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Ad-tech

Spend pacing

How a platform distributes a daily/lifetime budget across the day.

Spend pacing is how the ad platform distributes a budget across time. Standard pacing: even spend across the 24-hour window. Accelerated pacing: spend as fast as auctions clear (Google Ads default-deprecated in 2019; still available on some platforms). Lifetime budget pacing: platform spreads over the campaign's date range. Pacing matters because under-pacing means missed inventory; over-pacing means hitting the budget cap mid-day and going dark.

Example

Meta campaign with $500/day budget paces unevenly: 60% of spend lands in 9am–3pm window because that's when the audience is most active. Operator switches to dayparted bid strategy to capture more of the 3–9pm conversion window.

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