The Budget Scenario Forecast projects what a budget change would do to the metric you care about, whether that's clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS), 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 history, plus a range for how confident it is.
Note: The Forecast tab is available on the Pro plan and above. Workspaces below Pro see the tab with a Pro badge and an upgrade prompt. It isn't available on Amazon Ads accounts, which don't expose the daily history the model needs.
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 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. Pick the metric to project: Conversions, CPA, Clicks, CPC (cost per click), Impressions, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), Revenue, ROAS, or Spend. Then pick the slice of history to build from: the last 30, 60, 90, or 180 days. Both choices stick per account, so moving between accounts doesn't lose your setup. Then 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.
Each metric gets its own saturation curve fitted to your history, so switching metric reshapes the chart straight away. The curve captures diminishing returns: each extra dollar of daily spend tends to buy a little less than the last. Pace starts from a straight-line baseline, your recent results per dollar multiplied by the new spend level, then bends that line onto the fitted curve for larger changes. Both figures are labelled, so you can see 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 as Likely range (80%).
How to read the curve
Your current spend is marked on the curve as a labelled ring, and each scenario sits on it as a filled dot. With a scenario selected, one plain sentence above the plot says what it buys: "Going from A$288 to A$433/day: +3.3 conversions/day at A$29 each."
The spend range you've actually run is shaded Your spend history, and the curve there is solid. Above your highest daily spend and below your lowest it goes dashed, under a Beyond your data — estimated label. That stretch is Pace extending the curve into levels your account hasn't tried. A flag pinned to the top of the chart marks Diminishing returns: the spend level where extra spend stops paying for itself.
A header pill switches the chart from CPA-against-spend to Next $1k, which plots how many extra results the next thousand of daily spend buys at each level. That's usually the number you're deciding on when you move a budget. Money appears in the account's own currency throughout.
When your data is too thin to trust, Pace widens its ranges, shows a range in place of any single number, and hides the diminishing-returns flag rather than faking precision. A banner above the figures tells you why: partial history, flat daily spend, or noisy results.
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 you.
- 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 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.