There are two AutoPacing Algorithms, this article is about Linear Pacing. You can read about how the Responsive Pacing here.
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.
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. Apply the ideal daily spend in the current budget proportions.
Example:
Total daily budget to allocate = $146.67
Campaign 1 - 60% of the current total budget = $88 allocated today
Campaign 2 - 40% of the current total budget = $58.67 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)
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%)
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.
If the budget is underpacing, a buffer is applied to the ideal daily spend to help bring pacing back towards 100%