A campaign’s Bid Strategy determines how aggressively it should bid based on how much you’d like to spend, how you’d like to pace bidding, and how often you’d like for users to see an ad.

Three elements comprise a campaign’s Bid Strategy:

The way you manage these elements can impact the campaign’s performance, including its ability to pace on track. Refer to Troubleshoot a campaign that’s pacing behind for additional support.

With the Budget Capping tool, you can define a Maximum Daily and/or Maximum Total spending limit once a certain cost is reached for impressions, clicks, and/or 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%). You might also consider increasing a budget cap to allow the campaign’s pacing to catch up. Refer to Pacing overview for more information on how pacing performance is calculated, and how it differs for budget-based and impression-based campaigns.

Refer to Manage a campaign’s Bid Strategy for more information on how to enable or disable the Budget Capping feature and define impression, click, and/or conversion limits.

Advertisers 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 on frequency capping, and review Manage a campaign’s Bid Strategy to set up or adjust a campaign’s frequency-cap settings.

Bid pacing helps ensure smooth and consistent bid distribution. When enabled, the Bid Pacing tool evenly distributes your bids throughout the campaign’s scheduled display times based on the daily budget you defined.

The decision to keep bid pacing turned on for a given campaign can depend on its pacing performance. For example, consider disabling the Bid Pacing tool if the campaign is pacing behind. This change will allow it to spend the daily budget as soon as possible without pacing restrictions in place.

Refer to Manage a campaign’s Bid Strategy for more information on how to enable or disable the Bid Pacing feature.

When you enable the Bid Pacing tool for an impression-based campaign, we’ll also enable the

Budget Capping tool by default. The Maximum Daily Impressions and Maximum Total Impressions fields are prefilled to help evenly distribute bids according to the daily impression budget.

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.

With Bid Modifiers, you can optimize a campaign by bidding a higher or lower price for the individual dimensions that are most or least important to the campaign. These multipliers can be changed or removed at any time, as needed.

Refer to Bid Modifier overview for more information, including which campaign dimensions are supported.

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 the 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. Remember to select Save to apply your updated bid shading settings to the campaign.