Pacing determines if your strategies are on track to spend in full based on how much they’ve spent so far and how much time is remaining in the campaign or insertion order (IO).

Refer to Pacing overview for more information on your pacing options in the IQM platform. Return to this article to review the primary factors that influence a campaign’s pacing performance.

In most cases, a campaign paces behind when bid prices are too low to win in programmatic auctions, or when a campaign’s targeting rules are too restrictive. Follow the guidelines below to assess these factors and apply any necessary changes to help ensure your campaigns spend in full.

Win rate describes the percentage of impressions that you won in a programmatic auction, which is impacted most heavily by the bid price. Low win rates can cause your campaign to pace behind.

Check the campaign’s win rate, then consider optimizing its bidding to catch up on spending.

Note that win rates are ranges, and there’s not one ideal win rate. In general, you can consider a win rate of 50-80% to be good, 20-30% to be normal, and under 20% to signal an opportunity to improve your bidding strategy.

Your Max Bid Price may be limiting the impressions that the campaign can bid on.

You can adjust a Max Bid Price from the same dashboard table that you used to assess your Win Rate performance. Refer to the steps in Change Max Bid Prices from the Max Bid Price column to increase a campaign’s Max Bid Price.

There may be instances where your campaign is pacing behind, and you suspect that it’s due to your bidding strategy, but you only want to increase bids for certain dimensions.

Bid Modifiers allows you to take control of your campaign’s bidding strategy. You can choose to optimize your campaigns by bidding a higher or lower price for the individual creatives that are most or least important to them.

Bid Modifiers are especially useful when a certain targeting rule is non-negotiable. Since you can’t change the targeting rule, you can bid more for it instead to help keep the campaign’s pacing on track. These multipliers can be changed or removed at any time, as needed.

Refer to What is a Bid Modifier? for details on requirements and for instructions on applying a Bid Modifier to a creative in the Bid Model app.

Bid shading allows the platform to automatically optimize your campaign to achieve the best effective cost per mille (eCPM). It lowers your bid when you can win at auction for a lower price than the max bid price you specified for a campaign.

We enable bid shading by default across all campaigns to help you bid competitively in first-price auctions without overpaying. However, if a campaign is pacing behind, you might consider temporarily turning off the bid shading feature.

Click the Bid Shading toggle switch in the Campaign Info section to disable the feature. You’ll know that bid shading is turned off when the toggle switch moves to the left and changes in color from blue to gray.

Select Save to apply your updated bid shading settings.

The bid rate metric helps you determine how often a campaign’s targeting criteria and other details matched available bid requests. Low bid rates can cause your campaigns to pace behind.

Your campaign’s targeting strategies are the main factors that determine bid rate. It can only pace properly if there are enough available impressions that you can bid on after your targeting is applied. To run a data-driven campaign that still keeps your targetable audience wide enough to spend the entire campaign budget, you’ll need to limit your targeting to only include essential requirements. In other words, finding the balance between scale and value is essential for pacing on track while hitting your campaign goals.

Check the campaign’s bid rate, then consider optimizing its targeting rules to catch up on spending.

You can assess a campaign’s bid rate by generating a Campaign Bidding Insights report in the Insights app. The charts and figures included in the report highlight the following campaign details:

Refer to Generate and interpret a Campaign Bidding Insights report to assess a campaign’s bid rate, and pinpoint which targeting parameters are causing the biggest drop off in your campaign’s bid requests.

Use the insights you uncovered in the Campaign Bidding Insights report to adjust certain targeting rules, make your campaign eligible to bid on more impressions, and ultimately improve spend performance when your campaign is pacing behind. For example, if a campaign’s Location targeting settings are too restrictive, you can widen the targeted area to allow the campaign to serve more impressions.

You can apply campaign edits directly from the generated Insights report. Refer to Apply Campaign Bidding Insights to a campaign to make adjustments that will allow the campaign to bid on more ad impression opportunities.

Budget capping, bid pacing, and frequency capping are the three tools that form a campaign’s bid strategy. How you manage them can impact the campaign’s ability to pace on track.

