Campaign priority settings allow you to take control of the way your insertion order’s (IO) individual campaigns deliver their impressions. These settings are optional but recommended as they establish a sequential order of bidding once you choose the order in which each campaign should be executed. These priorities can range from 1 to 10, with smaller numbers indicating a higher priority, and larger numbers indicating a lower priority.

Review this article for more information on how campaign priorities work, then Set or manage campaign priorities.

Campaign priority settings are a necessary safeguard for your highly targeted strategies and niche audiences. These approaches are less likely to scale and spend your IO’s budget in full.

Campaign priorities allow you to reach the narrowest targeting dimensions first, then open up spending on broader targeting rules to increase scale and fulfill spend requirements. In other words, they aim to fill as much budget as possible on your highest-priority strategies. The IO will observe your priority settings and only serve impressions for lower-priority campaigns if pacing issues occur across your higher-priority ones. This means that you can streamline campaign management and avoid manual monitoring and optimizations, all while being more confident that your IO will perform.

These settings also offer flexibility. You can add, edit, or remove priorities at any time during the IO’s duration as your goals or strategies change.

All advertisers are eligible to assign priorities to campaigns; however, a campaign must meet each of these conditions before it becomes eligible:

* This item is not required, but is recommended to help you maximize the impact of your campaigns’ priority settings.

The campaign priorities that you define follow a waterfall method. The insertion order (IO) fills as much budget as possible on the highest-priority campaigns, then assesses those campaigns via recurring Spend pacing performance checks.

In certain cases, this means that the campaign will only spend on the campaigns that you’ve assigned to Priority 1. However, if a pacing check indicates that a given campaign is pacing behind, then the next-highest-priority campaign(s) will begin serving ad impressions. Due to this safeguard, advertisers typically prioritize their niche campaigns (Priority 1), followed by moderate (Priority 2) and broad (Priority 3) ones.

Once the system begins serving impressions for a lower-priority campaign, it continues to do so throughout the campaign’s duration or until its budget–or the IO budget–is depleted.

An advertiser wants their IO to prioritize Campaign A, followed by Campaign B, Campaign C, and Campaign D.

With these priority settings applied, any of the following outcomes are possible based on available bid requests and other factors:

These possible outcomes illustrate that a waterfall approach is applied to campaigns that are assigned priorities. Priorities are a sequential process that continues until all campaigns within an IO have been activated or until the entire IO budget is spent–whichever event takes place first.

An advertiser associates the following campaigns with an IO:

Each of the campaigns are relevant to the advertiser’s marketing strategy, but they’d like to specifically prioritize Campaign A, Campaign D, and Campaign E. They only want to enable serving on Campaign B and Campaign C if the IO can’t fulfill its entire budget by serving ads via the other campaigns.

The advertiser defines Priority 1 for Campaign A, Campaign D, and Campaign E; and Priority 2 for the IO’s less-essential campaigns.

The IO will serve impressions exclusively for Campaign A, Campaign D, and Campaign E if those campaigns achieve their expected daily spend. In cases when the expected daily spend isn’t met, the IO will activate the next-highest-priority campaigns (Campaign D and Campaign E) to help fulfill the IO’s budget.

The IQM platform automatically checks pacing throughout each campaign’s duration to help ensure optimal spending. The pacing performance of these campaigns impacts the way that the priorities you defined for the campaigns are applied. It determines the specific campaigns that can serve impressions based on how much time is left in a given campaign and how well it’s pacing.

These pacing performance checks include comparing the campaign’s total spend to the expected spend up to that point in the campaign’s duration. A campaign is considered to be pacing behind if its total spend is less than 90% of the expected spend. This triggers the IO to allow ad-serving on the campaigns that are one level lower in priority.

The IO applies the same logic throughout each campaign’s duration, and continues to enable the next-highest priority as needed to help ensure appropriate pacing and, ultimately, full-budget spend.

Note that, once the platform starts serving impressions via lower-priority campaigns, it continues serving ads on those campaigns throughout the IO duration. In other words, priority won’t shift back to only the higher-priority campaigns once pacing performance improves.

The frequency of pacing checks increases based on how soon a campaign is ending. Campaigns with assigned priorities follow this pacing-check schedule.

An advertiser creates an IO with four campaigns associated with it. Each campaign features the same Start Date and End Date settings, with total durations of 15 days. The campaigns each follow the pacing-check schedule shown below:

The IO initially serves impressions for only the campaigns that are assigned Priority 1. During a pacing check, the platform identifies that the campaign’s pacing has fallen below 90% of the expected spend. The campaign starts serving on all campaigns that the advertiser assigned a Priority 1 or Priority 2.