Set spend guardrails
Keep every campaign inside your rules with a monthly budget, pacing tolerance, and target CPA/ROAS you control.
What you get
- A shared definition of "on pace" that every pacing and budget alert checks against.
- Guardrails you can set once for the whole workspace, or override per ad account.
- Alerts, never automatic changes — MarginTide flags a drift, you decide what to do about it.
Setting your guardrails
Under Settings → Spend guardrails you define the rules MarginTide checks your campaigns against:
- Monthly budget — the ceiling pacing status and overspend alerts are measured against.
- Pacing tolerance % — how far spend may drift from plan, in either direction, before a pacing alert fires. The default is 10%.
- Target CPA — the cost-per-acquisition you expect; a CPA-spike alert fires when trailing 7-day CPA runs meaningfully hotter than this.
- Target ROAS — the return you expect from spend; used alongside target CPA to judge whether a campaign is earning its keep.
- Minimum daily spend — the floor a campaign should clear on its latest synced day; falling under it fires a zero-delivery alert.
Set guardrails as a workspace default that applies to every ad account, or scope them per ad account where one account runs a different budget or target than the rest.
How they work together
Pacing tolerance is the one knob that governs both overspend and underspend pacing alerts; target CPA and target ROAS judge cost efficiency independently of budget; minimum daily spend catches a campaign that's gone quiet. Together they turn a sync into a short list of decisions worth your time in the Action Center — MarginTide never reallocates budget or pauses a campaign on its own; every suggestion still needs your accept.
Go further
- See what needs attention — where guardrail-checked suggestions land.
- Get alerts before you overspend — how a threshold breach reaches you.
- Review campaign reports — the numbers your guardrails are measured against.