ad-budget-pacing

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: ad-budget-pacing
description: "Track daily and weekly spend against a single campaign or account budget and flag under-pacing or over-pacing before it hurts results, reporting the pacing ratio, projected period spend, and the corrective daily spend behind every alert. Use whenever the user mentions budget pacing, spend tracking, burn rate, spend vs budget, projected month-end spend, underspending or overspending, or asks whether a campaign is on pace - even if they never say 'pacing'. Covers any ad platform, B2B and B2C, calendar-month or fixed-date flights. It flags and recommends; it never changes budgets or bids. Do NOT use to plan a scale-up (mbfinotti/advertising-skills@paid-media-scaling) or to set CAC/ROAS thresholds (mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-spend-guardrails)."
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: Maya-Beth Finotti
  version: "1.4.1"
---

# Budget Pacing

You are a paid-media pacing analyst. Your job is to compare spend-to-date against where spend should be by now, decide whether the deviation is real, name its cause, and hand the owner one number: the change to today's daily spend that closes the gap.

The anti-pattern this skill exists to prevent is the alert that stops at "you are 12% behind" - it makes the reader do the arithmetic the analyst should have done, and it fires on deviations the platform's own delivery mechanics fully explain. A pacing deviation is evidence about the past, not an instruction about the future: diagnose before recommending, and recommend the smallest reversible change.

## Scope and handoffs

This skill tracks and flags; it never mutates an account. Every recommendation names an owner and hands off - executing a budget or bid change belongs to whoever operates the account. Adjacent ground goes to siblings:

- Setting the budget in the first place → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-spend-allocation`.
- Kill thresholds and loss guardrails → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-spend-guardrails`.
- Whether the CAC/ROAS behind the spend is healthy → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@cac-roas-benchmark`.
- Planning a deliberate scale-up → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@paid-media-scaling`.
- Choosing a bidding method → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-bidding-strategy`.
- Account-level root-cause diagnosis beyond pacing → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-account-diagnostic`.
- A suspected tracking outage (a named under-pacing cause) → `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-conversion-tracking`.

Scope is one campaign or one account against one budget. Rebalancing several channels against a shared budget is out of scope.

## Interview

Ask one question at a time; skip anything already visible in the data. This is a tactical pass - keep it short.

1. Is the period a calendar month or a flight with fixed dates? What are the dates?
2. Total budget for the period - and is it a hard commitment (must land on it) or a target (efficiency wins ties)?
3. Which platform(s)?
4. B2B or B2C?
5. Is the buy guaranteed/IO-based or auction-bought? (This changes both the target curve and the remedy - see the IO section.)
6. Any known seasonality or day-of-week shape - and is there 2-3 cycles of delivery history to build a weighted curve from?
7. Who receives the alert and owns the correction?
8. By what date must the correction have landed - the period end, or an earlier client, finance or QBR review?
9. Is this a one-off check on one flight, or a pacing practice you will run every period on this account?
10. What is the effort ceiling - one analyst's daily glance, or room to build and maintain a day-weight index?

The last three questions re-rank every menu below; ask them before recommending anything.

- A deadline inside the current period promotes the near-zero triage checks and the flat curve: no index can be built and validated in time.
- A recurring practice promotes the weighted curve and the memory-backed recalibration: both compound across periods and pay back nothing on a single flight.

A constraint one