Budgeting & pacing
Overspend
Overspend is spend running ahead of the approved plan. Common causes include platform budgets that do not match the plan, lifetime budgets entered as daily, shared budgets, duplicated campaigns, incorrect start dates and automation without guardrails. The response depends on whether outcomes are holding.
In practice
Not all overspend is equal. Efficient acceleration may deserve to be formalised through an approved reallocation; duplicated or uncontrolled spend requires immediate restriction and escalation.
Most overspend is preventable through plan-to-platform mapping and a two-person activation QA covering budgets, currencies, dates and bid strategies.