Question about budget pacing on Outbrain (3)
Hi all!
I'm new to native and currently learning Revcontent and Outbrain. I have an e-commerce campaign running on Revcontent with a $40 payout offer and it's gotten a bunch of conversions and currently breaking even. I started the same campaign on Outbrain and ran into some issues with pacing. I started the campaign with a Daily budget (which can only have Accelerated pacing as you all know) set at $50 and it blew through the $50 in like an hour. So I switched over to Monthly budget and set it to Standard pacing. This was yesterday, so with 20 days left in the month, i set it to $2000 so that i would spend ~$100 per day evenly throughout the day. At least that's how i thought it would work. But after the change, it again blew through $50 in about an hour, so i paused it. Then i resumed it after 12 AM the next day, blew through another $50 in an hour and paused it again because i figured that my idea that it would spend ~$100 evenly throughout the day was incorrect (I'm aiming for only $100/day because i'm still getting my feet wet and learning how things work).
Which brings me here to you guys with this question: how do I pace a campaign on Outbrain so that I can spend ~$100 evenly throughout the day? Is this amount too low? Or did I set up the budget incorrectly? Or does their algorithm just spend the budget as soon as possible and then waits for the next day, again spends it ASAP, then waits for the next day, etc.?
What is the bid you've set to your oubtrain campaings? Also how is the traffic distributed among publishers and sections?
Are you noticing any specific publisher or section responsible for spending your budget too quickly?
I haven't seen any option where you can chose to spread the ad spend evenly throughout the day. Most of the time the bid determine how quickly the daily budget is spent.
Keep present that when you launch a new campaign on OB, in the first couple of hours you will see no publisher data on their interface. That also limits you from being able to block publishers or sections that are sending lots of clicks based of the data you see on your tracker. In other words if a specific publisher or section is not present in the campaign ad spend report, you are not able to add it to the block list.
I would suggest to take a close look at both the publisher and section reporting, in terms of traffic distribution, engagement in your funnel (lander and offer) and any conversion results if you have any so far.
Based on the above, you'll be able to properly get rid of poor quality sections and publishers that just send huge amounts of clicks and focus on those that deliver results.
It is also worth noting that unlike RevContent, you have a default blocking limit of 30 publishers and 100 sections. And most of the blocking is done on the section level. Then if most sections of a publisher are junk you can block the publisher and keep going.
Alternatively, you can start playing with the section bids to bid more efficiently where your campaign level bid is too competitive.
@qtobrooklyn, daily budget with accelerated pacing should be fine, as long as you don't overbid-so see if you can decrease a few cents. Another thing that i notice is that your campaign resumes after 12 am the next day, so it would make sense why it would spend before the day starts. Try starting it in the morning at 6-7 am . It would make sense to spend it all overnight with a higher bid. As for 100$ budget, ok to test the water initially just to see how the platform behaves . And start with semi-automatic bidding strategy 
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