Microsoft Invest - Lifetime pacing

  • Article

Lifetime pacing intelligently distributes a budget over the lifespan of a line item's flight.

Lifetime pacing calculates the daily budget required to ensure the line item fully delivers its flight budget. Lifetime pacing uses flight, budget, and pacing settings as well as in-progress flight spend to calculate daily budgets.

Lifetime pacing algorithm

Microsoft Advertising's budget pacing algorithm uses minute-to-minute analysis to distribute a line item's flight budget over the total amount of time of a flight. This ensures more precise pacing.

There are two line item settings you can use to influence how the algorithm should distribute spend:

  • Pacing Percent
  • Underspend Catch-Up

Pacing percentage

Pacing percentage determines how the budget is distributed over the course of the flight. Pacing percent values may be 50-150%.

  • Pacing set to 100%: The flight budget is distributed evenly over every day in the flight.
  • Pacing set higher than 100%: The flight budget allocates more money to daily budgets at the beginning of the flight than at the end. For example, if a trader prefers to spend a larger portion of the budget earlier in the flight, to ensure full delivery, the trader may choose to pace at 120%.
  • Pacing set lower than 100%: The flight budget allocates more money to daily budgets at the end of the flight than at the beginning.

Underspend catch-up

Underspend catch-up allows you to dictate how Microsoft Advertising's system deals with an underdelivered daily budget. Select Evenly if you'd like the unspent portions of your budget to be spent evenly throughout the rest of the flight, or ASAP if you'd like the unspent budget to be spent as soon as possible.

Daily pacing allocation

Daily Pacing Allocation determines how the daily budget should be spent in one day. Select Evenly if you'd like the daily budget to be spent evenly throughout the day.

Note

Daily Pacing Allocation doesn't affect the lifetime pacing algorithm's daily budget calculations. Rather, it affects the outcome of flight spend by pacing daily budgets' spend behavior.

By selecting Evenly, your line item paces to a geo spend curve that represents available impressions for the targeted geography. Select ASAP if you'd like the daily budget to be spent as soon as possible. By selecting ASAP, your line item doesn't pace to a spend curve, and adaptive pacing doesn't shade bids.