A campaign’s Optimization & Delivery settings determine 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 Optimization & Delivery settings:

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 Optimization & Delivery settings 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 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 up or adjust 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.

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 Optimization & Delivery settings for more information on how to enable or disable the Bid Pacing feature.

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.