A spend guard watches your live campaigns and pauses anything that spends past your limit. Set it up once and it keeps checking, day and night.

Before you start

• You need a connected ad account with live campaigns.
• For the optional Slack message, connect Slack first. See Slack integration.

Set up the guard

1. Open Agent Tasks in the sidebar, select New task, then Start from a template and Spend guard. You get a Monitor trigger followed by a Pause step and a Slack notification step. (You can also build the same thing from Visual flow.)

2. Select the Monitor trigger. Pick the Level to watch (Campaign, Ad set or Ad) and how often to Check every: 5 minutes, Hour, 12 hours or Day. For spend, a frequent check catches problems sooner.

3. Pick the Campaigns to watch in the current ad account (in All Accounts, choose the Brand first), or turn on Apply to new campaigns automatically to watch every campaign, including ones you launch later.

4. Under Rules, select Add condition. A new condition starts as Spend, Greater Than, Today, from Meta. Type your limit in Value, for example 1500 for $1,500 today.

5. Select the Pause step and pick what to pause. To check before anything is paused, tick Require approval before this runs.

6. Select the Slack notification step and pick a channel, or delete the step if you don't use Slack.

7. Switch the task from Paused to Active. If the switch is blocked, its tooltip reads Finish setup: Monitor and names the cards that aren't finished. Hover the Needs setup badge on a card to see exactly what it wants, such as "Pick a brand to watch".

What happens next

On every check, Koast compares each watched campaign, ad set or ad with your rule. When one crosses it, the task runs its steps:

• Without approval, the pause happens straight away.
• With approval, the run waits and the pause appears in Needs your sign-off on Home. Nothing is paused until someone selects Approve. See Approvals and the Sign-off queue.

Good to know

• If the ad platform's API goes down, the Monitor follows the setting On Meta API outage (the name follows your provider). New Monitors you set up in the builder start on Pause affected entities. You can change it to Do nothing or Pause, then resume on recovery.
• Several rules? Add condition adds a rule that must also be true (AND). Add alternative adds one that can be true instead (OR).
• Rather slow down than stop? Replace the Pause step with Adjust budget and a percentage decrease. Ad-level Monitors can't adjust budget.
• Every metric, time range and option is listed in the Monitor rules reference.