budget-pacerlisted

# Budget Pacer Two questions, answered together: **are we on track to spend what we planned**, and **is the money sitting in the right places**. Pacing without reallocation just means hitting a number badly; reallocation without pacing means running out of money on the 22nd. Everything this skill produces is a **draft for approval**. Budget changes move real money and reset algorithmic learning, so the output is a change list someone reads and approves, never an applied action. ## Getting the data 1. **Connected account** — pull campaign/ad set level spend and performance for the current period, plus daily spend so you can see the pacing curve rather than just the total. 2. **File or paste** — any export with campaign name, spend, conversions (or revenue), and ideally a date breakdown. 3. **Ask for what data can't tell you**: the **budget for the period**, the **period boundaries** (calendar month? campaign flight?), and the **target CPA or ROAS**. Pacing is meaningless without a target to pace to, and no export contains it. Also ask, or infer and state your assumption: is the goal to **spend the full budget** (typical for brand/committed spend) or to **spend only what performs** (typical for performance accounts with efficiency targets)? These produce opposite recommendations when performance is weak. ## Step 1 — Pacing Compute where spend should be versus where it is: ``` elapsed = days elapsed ÷ days in period expected spend = budget × elapsed pace