New "AutoPilot Modes" Offer More Flexible PPC Budget Automation

AutoPilot is one of our ppc automation software's most powerful tools, but it can also be dangerous when implemented incorrectly. More than one customer has told us that Shape activated a campaign they wanted to remain paused.

Why? Implementing AutoPilot takes time and careful consideration. It shouldn’t necessarily be applied wholesale to all of your campaigns and budgets. When you implement or edit campaigns with AutoPilot, we provide a list of all the campaigns it will be applied to along with the campaigns’ statuses. If a campaign is paused and should remain paused, we recommend setting AutoPilot to off. If you don’t, AutoPilot will reenable paused campaigns to help you hit your budget target.

To help alleviate this issue, we’ve added AutoPilot Pause Only as an AutoPilot Mode.

In AutoPilot Pause-Only mode, when your campaigns hit their spend goal, they’re paused. WARNING: AutoPilot will not reenable these campaigns at the start of the next budget cycle. You’ll need to go in and manually reactivate campaigns in Shape.

AutoPilot is great at preventing campaigns from overspending. But until now, it couldn’t help reduce over-pacing. For example, it wouldn’t stop high-traffic campaigns from spending their entire budget in two or three days and then remaining paused for the rest of the budget cycle.

AutoPilot Daily Pause/Enable addresses over-pacing issues by spreading spend more evenly across the entirety of a budget cycle.

AutoPilot calculates your ideal daily spend each day of a cycle. If you hit that threshold during the day, AutoPilot Daily pauses your campaigns and won’t reactivate them until the following day. Didn’t hit the ideal daily threshold? Don’t worry! Shape will pass the unused spend onto the next day.

Our “classic” AutoPilot mode is still available. We’ve renamed it to AutoPilot Pause/Enable and it works exactly as before.

Around the middle of the month, there is a Sunday where your campaigns only spend $50. AutoPilot Daily accounts for that underspend, and your ideal daily budget is increased to $142 ($96+$46) the next day. You spent $142 that Monday and your campaigns pause. The following day, your ideal daily budget returns to $96. AutoPilot Daily continues to manage your campaign statuses accordingly until your target budget of $3000 is hit.

For more information on AutoPilot Modes watch the video below and find in-depth guides on how to set up or change AutoPilot Modes in Shape’s knowledge base.

We’ve also released two additional blog posts that dive deeper into the two new modes with examples and more!

• AutoPilot Pause Only
• AutoPilot Pause/Enable