If you ever log in to find your campaigns in a state of suspended animation, don't panic. Here you'll find three common reasons why you might see Budget Paused as your campaign status:

Daily Budget Limit

When you set your monthly budget, you can also set a daily budget limit. In the figure below, the campaign budget is set to spend $80 per day.

Because the maximum monthly budget is $3,000, there is an additional $600 per month, or $20 per day, available in a 30-day month. If the campaign spends the allocated $80 before the end of a day, though, its status will change to Budget Paused and won't serve ads again until the next day. If the status changes in the early evening, the campaign manager might want to tap into that additional $20 because many online shoppers are active then.

To make these additional funds available, the manager will either adjust the daily budget to $100 per day, or change the budget option to monthly instead of daily. With a monthly budget the manager can have adCenter either monitor and adjust the spend per day automatically, or spend the budget until it runs out. The following figure illustrates these options.

Divide budget across the month

With this option, adCenter monitors your campaign's spend patterns to ensure that the budget lasts through the month. With a $3,000 monthly budget, adCenter would allocate roughly $100 per day to a campaign running in a 30-day month. When that $100 has been spent on any given day, the campaign status changes to Budget Paused until the next day.

NOTE: The daily that adCenter allocates each day is a rough target, so the actual daily spend will vary; any funds not used on a given day will be spread out over the remaining days of the month. Although these budget limits will have slight variations in spend targets, you will never be billed for any spend that exceeds the monthly budget you set.

Spend budget until depleted

With this option, adCenter will serve your ads until all of the funds for that month have been spent - this could take anywhere from an hour to the entire month, depending on the popularity of your keywords and the bids you have set for each. When your budget limit has been reached, your ads won't be displayed until the next month, but you can increase your budget to override this.

In addition to tweaking these spend setting options within adCenter, there are a few other tips that can help you get the most out of your adCenter advertising dollars:

1.) Shift funds - Monitor your campaigns to see which ones are performing well and which aren't. If some campaigns aren't spending their full budget by the end of the month and others are consistently going over budget, consider shifting funds from the poor performers to the more successful campaigns to ensure that those ads are displayed for as long as possible every day.

2.) Reports and targeting - Consider running a campaign performance report to determine which days of the week are best for your campaigns. Certain days might show spikes in activity on a consistent basis, so you might want to target those days to be sure that your money is being spent as efficiently as possible.