Adjust budget cap, bid pacing, and frequency cap settings in the campaign’s Bid Strategy section. Save any changes to apply them before navigating away from the page.

With budget caps, you can customize your pacing strategy by defining a maximum daily spending limit once a certain cost is reached for impressions, clicks, and conversions. You can also set an impression cap to limit the number of impressions that you want to display per day.

Since impression and budget caps cause your campaign to stop spending once the daily limits are reached, we recommend reserving these settings for campaigns and IOs that are pacing on track (90%-100%) or pacing ahead (100%-120%).

Consider increasing the daily cap for the day, or removing the cap, to allow the campaign’s pacing to catch up. Refer to Set a bid strategy for your campaign to complete this step.

When enabled, the Bid Pacing tool evenly distributes the campaign’s daily budget throughout the day.

Consider disabling this feature if your campaign is pacing behind. This change will allow the campaign to spend the budget as soon as possible without pacing restrictions in place. Refer to Set a bid strategy for your campaign for more information.

Marketers walk a fine line to drive brand awareness and earn conversions without over-serving ads. You can use frequency caps to strike this balance by limiting the number of impressions a user is served across their devices over a set timeframe.

While frequency caps are critical for creating a positive user experience, a campaign can begin to pace behind when the frequency cap you define is too restrictive. Campaigns are highly customized based on the targeting parameters you set and the current bid landscape. This means that there’s not one recommended frequency cap for optimal campaign performance.

If you suspect that your frequency cap settings are the cause of your campaign pacing behind, consider its increasing frequency gradually while monitoring both reach and performance. Refer to What are the Capabilities, Limitations, and Best Practices for Frequency Capping? for more details.

The size and cost of a campaign’s audience(s) can impact its ability to pace as intended.

If the campaign is pacing behind and you suspect that it’s due to audience targeting settings, check these two items for each of your audiences:

Manage the audience(s) directly in the Campaigns app, or review Selecting your audiences for more resources on creating a new audience or managing an existing one in the Audiences app.

Choosing the right ad format helps ensure your message resonates with the intended audience, and affects how users engage with your ad. The size of your creatives also determines where your ad can get placed across digital inventory.

Check a campaign’s creative size(s) when it’s pacing behind. If your creative is a less common size, it can significantly reduce the number of impressions you can bid on. Consider adding more sizes in the same creative format (e.g., Image, Video, Native) to the campaign to win more bids.

Review Creative formats overview for more details about the ad formats that are supported on the IQM platform, and refer to Creative Ad Specs to check recommended sizes and requirements.

Allowlists and Blocklists help ensure that every marketing dollar goes toward the strategies that are the most likely to reach your target audience—but they also limit the number of impressions that you can bid on. This can put your campaigns at risk of spending in full.

If the campaign is pacing behind, evaluate each of the campaign’s Blocklists and determine whether you can remove any of them. Review Allowlist and Blocklist overview and Manage campaign Allowlists and Blocklists for more details.

In the future, take a proactive approach to pacing. Forecasting metrics provide a sense of scale to help you determine whether you have the right targeting and blocking strategies in place to spend your campaign budget in full and achieve campaign objectives.

Before you run a new campaign, leverage forecasting tools in the Campaigns and Planner apps to help ensure your campaign can pace on track or pace ahead.

Each time you create a new campaign or edit an existing one, you can select Run Campaign Estimations to generate forecasts based on the targeting rules you add to the campaign. These include the approximate size of your targetable audience, estimated reach and impressions, and the number of impressions you can expect to win at different bid prices.

Refer to Estimate reach, impression and audience size for a campaign for more information on generating campaign forecasts in the Campaigns app.

Planner proposals give you powerful insights into your media plan’s potential reach and impressions as you layer each targeting parameter onto your campaigns. This process helps highlight which rules will limit your strategy’s scale the most. You can pre-optimize your audience and targeting details to help ensure each campaign spends in full.

Unlike the Campaigns app, the Planner app creates your campaigns for you based on the rules you share when you create a proposal. You can review and tweak those campaigns, add your creatives, and run the campaigns in just a few clicks.

Refer to Create or manage a Planner proposal to learn how to add your targeting criteria to a new media plan.