Campaign Pacing

What is pacing?

Pacing is the mechanism that correlates your ad spend with your campaign timeline. It ensures your budget is distributed evenly over the active flight period of your campaign or ad group.

• Overpacing (>100%): Your campaign is spending faster than anticipated. If left unadjusted, it may exhaust its budget before the end of the flight.

• Underpacing (<10%): Your campaign is spending slower than anticipated. If left unadjusted, you risk leaving unspent budget on the table when the flight ends.

How Pacing is Calculated & Automated

The Baseline Formula

Ads Manager displays pacing as the proportion of the budget spent relative to the campaign duration elapsed. 

For example, a campaign with a $1,000 budget and a 10-day flight has an ideal daily target of $100/day. If it spends exactly $100 on Day 1, its pacing is 100%.

Platform Dynamics (Mid-Flight Changes)

The Ads Manager bidding engine is dynamic and recalculates spend targets automatically based on your actions:

• If a Campaign is Paused & Resumed: If a 10-day, $1,000 campaign is paused on Days 4–5, it resumes on Day 6 with 70% of the budget remaining but only 5 days left. The system automatically boosts the daily spend rate to utilize the full budget. While the dashboard may temporarily flag it as "underpacing" because total spending lags behind the time elapsed, the engine will aggressively catch up.

• If the Budget Increases Mid-Flight: If you increase a 10-day, $1,000 campaign to $1,500 on Day 5, the dashboard may initially flag it as underpacing. This occurs because the early spend rate was anchored to the old threshold. The system will dynamically scale delivery to utilize the remaining $1,000 across the final 5 days.

Troubleshooting: My campaign is underpacing

Underpacing usually indicates that your targeting criteria are too narrow, preventing the system from finding enough eligible devices to satisfy your budget. Use these platform levers to unlock scale:

Audience Adjustments

• Expand Segments: Add related behavioral categories, location-based audiences, or lookalike models to cast a wider net.

• Review Affinities: Check your Behavioral & Brand Affinity reporting mid-flight. These reports populate with real-time audiences showing high affinity for your tracked points of interest (POIs). Add these winning segments directly to your ad groups.

Location Adjustments

• Widen the Net: If you are restricted to a handful of Zip codes and delivery is stalling, add adjacent Zip codes or scale up to full City or DMA targeting.

Creative & Flight Constraints

• Upload All 4 Ad Sizes: Ensure your ad group utilizes all primary creative specs (320x50, 300x250, 728x90, 320x480) to tap into 90%+ of our available mobile inventory.

• Lift Frequency Caps: For niche audiences with strict targeting, remove or loosen ad group frequency caps to allow deeper penetration into available supply.

• Remove Day Parting: Specifying strict hourly windows drastically reduces available ad inventory. Remove day-parting rules to allow full 24-hour distribution.

Budget & Strategy Adjustments

• Reallocate Funds: Shift budget away from stalled ad groups and double down on your top-performing, high-pacing ad groups.

• Extend Timelines: Extend the flight end date of your campaign to give the bidding engine more time to cleanly distribute the budget.

   

Budget Protections: Platform overdelivery policy

Due to the fast-paced nature of real-time programmatic bidding, campaigns that pace in full may occasionally show a slight overdelivery on your dashboard (e.g., a $1000 budget showing an actual platform spend of $1001.24).

You will never be charged for these slight overspends. Any impressions delivered beyond your allocated budget are considered completely free added value. Our billing engine automatically protects your account based on your payment method:

• Self-Serve Credit Card Customers: The platform automatically caps credit card charges at your set budget. If an ad group overpaces, it will pause spending to keep your costs controlled.

• Invoiced/IO Customers: GroundTruth always bills strictly according to your contracted Insertion Order (IO) budget footprint.