Every Pace run is a pipeline. The AI gets one shot to recommend a budget per campaign, and before that recommendation lands on your ad platform it has to clear a stack of safety checks that you and your account both control.
The same pipeline runs whether the campaign lives on Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, Amazon Ads, or X Ads. The data Pace fetches and the signals it reads change per platform. The safety model around the AI doesn't.
Spending the budget comes first
Before any of the mechanics, one rule shapes every decision: spending your full monthly budget by the end of the period is Pace's highest priority on every platform. It outranks your account's performance goal.
Your goal decides where the money goes, not whether it gets spent. A weak campaign is a reason to move budget to a better one, never a reason to end the month underspent. There are only three legitimate reasons to fall short: the account has already hit its budget, every campaign is genuinely saturated and extra budget has no auctions to spend in, or you've asked for a slowdown yourself.
That last one is what User Context is for. Write something like "protect CPA even if we underspend" on the account and the AI follows it. You no longer need to ask Pace to spend the budget — that's the default now, and User Context is how you ask for the opposite.
Note: Accounts on Daily Floor pacing work differently. They have no monthly budget to finish, so they pace to a guaranteed daily floor and a hard daily cap instead.
Here's what runs, in order.
1. Permission and safety preflight
Pace runs five checks before anything else:
- Pacing is enabled for your workspace.
- The account is actually configured for pacing: a monthly budget with at least one included campaign, or an active campaign group with its own budget. An account that's connected but never set up is skipped entirely, so it never clutters your change history.
- The account isn't currently in an overspend hold.
- You haven't manually excluded the account from pacing.
- The account is a standard ad account, not a manager or agency-level parent like a Google Ads MCC. Pace only writes to standard accounts.
If any of those fail, the run ends and no budgets move.
2. Fresh data fetch
Pace pulls three windows of performance data from the ad platform:
- A long-term trend window covering spend, conversions, CPA, ROAS, and CTR. This tells Pace which campaigns are stable performers.
- A recent diagnostic window. The signals here depend on the platform: Quality Score, impression share, and auction insights on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads; audience and placement performance on Meta Ads; engagement signals on LinkedIn Ads. This is the why behind the trend numbers.
- Yesterday's pulse, so Pace can see how the previous run's changes landed.
Pace also pulls month-to-date spend separately, because that one number drives most of the math that follows.
Alongside it, Pace works out how far through the month you are, and on Google Ads it measures that by the hour rather than by the day. A run at 6am counts today as a few hours, not as a whole day gone, using the account's own clock and its active days if you've set a schedule. It's the same reading you see on the account page, so an early-morning run judges pace against the hours that have passed rather than the whole day. Once a full day of the month is complete the hourly reading applies; the first day of a month still counts in whole days.
3. Memory
Pace carries context across runs. On every run it also loads:
- The strategic notes the AI wrote last cycle.
- The last action it took, with its reasoning.
- Observations the system has confirmed about your account over multiple runs.
- A verdict on its own recent predictions: confirmed, contradicted, or inconclusive.
That last piece is the calibration loop. Pace tracks whether what it predicted would happen actually happened, and the next run sees that track record.
4. Numerical sanity check
Pace validates its inputs before calling the AI. Month-to-date spend has to be a real number. Your monthly budget has to be positive. The calendar math has to be internally consistent.
If something upstream is broken (a timezone glitch, a missing field, a non-finite value), Pace aborts the run and changes nothing.
5. AI recommendation
The model gets the data and memory, plus your goals, constraints, schedule, and any context you've added on the account. It returns:
- A recommended daily budget for each campaign.
- The reasoning behind each recommendation.
- An updated strategic note to carry into next time.
- An optional prediction about what should happen as a result.
This is the only non-deterministic step. Everything else, before and after, is deterministic.
6. Safety clamps
Every recommendation from the AI passes through several deterministic layers before it can be written:
- A platform floor that prevents budgets from going below the ad platform's minimum daily spend. Each platform has its own minimum, and Pace uses the right one for the campaign.
- A ceiling derived from your effective monthly target for the account, the days remaining, and the campaign's previous budget. The strictest cap wins. If Budget Rollover is switched on (Pro plan and above), that effective target includes last month's carry, so the ceiling reflects the number you're actually pacing to this month.
- Your own per-campaign rails, on Pro plans and above (Pro, Pace One, Agency). A minimum or maximum daily budget you've set on an individual Google Ads campaign, or on a managed Meta Ads ad set, is honoured on every run.
- A run-rate check on cuts. A reduction that on its own drops the account's total below the daily run-rate needed to finish the period on target isn't allowed. Money taken off one campaign has to land on another. An account already running ahead of pace can still come down.
- A run-rate band on Google Ads. After the ceilings are applied, Pace compares the total against the daily run-rate needed to finish the month on target, and holds it inside a band around that figure. If the total falls short, Pace raises budgets to meet the run-rate, spreading the increase by how much headroom each campaign's own ceiling allows, never past that ceiling and never past your monthly budget. If the total sits more than about 10% above the run-rate, Pace trims it back down to the run-rate instead, taking most from the campaigns with the most room between their recommended budget and their own minimum. Anywhere inside about 10% of run-rate, nothing is rewritten. The trim can never put a campaign below its minimum — the platform's, one you've set yourself, or the daily amount an account keeps running at once its month is spent — so a group already sitting at its floors stays put. Campaigns Pace isn't changing this run count toward the total but are never touched, and the trim stands down entirely once the account is at or past its budget, because your month-end setting owns that decision. Every change either half makes says so in your Changes tab. This backstop runs on Google Ads today. The other platforms get the same instruction to the AI, without the automatic correction behind it.
That means a single day can't burn a disproportionate share of your monthly budget, a single campaign can't jump wildly day-to-day, and a quiet month can't drift underspent because the AI was cautious. Even if the AI was wrong, the worst case is bounded in both directions. If a clamp fires, the change record shows which one and why.
7. Per-campaign write
Pace updates one campaign at a time, with its own success or error status. A single failed campaign doesn't block the others, and a platform-side error on Meta Ads (for example) doesn't stop Google Ads writes in the same run.
Every change (successful, errored, or capped by a clamp) is logged with the old and new budget, the reasoning, and which guardrails fired. That's what shows up in your Changes tab.
8. Outcome measurement
Seven days after each change, Pace looks back and measures what actually happened to spend, conversions, and ROAS. It writes a verdict on whether the AI's prediction held up.
That verdict feeds into the next pacing run as part of the model's memory. Over time the AI sees its own track record alongside fresh data, which is what closes the calibration loop.
What the AI can and can't do
The AI can recommend a budget in any direction and shift spend from poor performers to strong ones aggressively. It can also exit a self-imposed hold when the data supports it.
The AI cannot:
- Push a budget to your ad platform without going through the clamps above.
- Spend a disproportionate share of your monthly budget in a single day.
- Cut a campaign without the money landing somewhere else, unless the account is already ahead of pace.
- Treat a weak performance goal as a reason to leave the month underspent.
- Run when your workspace's pacing kill switch is off.
- Run on a manager or agency-level account.
What you control
- The workspace pacing kill switch turns the whole system off in one click, across every connected platform.
- Per-account exclusion opts a specific account out while leaving the rest enabled, regardless of platform.
- Account budgets, schedules, and goals shape every recommendation the AI sees.
- User Context is where you ask for a slowdown, such as protecting CPA even if that means underspending.
- The Changes tab gives you a full audit trail of every action, including the reasoning and any clamps that fired.
The Changes tab is the single source of truth for what Pace did on your account and why.