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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Ad Platform

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At a glance

Pacing read for the current month. Period spend so far against the declared monthly budget for the customer account. Microsoft Ads has both campaign daily budgets and an account-level monthly budget you set in Vortex IQ; this card uses the latter as the denominator. Fires early if you’re at >90% of budget before 80% of the month has elapsed, which usually means MSAN ramped, a competitor entered the auction, or smart bidding ran hot.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Microsoft Ads (Bing) data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK home-and-garden retailer with a £5,000/month Microsoft Advertising budget. Today is 22 Apr 26 (day 22 of 30 = 73% of month elapsed). What this means:
  1. The alert fired on 22 Apr because spend used (93%) exceeded period elapsed (73%) by more than 10pp.
  2. At current daily pace of £211, the merchant is on track to spend £6,330 by month-end, £1,330 over the £5,000 budget. The variance is significant (27% over).
  3. What changed. Looking at Spend by Campaign and Spend by Hour, the merchant should check:
    • Microsoft Audience Network on a Smart Shopping campaign that ramped in the last 7 days as Microsoft’s optimiser found new inventory.
    • A competitor entered the auction on three high-volume non-brand keywords; CPC rose 35% on those terms (visible in CPC Spike Detection).
    • Smart Bidding inflated bids in the learning phase after the merchant added a new conversion goal on 14 Apr.
The fix decision tree:
  • If ROAS is healthy and rising: budget through is the right call. Either raise the monthly cap to £6,500 or accept the overspend; the marginal ROAS is profitable.
  • If ROAS held flat: cap MSAN spend at 30% of campaign budget, or pause MSAN entirely on Search-only intent campaigns.
  • If ROAS dropped: the spend acceleration is buying lower-quality clicks. Lower target ROAS in Smart Bidding by 10, 20% to throttle volume back to budget.
  • If you can’t tell yet (week 1, 2 of a goal change): wait 14 days before reacting; the learning phase is noisy.
In a typical month with normal pacing, this card sits within ±5pp of period-elapsed, which is the calm read. A 10pp gap is the action threshold.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Microsoft Advertising: Microsoft Advertising → Account Settings → Account budget for the budget figure. For pace-to-date, Reports → Performance → Account Summary filtered to month-to-date. The pacing percentage shown here is computed; Microsoft doesn’t expose a native ”% of monthly budget used” metric. Why this card’s number may differ from the Microsoft UI: No vendor counterpart for the alert. Microsoft does not natively send a “budget pacing” alert below 100%, only an out-of-budget notification when campaigns stop serving. The 90%-by-80% trigger is a Vortex IQ early-warning convention. Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My alert fired but I’m only at 91% with 4 days left in the month. Should I act? The trigger is conservative on purpose, an early warning, not a panic signal. At 91% used with 87% of period elapsed, you’re 4pp ahead of pace. Realistic options: (a) let it run if ROAS is healthy; you’ll likely overspend by 4, 8% which is normal noise. (b) lower the daily budget cap on the largest non-brand campaign by 20% to throttle the last few days. (c) pause Microsoft Audience Network for the last week, MSAN is the most common cause of late-month spend acceleration. My budget should reset on the 1st but the card still shows 95% used. Why? Two likely causes: (1) Time zone. Microsoft Advertising uses your account-local time, but this card uses UTC. If your account is set to GMT-8 (US Pacific), the 1st of the month for this card starts 8 hours before your account thinks it does. Refresh after 16:00 UTC to see the reset. (2) Account budget vs campaign budget. If you set a campaign-level budget that is monthly-recurring instead of an account-level budget, the reset date may be tied to a different anchor. Microsoft Ads spent 1.5x my daily budget yesterday. Is that a bug? No, it’s expected. Microsoft (like Google) permits up to 2x daily budget on any given day to capture high-intent traffic when it appears, then averages back down over the month. Your monthly budget is the real cap, daily budgets are guidance to the auction algorithm. This card is built specifically because daily budgets can mislead; only the monthly view tells you whether you’re actually overspending. Can I set different budgets per campaign group and have this card aggregate? The current card uses a single account-level monthly budget. For multi-budget setups (e.g. £3,000/month on Search + £1,500/month on MSAN), you’d need to track each separately. Most merchants find a single account budget plus campaign-level priorities is simpler than multiple budget caps. The card shows I’m under budget but Microsoft is showing the account as “limited by budget”. Why? Microsoft’s “limited by budget” status fires per-campaign when the campaign’s daily cap throttles ad serving, even if your account-level monthly budget has plenty of headroom. Open the campaign settings and either (a) raise that campaign’s daily budget if you have monthly room, or (b) accept the throttle if you don’t want to spend faster. Often the right answer is a Shared Budget across the under-served campaigns, which lets Microsoft auto-allocate within the cap. Why doesn’t Microsoft Ads have a built-in pacing alert below 100%? Microsoft (and Google, and Meta) only natively notify when serving stops, the assumption is overspend is the merchant’s problem to track. This card is built to fill that gap. Industry-wide, 30, 50% of small-to-mid Microsoft accounts overspend their declared budget in any given month, mostly due to MSAN ramping or competitive auction shocks. Should I ever set my Vortex IQ budget figure higher than my Microsoft account budget? Yes, if you want the early-warning to fire later (e.g. you’re comfortable with 110% as a soft cap before alerting). The card shows whatever ratio you give it; setting the budget here at 110% of the Microsoft figure delays the alert by about 4 days in a typical 30-day month.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Spend vs Budget is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Microsoft Ads (Bing) and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.