Campaign and ad set budgets

Manage your advertising budget with flexible options that fit your goals. Whether you're looking to maximize daily performance or long-term impact, our budgeting tools help you stay in control of when and how much you spend. With lifetime pacing, Campaign Manager distributes your budget across your campaign or ad set’s schedule to help you achieve meaningful results without overspending.

Important to know

LinkedIn recommends that advertisers don’t change the start date of a campaign or ad set to within 24 hours of the current schedule, as the updates might not be fully implemented in time. Advertisers might be charged between the old and new start dates if the start date is changed to 24 hours or more beyond the current schedule.

Budgeting options vary by hierarchy:

Campaign budgets provide overall control across multiple ad sets.
Individual ad set budgets allow more specific allocation for one ad set.

Simultaneously, the type of schedule you choose, whether continuous or set, influences how your budget is paced across the duration of your campaign or ad set, as well as how much your campaign or ad set can spend on a daily basis.

Budget types by campaign hierarchy

LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers budget controls at two levels: campaigns and individual ad sets. Each level supports different budget types and behaviors.

Campaign hierarchy	Budget options	Description	Notes
Campaign	Dynamic Group Budget (daily or lifetime)	Dynamic Group Budget allows you to set an overall budget for all ad sets in your campaign. It then automatically and continuously finds optimal auction opportunities for your campaign’s objective.	- To turn on Dynamic Group Budget, your campaign must have one shared objective. - You can’t set budgets at the ad set level with Dynamic Group Budget. The budget you set at the campaign level will be used across all ad sets in the campaign. - You can set either a daily or lifetime budget with Dynamic Group Budget, but you can’t set both.
Campaign	Lifetime budget	Set a lifetime budget at the campaign level when you want an overall budget for all ad sets within the campaign, but don’t want to use the same objective for all ad sets.	- When a campaign lifetime budget is set, a minimum unspent amount must be available to launch new ad sets. You might see an error when setting your campaign budget if there isn’t enough unspent budget. - Learn how to troubleshoot campaign errors.
Ad set	Daily budget	Daily budget is the average amount you’d like to spend per day on your ad set. You can set a daily budget on a continuous schedule or with a set schedule.	- Actual daily spend might vary. - If your currency is USD or EUR, Campaign Manager automatically recommends a default daily budget for new ad sets. The recommendation is available at the ad set level and is personalized based on your ad account to provide more predictive budget guidance.
	Lifetime budget	Lifetime budget is the total amount that you’ll spend for the entirety of your ad set’s schedule from start date to end date.	When you select lifetime budget, the daily budget spend is paced to optimize performance during the lifetime of the ad set.
	Both a daily and lifetime budget	Setting both a daily and lifetime budget allows you to guide both the daily pace and total spend of your ad set. Lifetime budget is the total amount you will spend for the entirety of your ad set schedule. Daily budget is the amount you would like to spend per day.	- You can’t schedule an end date when you set both a daily and lifetime budget. - Setting both a daily and lifetime budget isn’t available for Accelerate ad sets.

Budget pacing by schedule type

Your campaign or ad set schedule determines how your budget is paced. Choose between continuous or set schedules depending on your goals.

Budget type	Schedule type	How it works	Example
Daily budget	Continuous schedule (no end date)	When you set a daily budget with a continuous schedule, it’ll be paced throughout a virtual week (Monday through Sunday). While your campaign or ad set’s actual daily spend will vary, your campaign or ad set won’t spend more than seven times your daily budget in a week. Actual daily spend might be up to 50% higher than the daily budget amount on a given day.	If you set your daily budget to $100 and you set a continuous schedule with no end date, your spend on a given day might be up to $150, but the total spend for the week (Monday through Sunday) won’t exceed $700 ($100 per day x 7 days).
Daily budget	Set schedule	When you set a daily budget with a start and end date, the total campaign or ad set spend won’t exceed the amount equal to your daily budget multiplied by the number of days in the schedule. Actual daily spend may be up to 50% higher than the daily budget amount on a given day.	If you set your daily budget to $100 and you have a set time schedule with a start date of January 1 and an end date of January 31, your spend might be up to $150 on any given day. Your average spend over the duration of your campaign or ad set will be about $100 daily, and total spend for the entire duration of the campaign or ad set won't exceed $3,100 ($100 per day x 31 days = $3,100).
Lifetime budget	Set schedule	To maximize impression opportunities and drive optimal results for your ads, the daily spend of your campaign or ad set will vary. Daily spend might be impacted by factors such as seasonality, traffic, ad inventory, and bid type. When you select lifetime budget with a start date and end date for your schedule, your lifetime budget must be equal to or greater than a minimum budget. The minimum budget required is determined by the duration of your campaign or ad set and will be displayed if the set budget is too low.	You could spend 10% of your budget on a particular day and 30% on another day, based on the impression opportunities. However, your total spend will never exceed the lifetime budget of your campaign or ad set.
Both a daily and lifetime budget	Continuous schedule (no end date)	When you select both a daily and lifetime budget, you can only set a continuous schedule with no end date because your ad set will end when the lifetime budget amount is reached. Daily spend might be up to 50% higher than the daily budget entered to optimize your ad set for impression opportunities in the ad auction and drive results for your ad set. However, total spend will never exceed the lifetime budget of your ad set.	You set your lifetime budget to $1,000 and daily budget to $100. On a given day, your spend might be up to $150, according to the market opportunities. However, the total spend of the ad set will not exceed $1,000. Since an ad set in which you set both the daily and lifetime budget can only be on a continuous schedule with no end date, the ad set will end when you have spent the entire budget of $1,000, after approximately 10 days.