“Limited by budget” is a bid strategy status that's used when your average daily budget is lower than the recommended amount. If you set a bid adjustment that increases your bids, then your resulting bid may increase the number of auctions your ad is eligible for. In turn, a higher resulting bid can lead to your campaign becoming "limited by budget". In that case, your budget may prevent you from getting all the new traffic available for your campaign.
It's important to keep in mind that a campaign that's "limited by budget" can still be successful and help you meet your advertising goals. However, if your campaign becomes "limited by budget" after setting a bid adjustment, consider increasing your budget to increase clicks, or lowering your bid adjustments to get more clicks within your budget.
When your bid strategy is ‘limited by budget,” ads aren't regularly showing as often as they could.
- Where you'll see it: A bid strategy can have the status "limited by budget" appear in the status column of the campaigns table. This means that your budget is lower than the recommended average daily budget.
- Why it appears: When your budget is below the recommended amount, it's possible that your budget can't accommodate all of the traffic available for your keywords and other campaign targeting settings. To make sure that your budget lasts throughout the day, Google Ads will reduce how often your ads appear. Ads in the campaign can still appear, but might not appear as often as they could.
- What it means: A campaign that's limited by budget can still be successful and help you meet your business goals. But there might be opportunities to gain more exposure if you're able to increase your budget.
- What to do next: Click the budget simulator
in the campaigns table to review how much exposure your campaign might receive if you use a different budget. You can also consider lowering your Target CPA or raising your Target ROAS in the limited campaign. Or you can lower your bid adjustment to try to fit more clicks or video views within your budget.
Example
Let's say you set a bid of $1 and an average daily budget of US$100, and your campaign is getting about 200 clicks and spending US$95 per day (it isn't “limited by budget”). Then, you set a bid adjustment that results in a +100% increase for searches in Chicago on mobile devices for a resulting bid of US$2.00.
Since your increased resulting bid causes your ad to be eligible for more auctions, you would need to spend US$150 to acquire all the possible clicks for your newly available traffic. But if your average daily budget remains US$100, your traffic will be "limited by budget." If you don’t change your average daily budget, your ads might get fewer clicks.
