Some publishers choose to sell their inventory by the number of ad impressions. This creates a question of exactly how quickly those impressions should be delivered, commonly referred to as “campaign pacing” or “impression pacing.” Impression pacing is only possible when there is both an impression limit and end date set for the campaign.
Broadstreet offers two types of pacing:
ASAP: This type of pacing delivers the impressions for the campaign as fast as possible. For example, let’s say you create a campaign with an end date 3 months from today, and you set an impression cap of 100,000. If you received a few hundred thousand page views within that first week, the ad server will deliver that campaign and exhaust the impression cap as quickly as possible. It’s possible that the campaign will end well before its stated end date.
EVEN: This type of pacing spreads impressions out over the course of the campaign. Broadstreet does this by intelligently creating a schedule for impression delivery and periodically adjusting it to come as close as possible to a perfect pace.
For EVEN pacing, it’s expected that the zones that the ads are placed in have the collective traffic required to deliver the expected impression target for the campaign. Campaigns that are under-delivering due to insufficient volume and share of voice scenarios may have their weights manually adjusted in the campaign settings. Broadstreet does internally optimize campaign weights toward the end of a campaign (typically in the last two weeks) in an attempt to achieve full delivery, overriding the settings in the campaign weight tab when necessary.