Budget pacing reports

The Budget pacing report feature has been deprecated. You can no longer create new budget pacing reports. You can still edit the settings in existing budget pacing reports.

You can perform many of the same tasks as Budget pacing by using Budget Management, which includes some important enhancements (such as the ability to set spend for a specific day or week and to automatically optimize spend).

If you want to report on the same groups of campaigns as your current budget pacing reports, you can manually recreate the reports in Budget Management. The existing reports aren't migrated for you.

The Budget pacing report allows you to set a budget (different from a campaign’s daily budget) across multiple campaigns and see if you’re on track to spend it. Tracking spend against a budget goal is a common need for many users. These reports save time for agencies that need to look at such data on a regular basis. You can:

See budget pacing for campaigns across multiple engine accounts, all in one report.
Enter expectations for your key performance indicator (KPI) and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them.
Visualize week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends and changes.
See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

These reports are created dynamically, so feel free to adjust the numbers frequently and see what settings result in the most useful reports.

Create a budget pacing report

Navigate to an advertiser.
Steps for navigating to an advertiser
1. Click the navigation bar to display navigation options.
2. In the "Agency" list, click on the agency that contains the advertiser. You can search for an agency by name or scroll through the list.
3. In the "Advertiser" list, click on the advertiser.
4. Click Apply or press the Enter key.
Search Ads 360 displays the advertiser page, which contains data for all of the advertiser’s engine accounts.
Click Budget pacing reports in the left navigation pane.
The list of existing budget pacing reports appears.
Click the + Report button, which appears above the reporting table.
Name your report.
Enter the owners of the report.
Separate multiple owners with commas. This is useful for filtering if your agency has many different account managers creating budget pacing reports. For example, you could put your team name or your own name in this field.
Enter the start and end dates.
Enter the budget you want to report against.
In the Additional metrics section, enter the key metric you want to track as your KPI for this report, and your expectations for it.
This represents the return you want for your advertising spend.
Example: While spending $300,000 this quarter, I expect to get 40,000 actions in return. You would enter Actions > Equals > 40,000, with the percent variance that is acceptable.
In the Included campaigns section, select the campaigns whose stats will contribute toward the budget goal.
Clicking on the small arrow next to an account name will add all the current campaigns. However, Search Ads 360 will not automatically add new campaigns in the future.
Click Save.
The report is added to the list of reports in the table.

Edit or remove a budget pacing report

Navigate to an advertiser.
Steps for navigating to an advertiser
1. Click the navigation bar to display navigation options.
2. In the "Agency" list, click on the agency that contains the advertiser. You can search for an agency by name or scroll through the list.
3. In the "Advertiser" list, click on the advertiser.
4. Click Apply or press the Enter key.
Search Ads 360 displays the advertiser page, which contains data for all of the advertiser’s engine accounts.
Click Budget pacing reports in the left navigation pane.
The list of existing budget pacing reports appears.
In the reporting table, select the check box next to a report.
To edit a report:
1. Click the Edit ▼ button that appears above the reporting table and select Edit details....
2. Edit the settings and click Save.
To remove a report:
1. Click the Edit ▼ button that appears above the reporting table and select Remove.
2. Click OK to confirm.

View budget pacing reports

View and compare all reports

Navigate to an advertiser.
Steps for navigating to an advertiser
1. Click the navigation bar to display navigation options.
2. In the "Agency" list, click on the agency that contains the advertiser. You can search for an agency by name or scroll through the list.
3. In the "Advertiser" list, click on the advertiser.
4. Click Apply or press the Enter key.
Search Ads 360 displays the advertiser page, which contains data for all of the advertiser’s engine accounts.
Click Budget pacing reports in the left navigation pane.
The reports summary shows a list of all the reports and provides an overview of your budget pacing status. The date selection tool does not appear on this page; all data is based on the start and end dates of the report.

In the reports summary, you can see columns such as:

Performance metrics such as Clicks, Actions, and Floodlight columns.
Note that the value of these metrics depends on the report's status. If the report is:
- Running: Columns show metrics starting from the report's start date to today.
- Complete: Columns show metrics starting from the report's start date to the end date.
- Not started: Metrics columns are empty.
% of budget spent
% of time elapsed
Budget pacing ratio
Budget remaining
Days left

View details and forecasts for a report

Navigate to an advertiser.
Steps for navigating to an advertiser
1. Click the navigation bar to display navigation options.
2. In the "Agency" list, click on the agency that contains the advertiser. You can search for an agency by name or scroll through the list.
3. In the "Advertiser" list, click on the advertiser.
4. Click Apply or press the Enter key.
Search Ads 360 displays the advertiser page, which contains data for all of the advertiser’s engine accounts.
Click Budget pacing reports in the left navigation pane.
The list of existing budget pacing reports appears.
Click a report name in the Report column.
Optionally customize the time range for the report.
Forecasted cost and Forecasted KPI appear in the scorecard below the performance summary graph.
To graph these metrics, select the Chart forecasted data check box, which appears in the top right corner of the performance summary graph.

The forecasts are calculated according to the following:
- Based on stats during the goal tracking dates, or, if there aren't enough stats available, based on the last seven days of data.
- The projections are dynamic, so adding new campaigns will automatically update the projections.
- For budget projections, we don't take campaign daily budgets into consideration.
- For the scorecard, we perform a projection for each campaign individually and roll up the results. As a result, if you're building up a new campaign, you may see projections that are higher than expected. The projections will be more realistic once the campaign stabilizes.

Known issue:

Formula columns that contain dates don’t appear properly in the summary page that lists all budget pacing reports. However, these columns will work if you click on a budget pacing report to see more detailed information.

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