Drift alerts
Set a tolerance per budget and let Level tell you when spend runs away from plan — once per direction, once per threshold crossed, never twice for the same news.
A budget nobody looks at is a budget nobody notices breaking. Every budget carries a drift threshold and an alerts switch, and Level checks them once a day.
Setting the tolerance
Open Alerts & threshold… from the row menu on the pacing screen, or set both fields when creating a campaign budget:
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Drift threshold, % | How far spend may wander from the linear plan before it counts as drift. Between 0 and 100; the default is 10 %. |
| Drift alerts | On by default. Off silences this budget without deleting the threshold. |
A tight threshold on a small account will fire often; 10–15 % is a reasonable starting point for most, tighter for accounts with steady daily spend and looser for ones that run in bursts.
When an alert fires
The check runs once a day, in the morning, after the previous day's spend has fully landed — so the numbers it judges are a complete day, not a half-loaded one.
An alert goes out when a budget is Over or Under by more than its threshold, and:
- it is the first alert for that budget, or
- the direction changed — an account that was underspending is now overspending, or
- the drift deepened past another whole threshold — with a 10 % tolerance, drifting past 20 %, then 30 %.
Otherwise it stays quiet. "Still 12 % over, same as yesterday" is not news, and a daily repeat of it is how people learn to ignore an alert channel.
Who gets told
Everyone in the organization with the Manage Budgets permission.
Where it lands is up to each person's notification preferences — the topic is Budgets. In-app it always arrives; Telegram and Slack depend on the organization having a channel configured.