How do I set (Ad Group) Budget Cap and Pacing

XPO offers granular budget control at both the campaign and ad group level. You can also adjust the pace of your budget spend. Your budget can either be:

• evenly spent,
• spent as quickly as possible, or
• spent dynamically for optimal performance.

Instructions

1. From your campaign dashboard, click +Ad Group to set up an ad group.
   
   
   
   
2. Under Budget, enter your budget and KPIs, and select your desired pacing option and settings. See below for detailed configurations.
   
   

A. Pacing Options

1. DAILY: This pacing feature helps campaigns spend their budgets evenly throughout the day. 
   
2. FLIGHT: This pacing feature divides the budget over the lifetime of the ad group. The ad group stops running either once the budget is exhausted or the ad group reaches its end date, whichever occurs earlier.

B. Pacing Settings

Fixed Schedule Pacing

If AUTO-BUDGET ALLOCATION is used, this pacing option will not be applicable.

Example: Assume that you have 2 ad groups:

• AG1 with ad group budget of $4,000 to be spent over 20 days, with daily budget cap of $200
• AG2 with ad group budget of $3,000 to be spent over 10 days, with daily budget cap of $250 (i.e. with $500 unused)

• EVEN:
  • DAILY-EVEN (RECOMMENDED): Budget spend is evenly paced every minute during the day (24 hours), and is capped by the daily budget. 
    • AG1 Pacing = $200 / (24*60) mins =  $0.14 per minute
    • AG2 Pacing = $250 / (24*60) mins =  $0.17 per minute
  • FLIGHT-EVEN: Budget spend is evenly paced every minute over the entire flight duration, capped by the sum of all ad groups budget.
    • AG1 Pacing = $4,000 / (20*24*60) mins =  $0.14 per minute
    • AG2 Pacing = $3,000 / (20*24*60) mins =  $0.10 per minute

      On daily basis, the maximum spent is $250 due to the daily budget cap that's being set

• ASAP: Budget is spent as soon as possible. Bidding will accelerate at 10x the pace of EVEN pacing.
  • DAILY-ASAP:
    • XPO will attempt to spend the entire daily budget of that ad group as quickly as possible, (e.g. within first few hours of that day) if there is sufficient bidding opportunity.
  • FLIGHT-ASAP: 
    • XPO will attempt to spend the entire ad group budget as quickly as possible (e.g. within first few days or first few hours) if there is a sufficient bidding opportunity.

Smart Pacing

Fixed-schedule pacing relies on predefined rules to divide your budget evenly and efficiently over time. 

Smart pacing tries to be more dynamic to adapt to the changing environment. No single pacing setting is the best, hence, depending on the situation, choosing one pacing setting over the other may work better.

Smart Pacing works by optimizing strategies at ad group level:

• Fixed price: The main goal of this ad group strategy is to spend according to a schedule. Additionally, this strategy aims to help you improve engagement/clicks while bidding for high-quality inventory
• Auto-optimization: The main goal of this ad group strategy is to ensure your pacing aligns with market conditions and the ad group's KPIs, without exceeding budget constraints. 

• FLIGHT-SMART: The main goal of this strategy is to ensure that total budget spend does not exceed the total budget cap, as budgets typically fluctuate during an ad group's lifetime.
  
  
• DAILY-SMART: The main goal of this strategy is to ensure that the total budget spent on a day does not exceed the daily budget cap of that same day. 

C. Pacing Status

From XPO, you can visually analyze the status of your budget pacing. This is based on your daily budget spend to help identify whether your campaign/ ad group is performing (a) On Target - within the budget, (b) Under pacing - under the budget, or (c) Over pacing - over the budget.

Pacing Status	Colour Indication On Spend Bar	Reason
(a) On Target Daily spend is considered to be at normal pacing and within your target	Green	On target = actual total spend > 90% of expected spend AND/OR actual total spend < 110% of expected spend Lies between 91% - 110%
(b) Under Pacing Daily spend is underperforming and budget pacing is lagging.  under pacing = actual total spend < 90% of expected spend	Yellow	When campaign/ad group is under pacing but pacing % is greater than 20% Lies between 21% - 90%
	Red	When campaign/ad group is under pacing but pacing % is less than 20% Lies between 20% and below
(c) Over Pacing Daily spend on the budget is moving faster than the required target. over pacing = actual total spend > 110% of expected spend	Yellow	When campaign/ad group is over pacing but pacing % is less than 120% Lies between 111% - 120%
	Red	When campaign/ad group is over pacing but pacing % is greater than 120% Lies between 121% and above