> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Spend vs Budget, Outbrain > Spend vs Budget for Outbrain stores. Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Key Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Ad Platform](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) ## At a glance > Pacing dial. Compares cumulative Outbrain spend against the period's allotted budget, surfaces over-pacing (about to exhaust the budget early) or under-pacing (spending too slowly to hit the period target). The alert is a *time-aware* check: spend at 90 percent of budget is fine on day 27 of a 30-day month, but unhealthy on day 18. | | | | ----------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **The formula** | `cumulative_spend ÷ budget_allotted_for_period`, displayed as a percent, with a parallel `time_elapsed_in_period` percent for context. The alert fires on the gap between these two: `(spend_pct − time_pct) > 10pp` triggers warn. | | **Budget source** | The *budget* figure comes from Outbrain's campaign/marketer-level configured budget. If the merchant uses Outbrain's `monthly_budget` setting, the card reads that. If the merchant uses lifetime budgets only, the card falls back to a manifest-defined monthly cap configured in `config/vortex_mind/manifests/outbrain.yaml`. | | **Currency** | Account currency. Multi-account merchants get aggregated FX-converted display. | | **What "over-pacing" means** | Spending faster than the period would absorb at flat-pace. Cause: bid algorithm scaled into a cheap inventory window, daily cap missing, or competitor pull-back on inventory dropped CPCs and Outbrain bought more clicks. Risk: budget exhausts mid-period; campaign halts; recovery tail loses attribution-window value. | | **What "under-pacing" means** | Spending slower than the period would absorb. Cause: bid too low to win inventory, audience saturation, daily cap too restrictive, creative-disapproval froze a campaign. Risk: budget under-utilised; the prospecting investment didn't happen; the next period's lift study has nothing to measure. | | **Refresh cadence** | Hourly. Spend ingestion lag is 1 to 4 hours; the card's pacing read is roughly that stale. | | **Time window** | `T/30D` (today within current calendar period, plus 30-day rolling for trend). | | **Alert trigger** | `>90% used before 80% of period`. The 10pp gap is the conservative threshold; tune to 5pp for tighter pacing or 15pp for looser. | | **Roles** | owner, marketing, finance | ## Calculation Calculated automatically from your Outbrain data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading. ## Worked example The same UK lifestyle brand. Monthly Outbrain budget £14k, period is March 26 (31 days). Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 22 Mar 26. | Metric | Value | | ------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- | | Budget allotted (March 26) | £14,000 | | Spend so far (1 to 22 Mar) | £11,420 | | Spend % of budget | 81.6% | | Time elapsed % of period | 70.0% (22 of 31 days, 09:00 GMT) | | Pacing gap (spend pct minus time pct) | **+11.6pp** | | Card status | **WARN** (>10pp over) | What this tells the merchant: 1. **Over-pacing by 11.6 percentage points.** At current run-rate, monthly spend will hit £16,150 (115 percent of budget). Either the bid algorithm scaled, daily caps slipped, or a recently launched campaign has no spend ceiling. Action required this week to avoid mid-period exhaustion. 2. **The diagnostic checks.** (1) Open [Spend by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/spend-by-campaign), look for a campaign that's spending 30 percent more than the prior week. (2) Open Outbrain → Campaigns → check daily-budget caps, the most common cause is a campaign launched without a daily cap. (3) Check [CPC Trend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/cpc-trend), bid auction may have inflated CPCs after a competitor entered the auction. 3. **The fix.** Set a daily cap of £450/day (target: £14k ÷ 31 days). The bid algorithm will throttle within 24 hours. Re-check the card on 23 Mar 26 morning, the pacing gap should narrow. 4. **Compare against last month.** Pacing gap on 22 Feb 26 was -2pp (slightly under-pacing). The shape of this card flipping from -2pp to +11.6pp month-over-month is what makes it a useful signal: the team didn't change anything materially, the bid algorithm just found an inventory window. **The card surfaces algorithm-driven spend drift before it becomes a budget-exhaustion incident.** 5. **The under-pacing cousin scenario.** If the same merchant on 22 Mar showed *spend 55 percent / time 70 percent* (under-pacing -15pp), the card would also alert. Cause: bid too low or campaigns disapproved. Action: raise bids by 10 to 15 percent, or check Outbrain → Notifications for creative-disapproval messages. Under-pacing is *not* free money saved; it's prospecting reach the merchant paid for via opportunity cost. ## Sibling cards merchants should reference together | Card | Why pair it with Spend vs Budget | What the combination tells you | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | [Total Spend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/total-spend) | The numerator. | Spend rising while budget held flat is the over-pacing root. | | [Spend by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/spend-by-campaign) | Per-campaign breakdown. | Identifies which campaign is the over-pacer. | | [Spend Anomaly](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/spend-anomaly) | 24-hour spike alert. | Anomaly fires before pacing tips into warn; treat as upstream signal. | | [Budget Utilisation](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/budget-utilisation) | Standalone utilisation gauge. | Same data, different framing; useful for non-time-aware monitoring. | | [Overspending Campaigns](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/overspending-campaigns) | Campaigns over their individual cap. | Headline pacing fine but per-campaign overspending hidden, this is the leak. | | [Underspending Campaigns](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/underspending-campaigns) | Campaigns under their cap. | Under-pacing root cause when headline shows under-pacing. | | [ROAS](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/roas) | Pacing context. | Over-pacing with rising ROAS is healthy; over-pacing with falling ROAS is the warning shape. | | Cross-connector: [Google Ads Spend vs Budget](/nerve-centre/google_ads/gads_spend_pacing), [Meta Ads Pacing](/nerve-centre/facebook/fb_pacing) | Multi-channel pacing portfolio. | Most merchants set channel-level monthly budgets; cross-platform pacing comparison helps spot which channel is the over-pacer. | ## Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard **Where to look in Outbrain's own dashboard:** > [Outbrain Amplify](https://my.outbrain.com/amplify/site/reports) → **Campaigns → Budget column** for per-campaign budget vs spend, or **Reports → Performance** filtered to the current calendar month. Outbrain's UI does *not* show a single account-level pacing dial; the merchant must derive pacing manually from the daily-spend column vs the days-elapsed-in-month. This card automates that derivation. **Why our number may legitimately differ from a manual derivation:** | Reason | Direction | Why | | ------------------------------------ | ------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Period boundary** | Either | The card uses calendar-month boundaries by default (1st to last-day-of-month). If the merchant's budget cycle is fiscal (e.g. 28th-to-27th), override in the manifest. | | **Time zone** | Either | Outbrain UI uses marketer-account TZ; card uses UTC. Period boundaries can shift by a day at TZ borders. | | **Spend ingestion lag** | Card under-states pacing | 1-to-4-hour API lag means the card reads slightly less spend than is actually committed; pacing reads slightly under-paced versus reality. | | **Multi-account aggregation** | Either | Card sums across all configured marketer accounts; per-account pacing in Outbrain's UI may show different shape per region. | | **Manifest-defined budget mismatch** | Card overstates pacing | If the merchant changed the monthly budget in Outbrain but didn't update the Vortex IQ manifest, the card uses the stale lower budget figure, making pacing look worse than it is. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** | Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [`google_ads.gads_spend_pacing`](/nerve-centre/google_ads/gads_spend_pacing) | Same pacing pattern, different channel. | Different budgets, different month-over-month seasonality. | | [`facebook.fb_pacing`](/nerve-centre/facebook/fb_pacing) | Same as Google. | Meta tends to over-pace early in month; Outbrain tends to under-pace early; channel-specific shapes are normal. | | [`shopify.total_revenue`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/total-revenue) and platform peers | Pacing context for ROAS interpretation. | Over-pacing with revenue tracking equals healthy scaling; over-pacing with revenue flat equals scaling beyond efficient frontier. | ## Known limitations / merchant FAQs **My pacing is +12pp over. Will Outbrain auto-throttle?