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Budget Allocation overview

Budget Allocation is the portfolio-level lever in Catchbase. You group a set of campaigns under one total daily budget, and a reinforcement-learning allocator proposes how to split that budget across them based on each campaign's recent performance. Active allocations are re-run weekly so the split keeps up with changing performance without a manual pass.

Budget Allocation decides how much each campaign can spend. The bidding model decides what each keyword inside a campaign bids. The two work at different levels and do not conflict.

Before you start

  • At least two campaigns already imported from Apple Ads. A single campaign does not need an allocation.
  • A few weeks of recent performance data per campaign. Very new campaigns produce less useful recommendations.
  • The Admin role.

Create and run an allocation

  1. Open Budget Allocation and click Create budget automation.
  2. Pick the campaigns to include and set the total daily budget.
  3. Click Allocate with AI. The allocator returns a recommended percentage for each campaign. Percentages sum to 100.
  4. Review the result. Move a slider on any row to override a share; the other shares rebalance so the total still sums to 100.
  5. Activate the allocation. Catchbase writes the per-campaign budgets back to Apple Ads on the next sync.

Once active, the weekly scheduler re-runs the allocator against the same campaigns and updates the percentages automatically. Open the allocation at any time to see the current split.

Budgets list showing active allocations, total daily budget, utilization bars, and campaign counts

Reading the spend bar

Each row carries a Budget Utilization bar showing spend over the last 7 days divided by the combined daily budget over that same window. Green below 60%, orange 60–95%, red above 95%. Red is not an error — it usually means the campaigns in the allocation are pacing to spend their full share.

Accepting, editing, or overriding the recommendation

Three common patterns:

  • Accept when the split looks reasonable and your recent performance data is stable.
  • Edit a few shares when you have context the allocator does not — a campaign about to change creative, a new campaign that should ramp faster, or a share that jumped for no obvious reason.
  • Override entirely when you are implementing a strategic decision the allocator cannot reflect (a fixed split from finance, a deliberate push into a specific market, a baseline for a brand-new group).

The weekly re-run will overwrite intra-week edits on active allocations. To lock in an edit, deactivate the allocation before the next run.

When to use it

Budget Allocation is useful when you operate a portfolio of campaigns whose performance varies and you want the stronger campaigns to take a larger share over time, or when you have a fixed daily envelope across a set of campaigns and want a defensible way to divide it up.

It is less useful when each campaign has a meaningfully different strategic purpose that cannot be compared on the same performance signals, or when you have fewer than a few weeks of data on every campaign in the group.

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