Should you use a daily or lifetime budget? Let’s consider each option…
Daily Budgets
If you use a daily budget, you can set how much you’ll spend every day on average.
Meta can spend a bit more to take advantage of opportunities (Daily Budget Flexibility), but you’ll maintain that daily average over a week.
You also aren’t required to set an end date when using daily budgets.
Lifetime Budgets
Lifetime budget allows you to set the total amount you want to spend on a promotion and your budget will be spread out (mostly) evenly. In this case, too, more may be spent on certain days to take advantage of opportunities.
Another difference is that lifetime budgets allow you to run ads on a schedule (also known as “day parting”).
When used, you can run your ads on only certain days and times.
While I wouldn’t normally recommend this, there are times when it makes sense.
Hybrid Approach
There is a hybrid option. If you have a promotion and want to limit the lifetime spend, you could use a daily budget but set a Campaign Spending Limit.
This way, you can leverage the benefits of daily budgets while capping how much you spend for the life of the ad set. You can also raise that limit whenever you want. It’s like the best of both worlds.
What I Do
Overall, I’m not aware of any inherent advantage of one approach over the other. It’s mostly a personal preference.
Personally, I prefer daily budgets because they give me a better expectation of what I spend every day. I also usually prefer not to set an end date so that I can leverage a high-performing ad set and keep it going.
What do you do?
