A campaign group is a set of campaigns inside one ad account with its own goal and, in most cases, its own monthly budget carved out of the account's monthly number. It's a sub-envelope: the group's budget comes out of the account total rather than adding to it.
Every campaign belongs to at most one group, and campaigns already assigned elsewhere are greyed out when you build a new one. Campaign groups work across all seven platforms: Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, and Amazon Ads.
If the envelope idea is new to you, start with how budgets and pacing fit together.
Permissions required: Campaign groups are available on the Pro plan and above. Having Pace automatically pause a group's campaigns at its cap is part of Custom AI Guardrails, on the One plan (the tier above Pro) and above.
Why use them
- Brand and performance, or one region against another, each get their own monthly cap inside one shared account.
- Every group with a budget gets its own AI optimization run, and the group's goals and context override the account-level settings for the campaigns inside it.
- A group can pause its own campaigns when it runs over budget while the rest of the account keeps running.
How it works
You set groups up in Account Settings, on the Groups tab. Each group carries these settings:
- A name and a colour, picked from the same twelve-colour palette your ad accounts use. Click the swatch beside the group name to open it.
- A Monthly Budget, optional for goal-only groups.
- A Primary Goal and an optional Secondary Goal.
- Additional Context to steer the group's AI runs.
- An Active Schedule that sets which days the group's ads run. Pick a preset: Every day (the default), Weekdays, or Weekends. Or choose Custom to select any combination, like every day except Sunday.
- Its campaign selection.
Goals can be CPA, ROAS, Conversions, Clicks, CTR, or Impressions; on Google Ads and Meta Ads a group can also target a specific conversion action.
Whatever budget isn't claimed by a group flows to your ungrouped campaigns automatically: the account budget minus the sum of every group budget. You can also pace a single group on demand with Pace Now.
When an account is paced entirely by group, Pace writes a strategy for each group and then rolls those up into one strategy for the account as a whole after each pacing run. That roll-up is what the Insights card on the account page shows. It starts with your biggest-spending groups, so an account with three groups and one with three hundred both get a summary of the same length.
Warning: If your group budgets add up to more than the account budget, your ungrouped campaigns receive nothing during pacing. Keep the total at or under the account number.
Group-level overspend protection is a Budget Guardrails option, Pause campaigns when over group budget. It's off by default and needs a monthly budget on the group. When it trips, only the campaigns inside that group pause; once spend drops back under the cap on the next cycle, Pace resumes the ones it paused. For the full mechanism, see overspend protection.
Where to see how each group is pacing
The Groups card on the account's Overview tab lists one row per group: colour dot, name, month-to-date spend against the group's monthly budget, a pace figure, and the group's goal performance. On a wide enough screen each row also shows its daily target and the budget it has left.
Rows sort worst-pacing first, overspending and underspending alike, so the group needing attention sits at the top. Groups with no monthly budget sort to the bottom. Use the Search groups box to jump to one by name; past ten groups the list paginates. Click a group's name to open the Performance tab with the campaign table already filtered to that group.
Hover a group's spend bar to see how the month-to-date total splits between campaigns still running and campaigns since paused. Paused campaigns keep counting toward the group's budget by design, so the split explains a total that looks higher than what's live.
On the campaign table, the Group column carries the same spend bar on every grouped row, always month-to-date whatever date range the table is set to. Click the Group column header to sort by pacing variance, or open the sort menu and pick Over to Under or Under to Over. Campaigns with no group, or in a group with no budget, sort to the bottom either way. See reading the campaign table for the table's other controls.
When to use them
- An agency keeping a client's brand spend and performance spend capped apart inside one ad account.
- An in-house team splitting budget by region because finance mandates distinct caps.
- Any client-mandated separation of spend that has to hold within a single account.
Limitations
Deleting a group unassigns its campaigns and stops group-level pacing, but it never pauses or deletes them. They return to the account's ungrouped pool.
Campaign groups aren't available in Daily Floor mode. The floor is account-level: Pace holds one daily number across the whole account, so there's no monthly sub-envelope to carve out. Switch the account to Monthly Budget if you need groups.