Budget rules — scheduling, performance triggers, and the BFCM playbook.
Budget rules let you raise daily budgets on specific dates or in response to performance thresholds. The two types — schedule-based and performance-based — and the standard rules every always-on campaign should have.
The daily budget on a campaign is a single static number. Budget rules let you stack scheduled or conditional increases on top of it. They are the right answer to "I keep raising and lowering budgets for Prime Day" and the wrong answer to "the campaign keeps running out of budget" — the latter is a structural problem, not a scheduling problem.
Schedule-based budget rules
Pre-define a percentage increase to the daily budget on specific dates. Example: +200% on the four Prime Day days, +150% on the Black Friday weekend, +100% on Cyber Monday. Set them up in November and they run automatically; the alternative is hand-editing 30+ campaigns at 23:00 on a Sunday night.
Performance-based budget rules
Pre-define a percentage increase to apply conditional on a performance threshold. Example: increase the daily budget by 50% if ROAS over the trailing 7 days has been above 5.0. Performance-based rules are more dangerous than schedule-based ones — they amplify a campaign that is already doing well, which is usually correct, but they will also amplify a one-off spike that does not repeat.
The rules every always-on campaign should have
- Prime Day window: schedule-based, +150–250% depending on category seasonality.
- Black Friday week: schedule-based, +100–200%.
- Cyber Monday: schedule-based, +100–150%.
- Christmas pre-week (mid-December): schedule-based, +50–100% for categories with gifting demand.
Performance-based rules: optional, reserved for proven manual exact-match campaigns with a thick conversion history. Never deploy a performance-based rule on a campaign less than 30 days old.
The interaction with portfolio caps
A budget rule that pushes a campaign's daily spend above its share of a portfolio monthly cap will quietly contribute to the portfolio hitting the cap mid-month. Always raise the portfolio cap before relying on schedule-based budget rules for major events — otherwise you bought the rule and lost the campaign for the second half of the month.
Why the rule cannot fix a structural problem
If a campaign hits its daily budget every single day, the rule to fix it is not a +50% schedule on Tuesdays. The rule to fix it is raising the daily budget permanently — the campaign is structurally under-funded relative to the demand. Budget rules are for predictable events, not for chronic under-budgeting.
Watch Episode 22: Budget rules (German)
The German walkthrough — budget rules in Sponsored Ads.
Stop hand-editing budgets every event.
AMALYZE flags campaigns where realised spend hit the budget ceiling on event days — exactly the campaigns where a budget rule would have paid back the credit.