Budgets and pacing

Give a client a monthly budget and Advec tells you when it's heading for an underspend or an overspend. Performance bands flag CPC, CTR or CPA moving well outside the normal range. Both run once a day on completed days and raise operational issues.

Set a monthly budget

Open the client and scroll to Alert settings. Enter a Monthly budget in the ad accounts' currency. It covers all the client's active ad accounts. A campaign group can also have its own Group monthly budget under Campaign group overrides. There are no per-campaign budgets.

How pacing works

Each day, Advec projects this month's spend so far, up to the newest completed day, in a straight line to month end. It judges pacing from day 7 until the day before the month ends.

• Underpacing: the projected spend is below 85% of the budget.
• Overpacing: at the current daily rate, the budget runs out before about day 25.

Example. A client, Acme, has a 10,000 budget for September (30 days). By 20 September it has spent 5,000. The projection is 5,000 ÷ 20 × 30 = 7,500, which is 75% of the budget, so Advec raises an underpacing issue: "Acme is on track to spend 75% of its 10,000 monthly budget". Had it spent 6,800 by then, the projection would be 10,200 (102%), which is on pace, and nothing would fire.

This assumes every ad account in scope has data from 1 September. If one doesn't, pacing is skipped for that month. If a daily data run was missed or failed in the last week, only overpacing is judged.

A pacing issue resolves itself when spend is back on pace, when a new month starts, or when you remove the budget.

Performance bands

Bands compare each day with the same weekday over the previous 8 weeks. They flag the bad direction only, with one exception:

• CPC high and CTR low: judged on the two newest completed days, normally yesterday and the day before.
• CPA high and CPA low: judged on 3 and 4 days ago. A falling CPA is flagged because conversion tracking may have broken.

Both judged days must be outside the band for an issue to open. It resolves once either of them is back inside the band, as long as both days have enough volume to judge. A band needs at least 4 usable same-weekday days, so allow about 4 weeks of daily history first.

To keep small campaigns quiet, a day only counts with at least 20 conversions (for CPA), 50 clicks (for CPC) or 1,000 impressions (for CTR).