** Only if you have daily caps set per campaign. Outbrain's monthly budget at the account level is *advisory*, not a hard ceiling, the spend can blow past it if daily caps are missing. Set a daily cap of `monthly_budget ÷ days_in_month` on every campaign as the simple defence. Outbrain's bid algorithm respects daily caps; it does not respect monthly budgets unconditionally. **My pacing is -15pp under. Should I worry?** Yes, but with nuance. Under-pacing means prospecting reach the merchant intended to buy didn't happen. Three diagnostics: (1) **Bid too low.** Open Outbrain → Campaign → Bid; if the bid is below the auction's clearing price, you'll under-pace. Raise by 10 to 15 percent. (2) **Creative-disapproval.** Outbrain occasionally rejects ads for content compliance; check **Notifications**. (3) **Audience saturation.** If your prospecting audience is small (e.g. UK-only, narrow interest targeting), you may have hit reach ceiling. Broaden targeting or accept the under-pacing. **What's a healthy pacing gap?** ±5pp is healthy normal variation. ±5 to ±10pp is worth a glance but rarely action-worthy. >±10pp is the alert threshold; >±15pp is intervene-now. The card's `>90% used before 80% of period` corresponds roughly to the 10pp threshold. **The card says I'm over-pacing but I haven't changed anything.** The bid algorithm changed something. Outbrain's bid auction is dynamic, when competing advertisers pull back (end-of-month, post-BFCM, holiday breaks), inventory becomes cheaper and your bids win more clicks at lower CPCs but higher volume. Net effect: same bids, more spend. Solution is daily caps; the algorithm cannot over-pace if a hard daily ceiling is in place. **My budget cycle is fiscal (28th-to-27th), not calendar. Can I configure that?** Yes, in `config/vortex_mind/manifests/outbrain.yaml` under `pacing.period_boundary: fiscal_28`. The card's pacing read aligns to the fiscal cycle; alerts fire on fiscal-day-of-cycle, not calendar-day-of-month. **Why does pacing read at 12pm and not real-time?** Outbrain's spend-data API has a 1-to-4-hour ingestion lag. The card refreshes hourly. For real-time monitoring during a heavy-spend day, watch the Outbrain UI directly; the card is for trend-monitoring and end-of-week reviews. **Can I have separate budget caps per campaign?** Yes, set them in Outbrain → Campaign → Budget. The card's headline pacing aggregates across all campaigns, but the per-campaign view ([Spend by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/spend-by-campaign)) shows individual-campaign pacing. Most merchants set both account-level monthly and per-campaign daily. **Multi-currency setup, how does pacing work?** Pacing is computed per marketer account in native currency, then displayed in a single converted currency. If GBP account is over-pacing while EUR is under-pacing, the headline figure shows the FX-blended pacing; per-account drill-down shows individual shapes. Most merchants find per-region pacing more actionable than the blended view. **Why does the card alert at >10pp gap rather than >5pp?** Calibrated against typical Outbrain volatility. Outbrain's intra-month spend pacing naturally swings ±5 to ±8pp because the bid auction is dynamic and publisher inventory is uneven. A 10pp gap statistically distinguishes "algorithm-driven drift" from "normal noise". Tune in **Settings → Alerts → Outbrain Pacing** if your team prefers tighter or looser thresholds. **The pacing was fine yesterday and over-pacing today. Did something break?** Two common causes. (1) **A new campaign launched without a daily cap.** Confirm via [Spend by Campaign](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/outbrain/spend-by-campaign). (2) **Existing campaign's daily cap was raised.** Outbrain's audit trail shows budget changes; check **Account → Activity Log**. Less commonly, a competitor exit can drop CPCs and let you buy more clicks at the same bid (this is "free win" if ROAS holds; cost-control issue if ROAS doesn't). *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *Spend vs Budget* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Outbrain and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. [Start for free](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.