Budget types — daily, lifetime, portfolio caps and the pacing logic underneath.
Daily budget is the only budget setting at the campaign level — but Amazon does not enforce it as a hard daily cap. The pacing logic explained, with the +10% overspend rule that catches new advertisers off guard.
Every Sponsored Ads campaign requires a daily budget. That number is not a hard daily ceiling — Amazon will, by design, spend up to 25% over it on individual days, balanced by under-spending on quieter days, to deliver the budget over the calendar month. This episode is about how that actually works and how to model your spend against it.
Daily budget — the field that lies a little
Set a daily budget of 100 EUR and a high-traffic day might spend 125 EUR. A quieter day later that week might spend 70 EUR. Amazon's stated commitment is that over a calendar month, average daily spend will not exceed the daily budget. In practice, the variance is meaningful: budget-capped campaigns frequently spend 110–125% of nominal budget on event days and 60–80% on weekends.
What this means for planning: the daily budget number is the expected daily spend, not the maximum. If you absolutely cannot exceed 100 EUR on any single day, the daily budget should be set lower than 100 — closer to 80 — and a portfolio monthly cap should sit on top.
Lifetime budget — Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display only
Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns can be configured with a lifetime budget instead of a daily budget. The lifetime budget is paced across the campaign's date range. This is the cleanest way to run a fixed-budget Prime Day push: a lifetime budget over a fixed-date window genuinely caps total spend.
Portfolio monthly cap — the only true cap
The portfolio-level monthly cap is the only Amazon-native setting that hard-stops spend. Once the portfolio hits its monthly cap, every campaign inside it pauses for the rest of the calendar month. Use it as a safety net (set 20–30% above your model spend), not as a target.
Budget rules — separate feature, separate episode
Budget rules let you schedule budget increases on dates or based on performance triggers. They sit on top of the daily budget and are powerful enough to need their own episode (number 22 in this module).
Practical defaults
For a launch campaign: daily budget set at the daily-loss budget you can stomach, with a portfolio cap at roughly 22× that number. For a profitable manual: daily budget set high enough that pacing rarely caps the campaign (otherwise you starve a profitable spender). For a brand-defence campaign: daily budget deliberately small — these should be cheap to run, and if the budget is being hit, something is wrong upstream.
Watch Episode 09: Budget types (German)
The German walkthrough — every budget setting in Sponsored Ads and how pacing actually works.
Cap spend before Amazon's pacing logic does it for you.
AMALYZE shows you, day by day, where pacing pushed spend above your nominal daily budget — so you can build budget rules that match how the bidder actually behaves.