Budget pacing
Advertising mechanicsDefined term
Budget pacing is the feedback controller that decides which auctions a budget-capped campaign even enters. Spending greedily would exhaust a daily budget in the morning and miss cheaper or better opportunities later, so the pacer throttles participation against a spend target curve.
Implementations mix probabilistic throttling (entering a fraction of eligible auctions) with bid adjustment. Pacing interacts with the learning phase and with auction pressure across the day, which is why identical budgets can buy noticeably different outcomes on different pacing curves.
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Advertising mechanics6 of 28 terms
- Ad rank⦿ liveThe auction score that orders ad positions — in the classic model, bid × quality — and sets what the slot above pays.Advertising mechanics
- Generalized second-price auction (GSP)⦿ liveThe multi-slot auction behind most search advertising: each winner pays just enough to keep its position, not its own bid.Advertising mechanics
- First-price auction⦿ liveAn auction where winners pay exactly what they bid — the rule most programmatic display moved to in 2019.Advertising mechanics
- Learning phaseThe exploration period after a campaign change when a delivery algorithm spends budget gathering data before optimizing on it.Advertising mechanics
- Budget pacingThe control loop that spreads a fixed ad budget across a period, throttling auction entries to avoid early exhaustion.Advertising mechanics
- Frequency cappingA delivery constraint limiting how often one person sees the same ad within a window — an identity problem as much as a rule.Advertising mechanics