choose a daily spending target, enter it in the Per Day field. The UI will automatically calculate the total budget based on your daily spend and defined date range, evenly distributing it over the specified dates.

Our budgeting system will then automatically calculate a total budget for your campaign, considering the duration of the flight or using a standard 30-day month. This ensures that your daily targets are more achievable than ever before.

[screenshot]

To input a daily pacing goal, follow the below steps:

1️⃣ Navigate to the Budget & Goal step of your campaign shell.

2️⃣ Select the blue + New Budget button in the top-right corner of the screen.

3️⃣ A drawer will appear asking you to define the budget type, start time, end time, and the budget or desired daily pacing. Select either the Flighted or Monthly budget type.

4️⃣ Select your budget Start Time, or the time you want your ads to begin to serve. Select your team's desired End Time if selecting a Flighted budget type, or Monthly if you want this daily budget pacing to be ongoing.

5️⃣ Enter your desired daily pacing goal in the Pacing field. Hit the blue Next button when complete.

6️⃣ A new drawer named Review Changes will appear. Ensure everything listed is to your team's liking, then hit the green Save button in the bottom-right corner.

Overlapping Budgets

If a new budget is added in that overlaps with existing scheduled or live budgets, you're given the option to either Boost your budget or Replace your budget during that timeframe.

Feature

Description

Use Case

Boost

  • Combine the budgets to boost spend on the overlapping dates

  • This will combine the existing budget with the new budget change for the defined timeframe

Incremental Dollars For:

  • Promotion

  • Sale

  • Seasonal Push

Replace

  • Replace spend on the overlapping dates using the new budget

  • This will replace the existing budget with the new combined budgets for the defined time frame

Boost

1️⃣ Navigate to the Budget & Goal step of your campaign shell.

2️⃣ Select the blue + New Budget button in the top-right corner of the screen.

3️⃣ A drawer will appear asking you to define the budget type, start time, end time, and the budget or desired daily pacing. Select the Monthly budget type.

Replace

Updating Budget's End Date

Instead of traditionally deleting budget's

Deleting Budgets

You can delete a scheduled budget.

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Monthly Budget Type

  • Defining Start or End dates that are mid-month

    • You have the option to set your budget as "monthly" even if the start or end dates do not fall on the 1st and last of the month respectively

    • If the start or end dates intersect the month, budgets will automatically be pro-rated for that time period based on the defined "Pacing per day" amount, and budget type will be changed to "flighted" only for that month. Example below:

  • If a new flighted budget overlaps with an ongoing monthly budget (AKA "end date" set as ongoing), that monthly budget will continue following the end of the flighted budget.

  • Daily budgets

    • The UI will allow you to end a budget and begin a new budget mid-day, but

FAQs

  • If my flight underspends, will that underspend be added into the next flight?

    • No, once a flight is complete, unspent budget will not roll over into the next flight. Our automated bidding technology is always striving to pace evenly while finding the most efficient inventory as possible, so while we don't expect your flight to underspend, please reach out to your CSM for any pacing questions.

Still want to learn more? View our Flighted Budgets Webinar that walks through the ins and outs of this tool in depth!

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