What is Budget Allocator?
Budget Allocator (available in Campaign Group) is an automated, performance-driven system designed to dynamically allocate an advertiser's Campaign Group budget across active campaigns within the group. By leveraging simulation data and real-time performance metrics, the product prioritises cost-efficiency by allocating budget toward campaigns with the lowest-cost conversions first while ensuring complete budget utilisation.
Why should you use Budget Allocator?
Improve performance: Automatically shifts budget to campaigns with the best performance and hence responding to performance changes
Improved efficiency: Save time by eliminating the need for routine manual budget management, and focus on strategic decisions and creative optimisations
Stability: Maintain stable performance at the campaign group level
How it works
A campaign group should always be built around one marketing objective and one success KPI — that's just good structure. Budget Allocator enhances any group built that way. There are two common plays of using the budget allocator; most advertisers start with Play 1.
Play 1: The Auto-pilot group (most common)
Objective: The advertiser runs a campaign group toward a single goal with multiple complementary campaigns — different audiences, creatives, placements or geo locations that all contribute to the same objective. They're not trying to crown one winner; they want the whole portfolio to perform, and they're confident in the overall mix.
What Budget Allocator does: It runs the group on auto-pilot — continuously rebalancing budget toward whichever campaigns are converting most efficiently over time and looking as a potential for scaling, holding a minimum spend on the underperforming, managing high budget depletion, and reacting to changes throughout the day. The advertiser stops manually reallocating daily budgets and trusts the group to self-optimise toward the goal.
Who it's for: Any performance advertiser who today manually manages budgets across campaigns in a group to keep CPA in check. This is an everyday use case.
Play 2: The Testing group
Objective: The advertiser wants to test different tactics against the same goal — and let the data pick the winner. Each tactic becomes its own campaign in the group:
Tactic Dimension | Examples of different campaigns under one campaign group |
Creative Strategy | Testimonial vs. product-feature vs. problem / solution angle |
Targeting / Audience | Broad (run of network) vs. retargeting vs. segments |
Platform | Desktop vs. mobile |
Operating System | iOS vs. Android |
Environment | Separate campaigns per environment |
What Budget Allocator does: It concentrates budget on the best-performing tactic over time while keeping a minimum on the others — so the advertiser discovers the winning strategy and improves blended CPA at the same time, with no manual reallocation.
The shared principle for both plays is: One goal = one campaign group; if a campaign has a different objective, then give it its own group.
How to use Budget Allocator
Budget Allocator can be enabled in the Campaign Group creation form
In the Campaign Group Budget section, use the auto budget allocation option (as shown below)
Optional: Under the advanced option, you can add a spending limit for the campaign group. This limit will act as a threshold and the campaign group will not breach this limit by pausing all the campaigns once this limit is reached
Best Practices for using Budget Allocator
Create a new campaign group and then create at least 2 new campaigns in this group
The campaign group should be built around one clear marketing objective and a single target KPI / success metric. If you’re running campaigns with different objectives, simply create separate Campaign Groups for each objective
Note: Keep the campaign conversion goals consistent across the group. If campaigns historically had different conversion events set at campaign level, that can create conflicting CPA goals in one group — not optimal for the budget allocator
Budget recommendation: We recommend daily campaign budget to be 5 to 10 times of your CPA goals (and not less than $50)
Total campaign group budget = (5-10xCPA) x number of campaigns x number of days
When you add a campaign to an existing group, raise the group budget accordingly (Realize will prompt you). Otherwise the same budget is just split thinner. A new campaign gets a small minimum learning budget for its first 1–2 days before the allocator starts comparing it to the others.
Treat the initial 2-3 days as learning period for the algo to allow for sufficient conversion volume (a few conversions per campaign per day is the comfortable threshold). Post this learning phase, we expect the budget allocator to gradually start disbursing higher budget to better performing campaigns
Run the activity for a minimum of 7 days to allow sufficient algo learning and performance optimisation
Bid strategy must be set as max conversions for all campaigns
Ensure Pixel based or S2S tracking implemented for your account
Scaling: While in beta, scale conservatively — 20–50% increase is the safe range. A more drastic budget increase is fine occasionally (roughly once a week or less), but expect some performance fluctuation that day before it stabilises. The more frequently you scale, the smaller each step should be
At present, we recommend not to use budget allocator with your display and native campaigns under the same Campaign Group - as using it might limit the spend for your display campaigns resulting in sub-optimal performance
FAQ
Who is the ideal advertiser for budget allocator?
