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Budget Pacing & Reallocation

Coming Soon — Phase 2

Budget pacing and reallocation (buyer-9zz) is part of Phase 2: Campaign Intelligence. It depends on the Campaign Brief to Deal Pipeline (buyer-u8l). This page describes the planned budget management capability.

The budget pacing engine monitors campaign spend against plan in real time, detects over-delivery and under-delivery, and reallocates budget across channels and sellers mid-flight. When pacing is off-target, the engine can issue deal adjustment requests to sellers to bring the campaign back on track.

What Budget Pacing Does

After a campaign's deals are booked (either manually or via the campaign pipeline), the pacing engine tracks delivery against the plan. Without pacing, a campaign can exhaust its budget early (over-delivery) or fail to spend its budget (under-delivery) — both waste advertiser money or miss reach goals.

The pacing engine addresses three questions continuously:

  1. Are we on pace? — Compare actual spend and impressions against the planned delivery curve
  2. What is off? — Identify which channels, sellers, or deals are over- or under-delivering
  3. What should we do? — Reallocate budget from under-performing deals to over-performing ones, or request delivery adjustments from sellers

Planned Capabilities

Spend Monitoring

  • Track actual impressions and spend per deal, per channel, and per seller
  • Compare against the planned delivery curve (linear pacing, front-loaded, or back-loaded)
  • Surface pacing alerts when delivery deviates beyond configurable thresholds

Delivery Detection

  • Over-delivery — A deal or channel is spending faster than planned, risking early budget exhaustion
  • Under-delivery — A deal or channel is spending slower than planned, risking unspent budget at flight end
  • Stalled delivery — A deal has stopped delivering entirely (zero impressions over a configurable window)

Budget Reallocation

  • Shift budget from under-delivering deals to over-delivering ones within the same channel
  • Shift budget across channels when an entire channel is under-delivering
  • Respect minimum and maximum allocation constraints per seller and per channel
  • Log all reallocation decisions with rationale for auditability

Seller Adjustment Requests

  • Issue deal modification requests to sellers when pacing requires delivery changes
  • Request increased delivery on under-delivering deals (if seller has available inventory)
  • Request throttled delivery on over-delivering deals
  • Track seller responses and adjust the pacing model accordingly

Key Planned Functionality

  • Real-time pacing dashboard — Current spend vs. plan across all active deals
  • Configurable pacing curves — Linear, front-loaded, back-loaded, or custom delivery curves
  • Automatic reallocation — Rules-based budget shifting when pacing deviates beyond thresholds
  • Manual override — Campaign manager can approve or reject reallocation recommendations
  • Deal adjustment API — Request delivery changes from sellers via the Deals API
  • Pacing history — Full audit trail of pacing measurements and reallocation decisions

Integration Points

Budget pacing builds on several existing and planned buyer agent capabilities: