Findings are cards from Dot that surface the handful of anomalies and opportunities across your accounts worth your attention. Findings used to be called Sparks. A finding never changes a budget, and nothing is applied unless you press Apply on a fix.
Think of a finding as a note from a senior analyst who watched your accounts overnight. Each one carries a short headline, a one-sentence diagnosis, a specific recommendation, and a colour-coded severity badge (info, success, warning, or critical). Findings read across all eight platforms: Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads, Reddit Ads, Amazon Ads, and X Ads.
Where you'll find them
Findings show up in four places:
- The Findings card on your Home page. Click a card to open the finding.
- The Findings tab of your inbox, opened from Dot's icon in the top bar. The same panel holds your alerts on its Alerts tab.
- The Findings card on an account's or a portfolio's Overview tab, with the three newest.
- The Findings tab on each account, with full history and search. A portfolio's Findings tab shows the same table for every account in the portfolio, with an Account column, and you can review fixes from it too.
New findings can also reach you through Slack, email, and the Bell. For a fuller map of where these sit, see understanding the Pace dashboard.
What Dot flags
A finding appears only when something is significant. Roughly 90% of the time the analysis returns nothing at all, which is what keeps the feed worth reading. When one does fire, it's usually one of:
- Cost and results anomalies: CPA (cost per acquisition) climbing week over week, ROAS (return on ad spend) sliding, a conversion campaign spending with zero conversions, or conversion volume dropping while spend holds steady.
- Positive signals: conversions up while cost holds or improves, or an ad resonating on click-through.
- Platform-specific issues: a single Google Ads keyword eating budget with no conversions, Meta Ads creative fatigue, or LinkedIn Ads lead-form drop-off.
Findings inform, and a few can fix
Most findings are a sentence in the card: a recommendation you act on yourself. Findings never move a budget. For four cases Dot goes one step further and attaches a ready-made fix:
- Add negative keywords to a Google Ads campaign, from search terms that spent with no conversions.
- Pause a Google Ads keyword that spends with no conversions.
- Pause a Meta Ads ad that loses clearly to a sibling in the same ad set.
- Pause a worn-out Meta Ads ad: shown often, with clicks falling.
Fixes only pause things or add negative keywords; they never touch budgets. Budget-changing automation is a separate system, covered in how Pace decides budget changes.
Applying a fix
Nothing is applied automatically. A finding with a fix shows Review: ... in the Fix column of the account's or portfolio's Findings tab, and a Fix ready line with Review fix in your inbox.
- Click Review to open the side panel. It shows the evidence and the exact change.
- For negative keywords, untick any search term you want to keep, and choose Phrase or Exact match.
- Press Apply. Pace re-checks the live data, makes the change, and records it in change history as a Dot change under your name.
Any workspace member with edit access can apply a fix. Press Dismiss if you don't want it. You can add a reason, and Dot stops suggesting that fix.
Undo
Every applied fix shows an Undo button on its row in Changes. Undo re-checks the platform first, then reverses the change: negative keywords are removed, paused keywords and ads are switched back on. Undo stays available even if your plan is later downgraded.
Why a fix might be out of date
Pace checks the live account just before it applies. If things moved since Dot wrote the finding, the fix says Out of date and nothing is changed. Common reasons are that the keyword or ad was already paused, the ad set changed, or the numbers no longer show the problem. If only some search terms have converted since, the fix narrows to the terms that still qualify and shows you the smaller list before you apply.
Why the feed stays calm
Findings avoid repeating themselves. When one flags a problem, you hear about it once, then it goes quiet for three days even if the issue persists. If it's still live after that, Dot re-flags it once so you know it hasn't been resolved. Pace tracks this quiet period per account and per platform, so a noisy issue on one account never silences the same pattern on another. A brand-new critical finding always comes through regardless.
That quiet period is automatic and temporary. Muting is your own decision, and it holds.
Mute a finding you've already decided about
When a finding tells you something you already know and can't act on yet, mute it. Hover any row in the Findings log, or any finding on Home, and open the three-dot menu. The same two actions sit in the footer of a finding's detail dialog as labelled buttons.
- Mute findings like this silences future findings about the same kind of issue on that account. Pick For 90 days (the default), For 30 days, For 7 days, or Until I reactivate.
- Hide this finding removes only that one row and leaves future findings alone.
A mute is scoped to one account, so the same pattern on another account keeps reporting. Pace also hands the investigation your active mutes before it starts, so it chases a different question instead of rediscovering the one you've settled. A finding that escalates to critical still reaches you: muting at warning or below never holds a critical back.
Muted findings stay on screen. A neutral Muted pill replaces the severity badge and the row dims. Click the pill to see when you muted it, when it expires and the severity floor, then Reactivate to bring it back, every row that mute covered returns to normal at once. Muting and reactivating are both written to your workspace's change history, so teammates can see who silenced what and until when.
Note: Findings are available on the Pro plan and above. On Basic, the Findings card on Home shows an upgrade prompt instead. Dot checks each account once every morning, in that account's own timezone, so findings arrive with your day rather than the instant something changes. There is no schedule to set. Newly connected accounts have Findings switched on by default; accounts you connected earlier keep whatever setting they had.