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Budget pacing

A daily budget is only useful if it's spent at the right time. Two failure modes waste money: a campaign that goes dark (burning through its budget early and sitting idle through the afternoon and evening when shoppers actually buy) and a campaign that never spends its budget at all. The Budget pacing page shows you which campaigns are affected and lets you fix them in one click.

Availability

Budget pacing is a feature-gated page. If you don't see it in your navigation, it isn't enabled for your account yet. It works for both fully connected and ads-only accounts.

The pacing problem​

Amazon spends a campaign's budget across the day on its own schedule, and it can front-load spend aggressively. A campaign that hits 100% of its budget at 2 PM stops showing ads for the rest of the day, including your peak conversion hours. Budget pacing cross-references each campaign's budget usage against when it actually converts, so a campaign running out of money before its best hours becomes visible instead of invisible.

Alerts​

The top of the page surfaces the campaigns that need attention, highest priority first:

  • Going Dark Alerts: a campaign has used most or all of its daily budget and risks stopping before its peak hours. Each alert shows the current budget, how much is used, the profile's peak hours for context, and a suggested new budget you can Apply.
  • Budget Shift Opportunities: campaigns where moving budget would put it to better use.

You can apply a suggestion to one campaign, or use Apply All to act on the whole set at once. Applying a suggestion updates the campaign's budget on Amazon directly, so each apply asks you to confirm first.

Reading the rest of the page​

Below the alerts, the page fills in the fuller picture:

  • Summary cards at the top: total campaigns, average utilization, and month-to-date and projected spend
  • The utilization table: every campaign with its budget, how much is used, and recent daily spend
  • The spend heatmap below: spend by hour of day across the week, so you can see when your budget actually goes out
  • The Budget Change Log: an audit trail of every budget change made from this page

Relationship to the Budget Utilization goal​

Budget pacing tells you which campaigns are mis-paced; the Budget Utilization goal in Smart Bidding is how you let SellerJar fix it automatically. That goal paces a campaign's bids to spend its full daily budget across the day rather than front-loading it. It requires a daily budget and disables dayparting for that campaign. Use this page to spot the problem, then switch the affected campaigns to Budget Utilization to keep them paced without manual budget edits.

Related​

  • Smart Bidding, set the Budget Utilization goal on paced campaigns
  • Dayparting, bid by hour of day (mutually exclusive with Budget Utilization)
  • Managing campaigns, set daily budgets in the Sponsored Ads Manager