The Budget Scenario Forecast projects what a budget change would do to a metric you care about — clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and more — before you commit to it. Ask "what if we raise this account's budget 20% next month?" and Pace answers with a projection built from that account's own recent history, plus a range showing how confident it is.
Note: The Budget Scenario Forecast is rolling out now to the Pro plan and above. Until it reaches your workspace, the Forecast tab on account pages shows as coming soon — this article describes what's arriving.
Why use it
- See the shape of a decision before you make it. Model a raise or a cut and read the likely outcome instead of guessing.
- Build a projection you can defend. Every number comes from your account's own data and carries a confidence range, so it holds up in a client deck.
- Compare scenarios side by side. Save several budget changes against one account and weigh them against each other.
How it works
Open the Forecast tab on any account page. You pick the metric to project — Conversions, CPA, Clicks, CPC (cost per click), Impressions, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), Revenue, ROAS, or Spend — and the lookback window to build from: the last 30, 60, 90, or 180 days of daily history. The metric you pick is the one the chart and scenario cards highlight, normally the outcome you care about like Conversions or CPA rather than Spend itself. Then you add a scenario: a preset change of −25%, −10%, +10%, +25%, +50%, or +100% (double the spend), or a Custom figure like the 20% raise above.
Behind each projection is a saturation curve fitted to your own history. The curve captures diminishing returns: each extra dollar of daily spend tends to buy a little less than the last. Pace starts from a simple straight-line baseline — your recent results per dollar, multiplied by the new spend level. For larger changes, it bends that straight line down onto the fitted curve, so the projection reflects diminishing returns instead of assuming every extra dollar performs like the last. Pace shows both numbers, so you can see exactly how much the curve moved the answer.
Every projection carries an 80% confidence range rather than a single figure. Pace resamples your daily data many times, refits the curve on each pass, and reports the middle band. That's the shaded ribbon on the chart and the low-to-high range on each scenario card.
How to read the curve
Each scenario shows up as a dot on the curve. Shading tells you where that spend level sits. Inside the range you've actually spent before, the projection stands on firmer ground. Beyond it, Pace is extending the curve into spend levels your account hasn't tried. The flatter the curve gets, the closer you are to the point where extra spend stops paying for itself.
When your data is too thin to trust — too little spend variation, too few results — the forecast widens its ranges and shows a range in place of any single number, rather than faking precision it doesn't have.
What it can't do
- It's a projection, not a promise. Real results shift with auction pressure, competitor activity, and seasonality your lookback window never saw.
- It leaves out CTR (click-through rate) on purpose. CTR is a quality signal driven by creative and audience, not by spend, so fitting a spend curve to it would mislead.
- It covers one account on one platform. Projections across a whole portfolio, or working backward from a target, aren't here yet. For the manual version of that across Google Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, see how to forecast ad spend across platforms.
The forecast only projects. It never changes a budget on its own.
See also
To act on what a scenario tells you, set your monthly budget and let Pace steer toward it. To understand how Pace's automated pacing adjusts budgets day to day, read how Pace decides what to change on your campaign budgets.