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). Taking an active approach to pacing helps ensure you gather enough trend details to inform your optimization decisions. You’ll decide whether to shift budgets to different strategies in real time based on market changes, or adjust other elements such as frequency caps to drive spend performance.

Monitoring a campaign’s pacing helps ensure that your campaigns spend in full. You can review and manage pacing at both the campaign and insertion order (IO) levels using one of three pacing options:

Refer to Manage pacing for instructions on locating an IO’s or individual campaign’s pacing details in the Campaigns and Dashboards apps.

Budget-based and impression-based IOs both run until a targeted number is reached. Budget-based strategies stop serving once a monetary budget is reached, while impression-based IOs stop serving once a certain impression count is reached.

Pacing performance metrics analyze the percentage of the total monetary budget Spent for budget-based IOs, or the percentage of the total impression budget Served for impression-based IOs.

The choice between budget-based and impression-based strategies depends on your goals and preferences. Refer to Pacing bar charts for more details on Spent and Served metrics, and review What is a Budget vs. Impression-Based IO? for more information and use cases on budget-based and impression-based IOs.

The IO Pacing metric compares the amount that each of its campaigns have spent so far against how much time is left before the IO’s end date. IO Pacing values are updated once every 24 hours, meaning pacing performance is calculated beginning from the IO’s start date through yesterday.

When an IO is pacing behind, you have the opportunity to allocate resources to the right strategies that’ll get spending back on track.

The Campaign Pacing metric compares the amount that the campaign has spent so far against how much time is left before its end date. Like IO Pacing, Campaign Pacing values are updated once every 24 hours, meaning pacing performance is calculated beginning from the campaign’s start date through yesterday.

When a campaign is pacing behind, you have the opportunity to adjust your campaign settings to get spending back on track. Refer to Troubleshoot a campaign that’s pacing behind for support.

Monitoring the Daily Pacing metric is recommended for campaigns with shorter durations. It checks how much of your budget was spent in the current day, and calculates what percentage of the total budget that the spend represents. Daily Pacing values are updated once every hour.

IO and Campaign Pacing are represented by two bar charts in the IQM platform: Spent/Served and Days Left. Since Daily Pacing is assessed on a day-by-day basis, Daily Pacing is represented by one bar chart: Spent/Served.

You’ll review either a Spent or Served chart depending on whether you defined a monetary (Spent) or impression (Served) budget for the campaign or IO. These charts feature a color that signals whether pacing is behind, on track, or ahead of schedule. This performance is based on the pacing option you’re reviewing—IO, Campaign, or Daily—and the Days Left in the campaign.

*The programmatic bid landscape is dynamic. Regularly monitor pacing performance, regardless of the prior day or week’s performance, to ensure your campaign spends the budget in full by its end date.

The Days Left chart illustrates the percentage of the campaign’s duration that’s complete. For example, if the campaign’s duration is 10 days, and 5 days have passed, the colored bar will fill half of the Days Left chart’s total length. The total days remaining in the campaign are displayed next to the chart.

Note that the Days Left chart will always display in the color gray regardless of the campaign or IO’s pacing performance. The gray bar will also fill up 100% of the chart’s total length in any of these scenarios: