Automatic pacing is one of our modes that manages your campaign’s bids. Instead of spending your daily budget at an even rate regardless of price, it continuously looks for the best-performing placements that still let your budget land on target by the end of the day.
The result: a smoother delivery than other pacing options, with more of your spend going to placements that actually perform.
How you use it
You turn automatic pacing on when creating or editing a campaign — it’s a pacing option alongside the other modes. Once enabled, the algorithm takes over the bidding tempo: if the campaign is running ahead of schedule, it quietly lowers its bids and sticks to cheaper, higher-quality inventory; if it’s running behind, it reaches into pricier inventory just enough to catch up.
With this, you’ll acheive:
- Lower effective CPC: The algorithm buys cheap clicks first, and only pays more when it has to.
- Smoother delivery: Automatic pacing naturally adapts to times of day and days of the week when your audience is more available, so spend follows real opportunity rather than a flat hourly curve.
- Better ROI without micromanagement: You set the ceiling (your CPC); the system finds the best price under that ceiling on its own.
- Automatic optimization toward well-fitting placements: Because it prefers inventory with strong predicted performance, the campaign drifts toward placements that best fit your creative.
Where you can find it
On any campaign, open settings → budget spending and select automatic. You can choose it when you first create a campaign or switch an existing campaign at any time. The setting is available to all users on all campaigns.
Practical rules
- Set your campaign CPC to the most you’d pay per click for your top inventory. Treat it only as a ceiling.
- Never lower the campaign CPC after launch. The algorithm already does this dynamically every bid.
- Only adjust site-level bids to steer traffic. Raise a site’s bid to get more traffic; lower it to reduce traffic.
- Automatic pacing needs time to learn your campaign’s market. Very short campaigns limit their ability to optimize.
Expect delivery to focus on fewer, better-performing sites
Buying traffic on the best-fit inventory often means the campaign won’t bid as widely as with other pacing modes. This is usually a feature, not a bug — those are the sites that best fit your campaign. If you want to drive more traffic to a particular site, raise its site-specific bid, and the algorithm will give it more room.
When should you use other pacing options?
Choose them if you must spend each hour or each day evenly, or if you want to spread spending evenly across sites. Automatic is the right choice if your goal is the highest performing, well-targeted clicks, not a precise spend curve.
How does this reflect on Video Native campaigns?
This applies the same to both CPC and CPCV campaigns.