Ad spend monitoring

Know the moment a budget goes wrong

Hourly spend checks across every Google Ads and Meta account you connect. Alerts in Slack or email when pacing drifts.

Try it on your data

Slack · Email

Every hour a campaign breaks,
someone loses money

Most tracking issues, budget spikes, and conversion drops go undetected for 5–7 days. Teams find out through client calls or end-of-month reports, after the damage is done.

$0
wasted per week, per broken campaign

at $100/day ad spend, 5–7 days is the average time to detect a marketing data issue manually

What is ad spend monitoring?

Ad spend monitoring is the automated tracking of advertising budgets against actual daily spend, with alerts when a campaign overspends, underspends or spikes. Google Ads and Meta both refresh spend data hourly or faster, making hourly pacing checks possible without relying on manual dashboard reviews.

Three ways budgets break

Overspend

Google Ads can spend up to 2x your daily budget on high-traffic days. A campaign at $400/day against a $200 budget burns $1,400 before Monday.

$0$200 budget
210% of daily budget

Underspend

A paused ad set, a broken pixel, a learning-phase stall. Spend drops to near-zero and nobody notices until end-of-month.

$0$150 budget
8% of daily budget

Spike

An accidental extra zero on a budget. A bid-cap removal. A suddenly-approved ad that eats the daily cap in hours.

$0$200 budget
920% of daily budget

How it works

Connect

Link Google Ads and Meta via OAuth. Takes a couple of clicks.

Baselines build

We learn each account's normal pacing by day, campaign and channel.

Hourly checks

Every hour, live spend is compared against the baseline and daily budget.

Alert with context

Overspend, underspend or spike: Slack or email with the campaign, the deviation and the likely cause.

What you get

Spend pacing across every account

  • Hourly pacing checks on Google Ads and Meta
  • Overspend alerts at configurable thresholds
  • Underspend alerts when campaigns fall behind trend
  • Spike detection for sudden deviations from baseline
  • Google Ads and Meta spend in one view
  • Per-account sensitivity controls
  • Route different accounts to different Slack channels or emails
Status: Pacing issue Live
Over 1
Under 1
On track 4
Spend pacing · 6 ad accounts · checked hourly
AccountPacingStatus
Google AdsBrand Search
$420 spent $200 budget
+110%
MetaRetargeting
$62 spent $100 budget
On track
Google AdsSearch Non-brand
$12 spent $150 budget
−87%
MetaProspecting
$82 spent $150 budget
On track
Google AdsShopping
$96 spent $200 budget
On track
Expected pace · Updated 2 min ago

Platforms monitored for spend

Google AdsGoogle Ads
Meta AdsMeta Ads
Instagram AdsInstagram Ads

We check every hour. Alerts typically arrive within an hour of the issue.

Ad spend monitoring FAQ

How often is spend data checked?
Spend data is checked hourly.
Can it pause a campaign that's overspending?
No. Read-only. We alert you; you make the call.
Does Google Ads really spend 2x my daily budget?
Yes, up to 2x on high-traffic days, balanced so the 30.4-day monthly total stays on target. The problem: "balancing" often means one Wednesday blows through half the week's budget.
Can I set custom thresholds per account?
Yes. A $500/day brand campaign and a $50/day test campaign need different sensitivity. We handle this for you by utilising AI to work out the expected value based on your data.
Which ad platforms are supported?
Google Ads and Meta (Facebook and Instagram). More on the roadmap.
Do I need a credit card?
No. The free preview runs on your real connected accounts and shows every anomaly we would have caught on the last 90 days of data, without taking any payment details. Add a card later only if you decide to keep live monitoring on.

Last updated: May 2026

Stop finding out about ad problems too late

Connect your ad accounts. See what we'd have caught. Live monitoring starts when you're ready.

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Free. No credit card. Connect in under 2 minutes.

Read reviews on: Capterra Capterra ★★★★★