A campaign’s Optimization & Delivery settings determine whether optimizations will be automatically or manually applied, how aggressively the campaign 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.

Four elements comprise a campaign’s Optimization & Delivery:

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.

When you create a campaign, you’ll choose whether you’d like to apply manual optimizations (Rule-Based Optimization) or let the IQM platform’s AI engine automatically apply optimizations that aim to achieve the campaign’s primary objective and goal (AI-Based Optimization).

The decision between Rule-Based Optimization and AI-Based Optimization depends on the individual campaign’s goal and your preference for managing performance. We recommend enabling AI-Based Optimization for campaigns that would otherwise require a significant time investment to complete the optimization cycle (optimize → serve → report → analyze → repeat).

Rule-Based Optimization gives you complete control over a campaign’s ability to achieve its performance targets. It involves monitoring real-time performance and steering the IQM platform’s manual optimization tools to refine your strategy–as needed–and ensure every dollar is spent efficiently.

*Estimated Impressions: A campaign’s Estimated Impressions are determined by multiplying its Total Budget by 1,000 and dividing the result by the campaign’s Total CPM value.

**Dependencies: These values must be added to the campaign before the Rule-Based Optimization option can be selected.

The Advanced Modeling optimization feature is available for campaigns with the Rule-Based Optimization setting enabled.

Advanced Modeling is supported for the Creatives, Location, Inventory, and Device dimensions. It allows you to create a set of rules that are deployed as the campaign runs. With intuitive controls, you can adjust bids with Bid Modifiers, allocate budgets with Spend Ratios, and define dimension value priorities with Priorities to optimize performance in real time.

In particular, Bid Modifiers are recommended to manage your campaign’s bidding strategy. 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 the Advanced Modeling collection for more information

AI-Based Optimization helps you avoid KPI-chasing via manual tweaks throughout a campaign’s lifecycle. When enabled, this feature signals the platform’s AI engine to automatically optimize your campaign in an attempt to achieve the Campaign Objective and Campaign Goal that you define. It bases these optimizations on an initial pre-optimization learning phase, and later on ongoing KPI performance after AI-Based Optimizations are applied.

A campaign must meet the following requirements at all times to be eligible for AI-Based Optimization settings.

If a campaign no longer meets the criteria after it starts serving, it automatically stops applying AI-Based Optimizations. You can adjust the campaign to again meet the criteria, which will resume optimizations and help avoid limiting overall spend and delivery.

*Estimated Impressions: A campaign’s Estimated Impressions are determined by multiplying its Total Budget by 1,000 and dividing the result by the campaign’s Total CPM value.

**Dependencies: These values must be added to the campaign before the AI-Based Optimization option can be selected.

***Conversion: You must add a Conversion to campaigns with a Conversion Campaign Goal.

Your Campaign Objective and Campaign Goal selections tell the IQM platform’s AI engine which optimizations it should prioritize to help achieve your desired goals.

We recommend also adding an optional Target KPI value. This will allow you to compare actual KPI performance against your target when you review KPI Performance Insights.

*Campaign Goal: Refer to the Report dimensions and metrics collection to learn more about a particular goal metric.

You can review the impact of AI-Based Optimization on your target KPI directly from the Campaigns app. Review the table below for more details, and refer to Review KPI performance details to learn how to locate KPI performance details for campaigns with AI-Based Optimizations applied.

Bid Shading is enabled by default, regardless of whether AI-Based or Rule-Based Optimization is selected. It allows the platform to automatically optimize your campaign to achieve the best effective cost per mille (eCPM) by automatically reducing your bid when you can win at auction for a lower price than the Max Bid Price you specified for the campaign.

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 Optimization & Delivery settings for more information on how to enable or disable the Budget Capping feature and define impression, click, and/or conversion limits.

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 Bid Pacing for more information on how to enable or disable the Bid Pacing feature.

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 increasing its frequency gradually while monitoring both reach and performance. When user-level frequency caps are the cause of bid drop-offs, the campaign’s Campaign Bidding Insights report will log these drop-offs under the Optimization & Delivery category and Frequency Capping sub-category.

Refer to Frequency capping overview for more details on frequency capping, and review Manage a campaign’s Optimization & Delivery settings to set or change a campaign’s frequency-cap settings.

A maximum of four frequency rules are supported per campaign. You can add one rule for each duration type (daily, weekly, monthly, campaign).

*The Weeks and Months durations are based on the calendar week and calendar month rather than today’s date. The Weeks duration takes place from Sunday at 12:00 AM through Saturday at 11:59 PM, and the Months duration takes place from the first day of every month at 12:00 AM through the last day 11:59 PM.

The campaign will apply an “AND” relationship to the rules you add. This means that a campaign can only target a user when every frequency rule is met.

For example, an advertiser adds the following two rules to a campaign:

By the last day of the week, a user was only served your ad a total of eight times. However, they saw your ad twice today. Since the first rule was already satisfied, the user will not be served more ads today to reach the total allowed 10 weekly impressions.

You can edit a campaign’s frequency settings throughout its duration. However, both the amount of time remaining in the campaign and the number of impressions already served to a given user can impact the way in which the campaign executes your settings.

For example, an advertiser sets a frequency cap of 100 impressions for the Campaign Duration. After the campaign runs for one month, the advertiser changes the frequency cap to 20 impressions for the Campaign Duration.

During its first month, the campaign served 50 impressions each to 90% of users. Since this number is greater than the advertiser’s new frequency cap setting of 20 impressions, the campaign will stop serving ads to those 90% of users who have already met the impression limit.