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 subtracts from the account total, so groups partition your spend 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 five platforms: Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, and TikTok 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
- Keep separate pots capped separately. Brand and performance, or one region against another, each get their own monthly budget inside one shared account.
- Give each pot its own goal. 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.
- Contain overspend to one pot. 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.
- 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.
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.
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.