There are two AutoPacing Algorithms, this article is about Responsive Pacing. You can read about how the Linear Pacing here.
When Responsive Pacing is best:
When Linear Pacing is resulting in underpacing, or you need more aggressive budget adjustments with the potential for budgets to be set higher than your daily target spend (within limits) with the goal of 100% pacing.
Overview:
AutoPacing will adjust your daily budget to spend as close as possible to 100% of the budget allocated for your selected time period, for example, 1 month.
Sometimes budgets need to be set higher than your actual spend target in order to encourage the bid strategy to spend your daily target. This algorithm builds on the linear pacing calculation by more aggressively increasing budgets artificially (within limits) in order to raise the daily spend to where it should be.
How does it allocate the ad spend across the campaigns within each budget?
Each day, we:
1. Identify the current daily budget proportions between campaigns/shared budgets that are in your Adpulse budget.
Example: We have two campaigns in your Adpulse budget, and the total daily budget for these campaigns is $100. The current proportions are:
Campaign 1 - $60 = 60% of the total budget
Campaign 2 - $40 = 40% of the total budget
2. Calculate the ideal daily spend between today and the end of your selected time period, taking ad scheduling into account (for example, if you don’t run ads on Sunday’s then the ideal daily spend is based on 6 spending days per week rather than 7).
Example:
We have a monthly $3,000 spend target for our two campaigns
Ad schedule is Mon-Fri (meaning we have 21 ‘spending days’ this month)
It’s currently the 11th of the month
We have 15 ‘spending days’ left
We have spent $800 so far this month, meaning we still have $2,200 to spend
To calculate the ideal daily spend, take the amount of budget remaining and divide that by the number of spending days remaining, so $2,200/15 = $146.67 per day.
3. Consider recent daily budget vs spend levels to determine if the budget needs to be set higher than the spend target in order to hit the actual desired spend levels.
Example:
Jumping forward a few days, we notice that even though we set the budgets between our campaigns at $146.67 (which was our ideal daily spend to ensure we hit our month’s spend target), we are really only really spending a total of $110 per day.
Adpulse will increase the daily budget by a calculated factor (let’s say 1.3 in this example) in order to try and get the daily spend closer to $146.67. In this example, this means our daily budget would be set to $146.67 x 1.3 = $190.67
There are limits in place to ensure the budgets do not increase excessively.
4. Apply the calculated budget in the current budget proportions.
Example:
Total daily budget to allocate = $190.67
Campaign 1 - 60% of the current total budget = $114.40 allocated today
Campaign 2 - 40% of the current total budget = $76.27 allocated today
Points to note:
If a campaign is part of a shared budget (in Google or Microsoft), Adpulse displays and adjusts the shared budget, not the underlying campaigns (in shared budgets, underlying campaigns do not have their own budget)
Adpulse places an upper limit on the calculated daily budget to prevent budgets from being excessively increased. The upper limit calculation is: (Budget/Scheduled Days In Period) x 2. For example, if you set a monthly budget of $2,000 in a month where you have 20 scheduled days, your expected daily budget would be $100 per day. Therefore the upper limit that Adpulse would set your budget to would be ($2,000/20) x 2 = $200/day.
Responsive Pacing relies on previous spend history to calculate today's budget. If no recent history exists, no adjustments will be made until some spend occurs. We therefore advise not to use Responsive Pacing unless there is at least seven days of spend history in the underlying campaigns.
If an Adpulse budget contains just one campaign or shared budget, the ‘ideal daily spend’ will be applied to that budget (eg the proportion is 100%)