At a glance
Pacing card: how much of the planned LinkedIn budget you’ve used vs how far through the budget period you are. spend_to_date ÷ planned_budget plotted against the equivalent calendar fraction. Triggers when you’ve spent >90% of the budget before 80% of the period has elapsed (i.e. you’re going to overrun). The hardest-to-detect issue is the inverse: spend tracking flat on plan when conversions have collapsed, you’re on plan in dollars but burning money in poor-quality inventory.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your LinkedIn Ads data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A B2B fintech running a £50,000/month LinkedIn budget across always-on demand-gen and ABM. Today is 22 Apr 26 (day 22 of a 30-day budget period; period started 01 Apr 26). Account currency GBP.
What’s interesting:
- Pacing index 1.124 is past the typical “easy ride” zone (0.95 to 1.05) but inside the “moderate concern” zone (1.05 to 1.20). The alert hasn’t yet fired (>90% used before 80% of period would mean £45k by day 24); current trajectory hits that threshold by Friday morning if nothing changes.
- The remaining-days implied budget (£1,100/day) is half of what the trailing 7D actually averaged (£2,050/day). Which means: continuing at current pace will exhaust the budget on day 27, forcing ads to pause for the last 3 days. This is a worse outcome than throttling now, you’d lose 3 days of presence in front of the right audience right at month-end (when B2B demos are getting urgency-pushed by AEs).
- The over-pacing came from week 2. The webinar-promotion burst campaign launched 09 Apr with a 14-day flight at £4,500 lifetime budget. Actual delivery: £4,800 over 11 days because LinkedIn’s auction over-delivered most days during Cannes-week competitive softness. Lifetime cap held; pacing-against-monthly-budget bled.
- Recommended action: lower the daily caps on always-on demand-gen by 25% for the remaining 8 days (£330/day → £250/day on the broad-ICP campaign). Keep ABM at full pace; that’s the best-fit money. Webinar burst already ended.
- If the alert had fired on day 18 instead of being caught manually, the operator would have had 4 more days of runway. This is why the >90% before 80% threshold matters, it’s set conservatively enough that there’s still time to course-correct without hard-pause mid-campaign.
Aim for the pacing index to track within ±5% of 1.00 throughout the period. Bigger swings indicate a bid-strategy or daily-cap misconfiguration.
Quick sanity tests for spend vs budget:
- Pacing index 1.05 to 1.15 mid-period = mild over-pace, throttle daily caps slightly.
- Pacing index >1.20 mid-period = strong over-pace, consider pausing one campaign or cutting daily caps 30%.
- Pacing index <0.85 by day 25 = under-pace, check for paused campaigns or rejected creatives that haven’t been re-approved.
- Pacing flat throughout but conversions dropping = on-plan in dollars, off-plan in outcomes. Open Wasted Spend and Worst Campaigns immediately.
- Pacing index changed sharply day-over-day = a campaign daily-cap was changed without notice, audit Edit History.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in LinkedIn Campaign Manager: LinkedIn does NOT provide a single “account budget vs spend” pacing view. The closest views are:- LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Account, Performance Chart: set the date range to the budget period and compare the “Spent” footer against your planned budget.
- Campaign Manager, Campaigns, Budget column + Spent column: per-campaign pacing roll-up; sum manually across campaigns for an account-level pacing check.
