At a glance
Pacing check: how much of the configured monthly budget Taboola has spent vs how far through the period we are. Taboola’s smartBid auto-bid is unusually fast at exiting learning phase; once it does, daily spend can double overnight. This card is the early-warning that auto-bid is outpacing plan.
| What it counts | spent_to_date ÷ budget_for_period, expressed as a percentage. Budget is taken from the campaign-level monthly budget caps configured in Taboola Backstage; spend is real-time spent from campaign-summary. The card also tracks period progress (% of days elapsed) so you can compare “spend pacing” to “time pacing”. |
| Cost basis | Same as Total Spend; CPC, CPM, or smartBid CPA depending on the campaign. The pacing math is unit-agnostic. |
| Currency | Account currency, single-currency per Taboola account. |
| Conversion attribution | Not applicable; this is a budget-pacing card, no attribution involved. |
| Attribution window | Not applicable. |
| Bot / invalid traffic | IVT-credited spend reduces the spent figure on the 7, 14 day correction cadence; pacing temporarily reads slightly high before IVT credits post. |
| Time window | T/30D. Today’s pacing as a snapshot, plus 30-day rolling for the broader pacing shape. |
| Alert trigger | >90% used before 80% of period. The classic “pacing ahead of plan” pattern; on Taboola this most often signals (a) smartBid exited learning phase and ramped, (b) an auto-bid campaign found cheap inventory and is buying aggressively, or (c) a manual budget increase that nobody flagged. |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Taboola 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 supplements brand. Period: 01 Apr 26 to 30 Apr 26 (30-day month). Today is 18 Apr 26.| Campaign | Monthly budget (£) | Spent to date (£) | % of budget | % of period elapsed | Pacing status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Article Distribution | 5,000 | 2,800 | 56% | 60% | On pace |
| Product Promotion (smartBid) | 8,000 | 7,400 | 93% | 60% | OVERPACED, alert |
| Premium Publisher (paused 12 Apr) | 3,000 | 2,400 | 80% | 60% | On pace (paused, will not exhaust) |
| Lookalike Retargeting | 2,000 | 1,200 | 60% | 60% | On pace |
| Account total (this card) | £18,000 | £13,800 | 77% | 60% | OVERPACED |
- The Product Promotion campaign is the alert source. It exited smartBid learning phase on 09 Apr 26 (after 92 conversions) and ramped from £180/day to £620/day overnight. By 18 Apr 26 it has used 93% of its monthly budget with 12 days still to run. Action options: (a) raise the budget cap if performance is good (ROAS on this campaign is 3.29×, comfortably above the account average); (b) lower the smartBid CPA target to slow delivery; (c) accept the early exhaustion and let it stop on 23 Apr 26.
- Account-level pacing 77% vs 60% time-elapsed = 17 percentage points overpaced. That equates to a £3,060 overspend trajectory on the current run rate. The 18,000 monthly budget will be exhausted around 24 Apr 26 if nothing changes.
- The pause on Premium Publisher is helpful here. Without that pause (logged 12 Apr 26 in change history), pacing would be at ~83% with 60% elapsed. Manual intervention saved roughly £600 of overspend trajectory.
- Article Distribution and Lookalike are well-paced. They are not the issue; do not throttle them just to recover account-level pacing. The fix is to address Product Promotion specifically.
- Pacing ≈ time-elapsed ± 5pp = healthy.
- Pacing > time-elapsed by 10, 20pp = mild overpacing; smartBid likely ramped, raise cap or trim target CPA.
- Pacing > time-elapsed by 30+pp = something accelerated sharply (smartBid graduation, manual increase, audience surge); investigate before throttling.
- Pacing < time-elapsed by 10, 20pp = underspending; the algorithm is failing to find inventory or your bid is too low; raise CPC or expand publisher allowlist.
- Pacing flat for 3, 5 days while time elapses = campaign hit a daily cap or auto-pause; investigate the campaign-level state.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Spend vs Budget |
|---|---|
| Taboola Total Spend | The numerator. Pacing is just spend ÷ budget; the spend trend tells you whether overpacing is structural (auto-bid ramping) or transient (single-campaign spike). |
| Taboola Spend by Campaign | Where the overpacing came from. One smartBid campaign exiting learning phase usually drives 80, 90% of an account-level pacing alert. |
| Taboola Overspending Campaigns | The named-and-shamed list of campaigns over their per-campaign budget. Direct counterpart at campaign level. |
| Taboola Underspending Campaigns | The other side of the pacing problem. If account is overpaced but some campaigns are underspending, reallocation rather than throttling is the answer. |
| Taboola CPC Trend | Pacing rises with rising CPC even at constant volume; this card tells you whether the overpacing is a price problem or a volume problem. |
| Taboola ROAS | If overpacing comes with high ROAS, raise the cap; if it comes with falling ROAS, the auto-bid is buying garbage; throttle. |
| Outbrain Spend vs Budget | If you run both native networks, total native pacing matters more than per-network pacing. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Taboola Backstage: Backstage → Campaigns → Performance and check the “Daily Cap” and “Monthly Cap” columns alongside “Spent”. Backstage also surfaces a “Pacing” indicator on the campaign row when set. The account-level total in this card sums per-campaign budgets and per-campaign spend. Why our number may legitimately differ from Backstage’s pacing display:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Pacing % off by ±5pp on day-1 / day-30 | Taboola Backstage uses account time zone for the period boundary; this card uses UTC. The boundary effect is biggest on the first and last day of the calendar month. |
| Real-time spent lag | Card pacing slightly low for “today” | 1, 2 hour ingest lag on billable spend; pacing reads conservative until catchup. |
| Budget hierarchy | Card uses configured budgets only | Some merchants set a portfolio-level budget on top of campaign budgets; this card aggregates campaign-level budgets, so portfolio-level spend caps will not appear here. |
| IVT credits | Card pacing slightly high before credits post | IVT refunds post on a 7, 14 day delay; pacing reads high until the credit reduces the spent figure. |
| Mid-period budget changes | Direction depends | If a campaign budget was raised mid-month, this card uses the current budget value; pacing % retroactively reflows. The Backstage history log is the source of truth for what changed when. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
outbrain.out_spend_vs_budget | Independent. Aggregate native pacing = (Taboola spent + Outbrain spent) ÷ (Taboola budget + Outbrain budget). | Different network budgets, different campaign cycles. |
google_ads.gads_spend_vs_budget | Independent; benchmark only. Different ecosystem. | Search and Native have very different pacing patterns; don’t compare directly. |
shopify.total_revenue | No mathematical relationship; context only. | Pacing is an input-side metric; revenue is the outcome. |