Also known as: Daily Cap, Budget Pacing, Delivery Pacing
A Daily Cap limits how much a campaign can spend or how many conversions it can generate per day, while Pacing controls how evenly that budget is spent across the day. Together they govern the rate at which a campaign burns budget.
A daily cap is a hard limit written into the deal or set in the ad platform: a maximum daily budget or a maximum number of conversions the broker will accept and pay for. Brokers impose it so their onboarding, compliance and risk teams are never flooded with more new clients than they can properly vet in a day. Any conversions a partner generates above the cap are typically rejected and unpaid.
Pacing is the delivery-side control that spreads spend smoothly through the day rather than front-loading it. A partner who paces well hits the cap steadily near the end of the day, extracting full value from every capped slot. Poor pacing burns the budget by noon, leaving the campaign dark for peak hours, or overshoots the cap and produces conversions the broker refuses. Good ad-ops means aligning your delivery curve with the broker's cap.
Confirm the broker's daily conversion or budget ceiling from the IO.
Configure the matching daily budget or conversion limit in the ad platform.
Select even/standard pacing to spread delivery rather than accelerated front-loading.
Watch spend through the day to see whether you will hit the cap too early or too late.
Tune bids so delivery lands near the cap at day's end without overshooting.
Check that conversions stayed within the cap and were all accepted.
Why it matters for partnership: Caps and pacing protect both sides. A broker caps daily FTDs to keep its compliance and risk teams in control of intake; a partner paces spend to avoid blowing the whole budget on early, untested traffic before the data is in.
A deal caps the affiliate at 50 FTDs per day. The affiliate paces ad delivery evenly so they hit the cap steadily rather than burning through it by noon and then sitting idle.
| Aspect | Daily Cap | Pacing |
|---|---|---|
| Controls | How much total per day | How evenly across the day |
| Set by | Broker deal terms | Partner's ad platform |
| Failure mode | Overshoot = unpaid | Front-load = idle peak hours |
Match your pacing to the broker's daily cap; overshooting the cap means unpaid conversions, while underspending wastes a whitelisted winning day.
Ignoring the broker's daily cap and generating conversions above it that the broker refuses to pay for.
To keep new-client intake within what their compliance, onboarding and risk teams can properly handle.