- Billing, Receipts: invoiced spend. Useful for finance-side reconciliation but lags real-time pacing by a billing cycle.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My pacing index is 1.20 mid-period. Should I panic? Not panic, but act today. A pacing index of 1.20 at day 15 of a 30-day period means you will exhaust the budget by day 25 unless you throttle. Throttle now (cut daily caps 20%) rather than hard-pause at month-end; sustained presence matters more than absolute parity with the planned budget. If the over-pace is producing better-than-baseline ROAS, top up the budget instead of throttling; on B2B accounts a top-up is often the right call because LinkedIn’s audience is hard to re-engage after a multi-day pause. Pacing is exactly on plan but conversions are down. What is happening? The hardest pattern to detect, and the most expensive. Three usual causes. (1) Auction inflation: CPCs rose, you paid more for the same volume; check CPC Trend. (2) Audience exhaustion: frequency over the period is high, the same people are seeing the same ads. (3) Creative fatigue: CTR has been falling for 14+ days. The pacing-on-plan signal is hiding a quality problem. Open Wasted Spend and Worst Campaigns immediately. LinkedIn over-delivered my daily cap by 22%. Is that a problem for pacing? Daily over-delivery (up to 25%) is built into LinkedIn’s auction logic and is normal. Pacing accumulates the actuals, so a single over-delivery day shows in the curve but rarely breaches alert on its own. Two over-delivery days in a row plus a mid-period start can push pacing past the threshold; this is the most common single cause of pacing alerts firing in week 2. The card uses my Vortex IQ override budget but my CFO uses the LinkedIn-set budget. Which is right? Both, for different audiences. The Vortex IQ override is what your team should manage to (it reflects current planning, including mid-period adjustments). The LinkedIn-set budget is what your finance team reconciles against (it locks once set in LinkedIn). Keep them within 5% of each other; bigger gaps create pacing-alert noise. The card prefers the override because it is the operational truth; the LinkedIn-set budget is the contract. Why does the card use UTC and LinkedIn use account timezone? UTC is the only timezone consistent across multi-region brands running multiple LinkedIn ad accounts. The card uses UTC so the pacing math is comparable across accounts. For 30-day windows the gap averages out; for daily reads (e.g. “today is day 21 of 30 = 70%”) the timezone offset can shift the percent-elapsed by 1 to 2 percentage points. Override the timezone in connector settings if your team prefers account timezone for daily reading. Pacing dropped suddenly mid-period. What changed? Three usual causes. (1) A campaign was paused (intentionally or by accident), check the LinkedIn Edit History under each campaign. (2) Daily caps were cut, ditto. (3) A creative was rejected by LinkedIn’s review and the campaign delivered less than planned; check Campaign Manager Notifications. The under-pace alert (<70% used after 90% of period elapsed) catches the worst version of this; the directional drop in pacing index catches it earlier.
Does this card include Sponsored Messaging cost-per-send?
Yes. CPS spend rolls into the same Insights API spend total. Sponsored Messaging is a small share of most B2B accounts (typically <15% of monthly spend) but can spike during ABM campaign launches. The card aggregates regardless.
My pacing alert fires every month for the same reason. How do I tune it?
Two practical options. (1) Adjust the threshold: in connector settings, change >90% used before 80% of period to >95% used before 85% of period for a less sensitive alert. (2) Adjust the budget: if your team consistently spends more than the configured budget and the spend is profitable, raise the budget rather than fighting the alert. Pacing alerts that fire “for known reasons” every month indicate a planning gap, not a configuration issue.
Multi-currency: how does pacing work across accounts?
LinkedIn ad accounts are single-currency by design. Each account has its own pacing card. To roll up pacing across currencies for a single business view, you would need to FX-convert spend and budget at month-end rates externally; LinkedIn does not surface a unified-currency total. Use a Stacked Panel in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre with one panel per account for the multi-currency view.
Make-good credits arrived after period close. Does pacing recompute retroactively?
Yes. If LinkedIn issues retroactive credit, the historical spend is restated and the pacing index recomputes on the corrected number. The pacing reading for past periods updates on the next refresh; this can make a previously-tripped alert “un-trip” retroactively. The card history reflects current state, not the state at the moment of alert.
Should I top up the budget or throttle the daily caps when the alert fires?
Depends on ROAS. If ROAS is at or above plan, top up the budget; LinkedIn-audience-warmth is hard to rebuild after a pause and the over-pace is usually producing real value. If ROAS is below plan or trending down, throttle daily caps; the over-pace is likely scaling into less-efficient inventory. The decision rule: top up when efficiency holds, throttle when efficiency drops.
Why is the under-pace threshold <70% used after 90% of period?
Because by day 27 of a 30-day period the pacing should be >90% on a healthy campaign; <70% means roughly £15k unspent on a £50k monthly budget, which is significant under-spend. Common cause: a paused campaign no-one re-enabled (check Edit History first). Less common: a high-cap campaign that lost auction competitiveness mid-period. Tune the threshold for your context; agency-managed accounts with disciplined daily monitoring can use a tighter <80% threshold.