Track Budget Pacing for Google Ads

What is Budget Pacing?

Businesses can monitor and manage Google Ads budgets to ensure optimal spending throughout a campaign. By leveraging real time monitoring of the metrics such as cost compared to budget, businesses can avoid over or under-spending and maximize their campaign spending. It's often used by digital marketing agencies that specialize in creating, managing, and optimizing digital advertising campaigns for their clients.

Required Tools/Platforms: Google Ads, Google Sheets, Databox
Data needs to be stored in: Google Ads data from active campaigns

To help businesses manage and monitor their Google Ads budget, we suggest a solution that uses Google Sheets alongside your Google Ads data. By combining budget tracking, the percentage of the month that's passed, and real-time cost data from Google Ads, you'll get more visibility into your data and easily see whether your spending is on track, overspending, or underspending. This approach provides clear insights and helps you adjust your spending as needed.

How to access the Budget Pacing Template

  1. Create a duplicate of the Google Ads Budget Template and populate it with your budget for remainder of the year.

  2. Connect this Google sheet to your Databox account.

Create Custom Metrics

  1. Create the following metrics:

    1. GAds Daily Budget

    2. GAds Monthly Budget

    3. % Month Elapsed

    4. Use the Google Ads metric "Cost".

Calculate the Custom Metrics

  1. Create the following calculated metrics (check the Calculation column in the screenshot):

    1. Budget pacing ratio

    2. % Budget Spent

    3. Remaining Budget


Add the Metrics to the Databoard

In Databox, create a databoard and add the new metrics to it. You can find the metric names in the title above the visualization:


You can access the template here: Google Ads Budget Pacing Template.

For the bottom chart, use the Line visualization and add the metrics GAds Daily Budget (set the visualization to Bar) and Cost (set the visualization to Line).


Optionally, you can automate the delivery of this Databoard to your inbox by setting up a Scheduled Snapshot.

You can set up Alerts and Goals based on the Budget pacing ratio.

If you need any help with the setup, please reach out to our support team via chat.