Budget a campaign that runs for a fixed period

A daily budget is the right shape for an always-on campaign. It’s the wrong shape for a two-week launch with EUR 150 behind it — you’d have to divide by the number of days, watch the campaign end early or late, and hope nobody unpauses it in March.

Google Ads calls the other shape a custom-period budget: you name the total, Google paces it across the campaign’s run.

resource "google_ads_campaign_budget" "q3_launch" {
  name                = "Q3 Launch Flight"
  period              = "CUSTOM_PERIOD"
  total_amount_micros = 150000000     # €150 for the whole flight
}

resource "google_ads_campaign" "q3_launch" {
  name                     = "Q3 Launch"
  advertising_channel_type = "SEARCH"
  campaign_budget          = google_ads_campaign_budget.q3_launch.id
  start_date               = "2026-09-01"
  end_date                 = "2026-09-14"

  manual_cpc {}
}

Set start_date and end_date on the campaign: they’re what the total is spread over.

One amount or the other, never both

amount_micros is a daily rate. total_amount_micros is a lifetime cap. A budget uses exactly one of them, decided by period:

period	Says	Ignores
"DAILY" (the default)	amount_micros	total_amount_micros
"CUSTOM_PERIOD"	total_amount_micros	amount_micros

validate enforces the pairing, so a budget can’t quietly run on a figure nobody meant:

× google_ads_campaign_budget.q3_launch sets period = "CUSTOM_PERIOD" but no
│ 'total_amount_micros' — a custom-period budget spends a lifetime total, not
│ a daily amount

The plan keeps the two apart

Lifetime totals aren’t summed into the daily figure — a EUR 150 flight is not EUR 150/day, and a plan that added them together would be worse than useless:

Budget: committed daily spend 320.00 EUR/day across 16 enabled campaigns
        plus 1 custom-period budget totalling 150.00 EUR over their lifetime

A budget's period can't be changed later

Google Ads fixes period when the budget is created and refuses to edit it afterwards, so bidsmith won’t plan the change. To move a campaign from daily to flight spending, declare a new budget and point the campaign at it.

The same applies to adoption: if a file says nothing about period (so, daily) but the live budget it matches is a custom-period one, plan warns instead of reporting a clean run — the amount_micros in the file is being ignored by Google.

See also

• google_ads_campaign_budget — every attribute a budget takes.
• See what a change costs before you merge it — the rest of the budget line.
• Pause everything for the holidays — the other way to stop spending on a date.