For Budget Allocator verticals don’t matter - we’ve seen positive signals across hearing aids, insurance, skincare, e-commerce, CRM / Finance, Tech and others.
An ideal advertiser is one who can:
Create a new campaign group containing 2 or more campaigns
Use conversion-based optimisation (for example CPA goal or similar conversion KPI)
Provide sufficient conversion volume to give the allocator signals (a few conversion per campaign per day is the comfortable threshold)
If my campaign group is optimising towards purchase and I’m measuring CPA, would budget allocator allocate the budget based on the best CPA in terms of purchase conversions?
Yes
It seems like the campaigns in the group get equal shares of the budget despite one clearly outperforming the others?
The reason for such a behavior is that the initial 2-3 days the algorithm is learning from the conversion data and signals, once this learning phase is completed you will be able to notice the budget allocation focus towards campaign with better performance. Please note that the budget allocator has to take into consideration stability as well and hence you might witness conservative budget changes (as opposed to more aggressive budget changes)
If campaign 1 has a much better CPA, does it get more budget — or is budget split evenly first?
The better performer gets more — it's not split evenly. On top of actual CPA, the allocator weighs estimated performance and opportunity: e.g. if a campaign had a great CPA over the last 3 days but the next-day projection points to a different trend, or it's reaching its potential and no further conversions are realistically reachable within the budget, that's factored into the next allocation
I have 3 campaigns sharing a budget and I remove one — what happens to its budget?
It's reallocated to the remaining campaigns, and this happens as a mid-day change — based on their current performance and the opportunity for the time left in the day
One campaign uses tCPA and isn't hitting its cap. If the allocator pushes more budget there, what happens?
The allocator is enabled only for Max Conversions groups, so a tCPA mix isn't the supported setup. It also detects campaigns that aren't depleting throughout the day and adjusts allocation intraday, so the budget isn't fixed set on a campaign that can't spend it.
What if one campaign has the better CPA but another delivers better lead quality?
The allocator optimises on the conversion data reported into Realize (including delayed conversions). Quality signals not captured in Realize can't be factored in — true with or without the allocator. Work out the CPA target that corresponds to your better-quality leads and optimise toward that, so the metric the allocator sees reflects the outcome you care about
What data window will the algo look back to analyse the performance and make decision about allocation?
The budget allocator takes into accounts last few days of the campaigns' performance data and based on that decides on the next allocation. It happens quite frequently (± few times a week)
How is budget distributed to winning campaigns? Will the losing campaigns stop getting budget at all or will there be a minimum spend there?
The budget allocator shifts budget towards the campaigns with the best CPA (and estimation continue with this direction). Stability is a consideration as well, so expect a gradual daily changes that are in line with our best practices
Loosing campaigns are not paused and don't drop to zero. We keep a minimum budget per campaign, in order to give these campaigns an opportunity to come back, and it acts as a hedge in case the winning campaigns start to degrade
Will the algo be able to reallocate budget back if losing campaigns start performing better?
Yes, If a "losing" campaign starts performing better, budget will shift back towards it
Can I add, pause, or delete campaigns in a running group?
Yes. When adding, raise the group budget (refer to the Best Practises). New campaigns get a 1–2 day learning period before the allocator compares them to the others, and shifts stay gradual to keep group performance stable
If I select ROAS as the success metric for a campaign group, will the allocator optimise toward ROAS — or does it still go by other metrics?
Today the success metric is used for reporting purposes. For budget allocation, the supported bid strategy is Max Conversions, so ROAS isn't supported directly — though it's affected indirectly
✅ If you have questions or concerns, contact your Account Manager, chat with Abby, our AI assistant on realize, email support@taboola.com or contact our support over live chat within Realize.