Set budgets, pacing and flight dates

Three things set how a line item spends: its price, its limits and its pace. All of them are on the line item, not the order.

What limits spend

Setting	What it does
CPM ($)	Your price per 1,000 impressions. Each impression costs this amount ÷ 1,000.
Impression Goal	The line item stops when it reaches this many impressions in total.
Daily Budget ($)	The line item stops for the day once that day's spend reaches this amount. It resets at midnight UTC.
End Date	The line item stops after this date.
Your wallet, if you have one	Your campaigns stop when the balance reaches zero.

For example, a $5.00 CPM with a goal of 100,000 impressions costs at most $500.

Flight dates

Start Date and End Date are on the line item. Both days are included, and days run in UTC. Leave End Date empty to run with no end date.

A line item stays Active after its flight ends. It just stops delivering. To extend it, change the End Date.

Delivery Pacing

Pacing limits how many impressions a line item can take each day. It needs an Impression Goal and both dates, on a flight longer than one day. Without those there is no daily limit.

The daily limit starts from the even share: goal ÷ days in the flight.

Option	Daily limit	Use it when
High	Twice the even share	You want delivery early in the flight. It can reach the goal in half the flight.
Medium	The even share. This is the default.	You want steady delivery on newsletters that send most days.
Low	Half the even share	You want to go slowly. It can deliver only about half the goal within the flight, so set a longer flight or a bigger goal.
ASAP	No daily limit	You run on one to three weekly newsletters. The goal and budgets still apply.

For example, a 100,000 goal over 10 days has an even share of 10,000 a day. On High the limit is 20,000 a day. On Low it is 5,000.

The daily limit doesn't catch up. A day with fewer opens, or a day spent paused, isn't added to later days.

How you are charged

You are always charged per impression, at the amount in CPM ($). That includes line items set to CPC or CPL.

Bid Type tells us you're buying for clicks or leads rather than views. It doesn't change the charge. There is one price field, so a line item with Bid Type set to CPC and $1.00 in CPM ($) costs $1.00 per 1,000 impressions, not $1.00 per click.

Clicks and leads are never charged. Your real cost per click or lead is your spend divided by your results, and it can be higher or lower than the number you entered. The form has no cap on cost per click or cost per lead, so use Daily Budget ($) and Impression Goal to control spend.

For publishers

On a direct-sold order, Flat Rate is also available, with a Flat Rate Amount ($). The sponsor's fee is between you and your sponsor. Impression goals and pacing work the same way.

What happens next

The Pacing column on Line Items shows delivery against the goal. An alert warns you if a line item is well ahead of its pace or well behind it, once two full days of the flight have passed.

If something goes wrong

• It stopped before the end date. Check whether it reached its goal or its daily budget.
• It delivers well under the goal. With a few weekly newsletters, switch to ASAP. Otherwise see Why a line item isn't delivering.
• The warning says even pacing caps each day. See Choose which newsletters a line item runs in.
• The Bid Type list is greyed out. Interactive line items are bought by CPM only.