Should you use a daily or lifetime budgetAdvertisers have the option of setting a daily or lifetime budget. A lifetime budget lets you set a spending limit for the lifetime of an ad set. Meta will attempt to evenly spread the amount you spend across the dates that you’ve selected. More? Let’s consider each option…

Daily Budgets

If you use a daily budgetA budget is an amount you’re willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More, 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 setAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More. 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?