Advanced | Campaign Management

Set and adjust budgets

How to manage and increase your budget

Apple Search Ads Advanced lets you set a budget and time period for each campaign. Once you set a budget, your campaign will run until you exhaust your budget, pause your campaign, or reach the end date you set.

You can add to your campaign budget and adjust any daily spend cap at any time to ensure your ads keep running. Note that you can’t decrease your budget once your campaign has started.

To increase your budget, simply click the Edit Campaign Settings link at the top right side of your Ad Groups dashboard for that campaign, and enter a new amount. You can also change your budget directly in the field in the Budget column on the Campaigns dashboard.

Note that when you increase your budget, you’ll see the cumulative total for the campaign since it was created. For example:

Your current budget that’s run out: $100 (US)
Your additional budget: $100 (US)
The campaign budget you’d enter: $200 (US)

If you’d like your budget to last for a specific time period, you may want to add a daily spend cap to distribute your spend over your desired period of time.

For example, if your budget is $1200 (US) and you’d like it to last for 30 days, consider setting a daily spend cap at $40 (US) per day.

Once you reach your daily cap, your ads stop appearing for that day, but will restart the next day, until your campaign-level budget is depleted.

If you find you’re hitting your daily cap every day and your ROI is meeting your goals, consider increasing your daily cap to see if you get additional impressions and conversions.

While we make our best effort to limit your campaign spend to your requested daily caps, they’re not guaranteed and your campaign may occasionally spend more. But you’ll never be charged more than your campaign lifetime budget.

How to set or adjust your cost-per-acquisition goal

Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goals are optional, but there’s a good reason to opt in: We use your CPA goal as guidance to maximise your app downloads. Note that it’s not guaranteed.

You can add or adjust a CPA goal at anytime. For example, if your impressions are low, you might want to consider raising your CPA goal. If it’s priced too low, it can prevent your ad from being entered into auctions. Here’s how to set or adjust it:

From your Campaigns dashboard, click the campaign with the ad group containing the CPA goal you want to change.
Within the Ad Groups dashboard, make sure you can see the CPA Goal column. If it’s not showing in the table, click the “Edit columns” link on the right and add CPA Goal to the Columns to Show section.
Click the amount in the column.
Enter your new amount in the highlighted field.
Click the tick to confirm.