Overspend protection is a hard spending ceiling that pauses your campaigns before month-to-date spend runs past your budget. It's a fixed rule, and it runs independently from Pace's AI optimization engine, so even if a pacing decision misjudges a day, your account can't blow past the number you set.
Permissions required: Account-level overspend protection is available on every Pace plan — switch it on under Account Settings. Group-level protection needs campaign groups (Pro plan and above), and its automatic pause-at-cap option is part of Custom AI Guardrails on the One plan and above.
Why it matters
- The ceiling sits on top of every pacing decision, so a misfire in the optimizer can't push you over budget.
- A monitor compares spend to your cap every five minutes across every connected platform, rather than only when a pacing run happens.
- Pace logs every pause and resume, and can send a Slack or email alert.
How it works
Your cap is your monthly budget plus a small tolerance buffer, your Acceptable Variance, such as 2% or 5%. A $10,000 budget with 5% variance gives a $10,500 cap. When month-to-date spend reaches that cap, Pace pauses the account's active campaigns across Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, and Amazon Ads.
When spend drops back under the cap, say after you raise your budget, Pace re-enables only the campaigns it paused. Campaigns you paused yourself stay paused. On the 1st of each month, in your workspace's timezone, Pace resumes anything the guardrail paused, so every month starts clean.
Account level and group level
At the account level, overspend protection watches your whole monthly budget across every connected platform.
If you use campaign groups, which are smaller budgets that sit inside an account, Pace watches each group against its own cap too. When a group's spend crosses its cap, only that group's campaigns pause; the rest of the account keeps running. On LinkedIn Ads, Pace pauses at LinkedIn's own campaign-group level rather than individual campaigns, to match how LinkedIn organises its own interface.
When a group pauses, Pace confirms every campaign with the ad platform before recording it as stopped. Any campaign it can't confirm goes on a short list and gets another attempt on a later sweep, at least 30 minutes after the last one. After three attempts, Pace stops retrying and sends a single alert naming the campaigns still running, so you can stop them yourself instead of finding out at month end. This applies on every platform.
A $0 budget pauses a group
Set a campaign group's monthly budget to $0 and Pace pauses that group's active campaigns, so nothing spends against a budget you've zeroed. It runs as the first phase of every pacing run, and fires straight away when a budget edit or a sheet import sets a group to $0. Give the group a real budget in a later month and Pace re-enables the campaigns it paused and resumes pacing them.
If someone turns one of those campaigns back on outside Pace, Pace leaves it running, won't pause it again that month, and sends a Budget override left in place alert so the decision is visible.
How you know it fired
Pace records it in two places, every time:
- The Changes tab logs each pause and resume, attributed to Pace. For example, "3 campaigns paused — spend ($10,540) exceeded budget cap ($10,500)."
- Optional Slack and email alerts fire the moment Pace pauses your campaigns, and again when it re-enables them. Each names the account, platform, campaigns affected, spend, and the cap that was crossed.
If a pause ever looks wrong, why did Pace change my budget? walks you through diagnosis.
Limitations
- Daily Floor accounts are exempt. An account set to spend a fixed amount every day gets its own hard daily spend cap instead, so neither month-to-date protection nor $0 group enforcement applies to it. Accounts on a monthly budget, which is most of them, are fully covered.
- While an account or group is overspend-paused, you can't trigger a manual pacing run (Pace Now) on it. It unblocks once spend drops under the cap.
- A budget has to be set. Set your monthly budget first, because a group with no monthly budget is skipped rather than guessed at.