Monthly budget
Access from: Processes → Workflows → New workflow → From template → Campaign Budget Pacing
Beta feature
This template is in beta: it is enabled account by account. If you don't see it under Available templates, it isn't enabled for yours yet — get in touch and we'll enable it.
Amazon only understands daily budgets, and on a good day it can spend up to twice yours. The typical result is a month that runs out of money halfway through, or one that reaches day 31 with half of it unspent.
This workflow checks every day how much of the month you have spent and how much you should have spent by now, and adjusts the daily budget so the money lasts to the last day. It never pauses campaigns.
How to turn it on
It is a standalone workflow: you don't need the Smart Campaigns Optimizer, and it doesn't interfere with it if you have it (the optimizer moves bids, this one moves budgets).
- Go to Processes → Workflows.
- New workflow → From template → Campaign Budget Pacing.
- Adjust the thresholds if you want to (or Skip and keep the defaults).
- Run a manual execution and review in the history what it would have done.
- Activate the workflow. It runs every day at 06:00.
It starts paused
Like any template, cloning it leaves it paused: it touches no budget until you flip the toggle.
Once active, it covers all your campaigns
There is no campaign to tick: as soon as it is active, it paces every enabled campaign with a daily budget. To leave one out, exclude this workflow in that campaign's AI settings.
Where the monthly target comes from
The workflow needs to know how much money that campaign has for the month. It looks in three places, in this order, and uses the first one it finds:
| Order | Source | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monthly portfolio cap in Amazon | The campaign belongs to a portfolio with a monthly budget. It is split across the active campaigns of that portfolio |
| 2 | Campaign monthly target | You have set it in the campaign's configuration |
| 3 | Daily budget × days in the month | Always available. It is the implicit plan behind your daily budget |
For it to actually brake, it needs a real target
With the third level the target is your daily budget times the days in the month, so by definition it cannot "run out early": the workflow will only be able to release budget to campaigns that keep running out, not brake the ones spending too fast.
If what you want is for a monthly budget to last, set the cap on the Amazon portfolio or set the Monthly spend target in the campaign’s AI settings.
An example
A campaign with €3,000 for the month, halfway through, when it should have spent around €1,500:
| Situation | What it does |
|---|---|
| It has spent €2,100 | Too fast. €900 left for 15 days → lowers the daily budget to about €60/day. It brakes, and the month lasts |
| It has spent €1,550 | Right where it should be. Nothing is touched |
| It has spent €700 and kept running out of budget | €2,300 left for 15 days → raises the daily budget so it can spend them |
| It has spent €700 but never ran out of budget | Nothing is touched. Budget isn't the constraint there, demand is, and raising the cap doesn't sell more |
The limits it respects
| Variable | Default | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Tolerance band (%) | 10 | How far spend can drift from the ideal pace before touching the budget. At 10%, a month running 8% ahead is left alone |
| Maximum change per run (%) | 25 | How much a campaign's budget can move in a single day. A low value makes corrections gentler |
| Minimum daily budget | No minimum | Floor below which it won't go. Amazon also has its own per-marketplace minimum, and the higher of the two always wins |
| Maximum daily budget | No maximum | Ceiling above which it won't go, even if the pace calls for it |
The workflow also skips insignificant changes: if the correction is smaller than 1%, it leaves things as they are.
If the monthly budget runs out
It lowers the daily budget to the minimum Amazon accepts (€1 in Spain) in one step, and leaves it there until the next month starts. The campaign is not paused: it idles.
When the new month begins it restores in one jump the daily budget you had configured, without ramping up.
What it does not do
- It does not pause campaigns. Pausing and reactivating repeatedly resets the learning phase of Amazon's algorithm, and that hurts performance exactly when you want more control.
- It does not move budget between campaigns or portfolios: each campaign is measured against its own target.
- It does not change the daily budget you configured. That number is kept as the reference; what it adjusts is the live budget in Amazon.
- It does not adjust by hour of day.
Where to see what it decided
In the workflow history, every cycle leaves one line per campaign with the monthly target, the spend so far, the drift from the ideal pace and the resulting budget. Decisions to leave things alone also show up, with their reason: that's how you confirm the workflow is looking at the campaign even when it hasn't changed it.
Two things worth knowing
- Data runs two days behind. Amazon takes time to close a day's spend, so pacing is computed over the days already closed. Over a full month that doesn't change the outcome.
- It acts on any enabled campaign with a daily budget, whether the optimizer manages it or not. Paused ones and lifetime-budget ones are skipped.
Next steps
- Smart Campaigns Optimizer — what it decides each cycle and which campaigns it acts on
- Autonomy modes and variables — the rest of the workflow parameters
- What the workflow did — check the effect on your campaigns
- Per-campaign AI settings — target and limits for a specific campaign