What is pacing?
Pacing is a metric that correlates budget/impressions with campaign timeline. It is how we ensure that your budget is spent evenly over the flight period of your campaign or ad group.
Let’s take an example of a campaign with a $1000 budget and a flight period of 10 days. If the campaign spends $100 on day 1 and hits its daily quota (budget/impressions), that shows pacing to be 100%.
Overpacing and underpacing is a comparison between the anticipated spend rate and the actual spend rate. Overpacing means you’ve spent more than you were supposed to during that time period and could run out of budget before the end of the flight. Underpacing means you’ve spent less than you were supposed to and could have money left over by the end of the flight.
My campaign is underpacing, what should I do?
When a campaign is underpacing , it usually indicates that your ad(s) cannot reach enough devices to satisfy your campaign targeting parameters.
When it comes to optimizing your campaign and ad groups for pacing, there are some common levers immediately at your disposal. Below we’ll review a few of the basics:
- You can expand your behavioral or location-based audience targeting to other audiences or even able lookalike audiences.
- As your campaign is in-flight, relevant audiences begin to populate in your behavioral affinity and brand affinity reporting. These audiences are relevant to the POIs you’re tracking visits to.
- If you’re using very few geographic filters on your campaign, you can look to expand your geotargeting. For example, if you’re using zip code targeting and having trouble finding scale, consider adding more surrounding zip codes, or expand to city targeting with the addition of neighboring cities.
- Make sure that you are using all main creative sizes that makeup GroundTruth's inventory. Visit our creative specifications page for more details.
- If your targeting is very narrow and you don’t have much room to edit, ensure that you’ve removed any creative frequency caps as these can inhibit delivery to very niche audiences.
- If you are looking for engagement with your campaign, like CTR or secondary actions, be sure to review your creatives and messaging during the campaign.
- If you’re only using geotargeting in your campaign, consider adding an audience product for behavioral or location-based targeting.
- Consider shifting budget between your ad groups to the top-performing ad groups, or by adding in new ad groups.
- You also have the ability to extend your campaigns to ensure you deliver your full budget over time.
- If you have set ‘Day Parting’, your campaign or ad group will not spend outside of the specified time window thus reducing your supply. Consider removing Day Parting from your strategy.
Note
- Don’t forget you have Behavioral and Brand Affinity reporting available, these powerful tools can help you optimize mid-flight to find relevant audiences or heavy up on top-performing geographic locations. It’s important to note that these reports can change over time as you make edits to your campaign, so be sure to check on them regularly.
- While the “Projected Daily Impressions and Reach” tool is merely meant to provide a projection or estimate, it is important to note how the scale changes as you alter your targeting.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.