[FAQ]

Hey,
I’m hoping someone can explain what’s going on with my ad billing because I’m completely baffled. I set a strict $20 daily budget for my campaign. I’m checking my reports, and on Monday it spent $20, but on Tuesday it spent $24.50, and yesterday it spent $23.80.

How is this possible? I thought ‘daily budget’ was a hard cap. It’s making it impossible for me to predict my monthly costs. Is this a glitch, or am I missing a setting somewhere? I need it to stick to the $20 I set.

[Jeff Bullas]

This is one of the most confusing parts of Facebook advertising, so it’s a great question.

Short Answer: Facebook’s “daily budget” is not a strict daily cap but an average spend over a calendar week. Facebook may spend up to 25% more than your daily budget on any given day if it sees a good opportunity.

The system is designed to automatically spend your money more efficiently, so it overspends on high-opportunity days and underspends on low-opportunity days to balance out.

Think of your twenty-dollar daily budget as a one-hundred-and-forty-dollar weekly budget ($20 x 7 days). Facebook’s algorithm analyses your ad’s performance and, if it identifies a day with a lot of high-quality traffic, it will spend more to capture those extra results, which is why you see spending of twenty-three or twenty-four dollars. The system is designed to compensate by spending under your budget on other days. The most important rule to know is that while Facebook may exceed your daily budget by up to twenty-five per cent on any single day, it will never charge you more than your daily budget multiplied by seven over a calendar week.

Cheers,

Jeff

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