Paid Spend Pacing Dashboard
Pacing drift starts today, not on Friday.
What changes when you build this
The gaps you're living with today,
and what this tool fixes.
Problems
- Daily spend data lives across Google Ads, Meta, and LinkedIn with no single view of how each channel is tracking against its monthly budget
- Pacing problems get caught 3-4 days late because the team relies on weekly exports instead of live data
- Media buyers spend 20+ minutes per channel pulling numbers before analysis can start
- Overspend on a low-ROAS campaign goes unnoticed until finance flags it at month end
- No one knows which channel to reallocate budget to mid-month because there's no live performance-vs-pace comparison
Solutions
- One dashboard shows every channel's cumulative spend vs. expected pace, updated daily from source APIs
- Pacing alerts fire automatically when daily variance exceeds a set threshold — no manual check needed
- Reporting starts with analysis, not data assembly; the numbers are already there
- Overspend is flagged at the campaign level before it compounds into a monthly miss
- A live ROAS column next to remaining budget makes reallocation decisions obvious, not guesswork
What the data model looks like
Refine generates this table structure from your
prompt. Edit columns, types, and relationships after.
100%
Mistakes to avoid
These are the failure patterns teams hit most often
when building this.
Mismatched channel naming across exportsFix: Enforce a canonical channel taxonomy at ingest so 'Google / Search' and 'google_search' don't show up as separate rows.
Mismatched channel naming across exports
Fix:Enforce a canonical channel taxonomy at ingest so 'Google / Search' and 'google_search' don't show up as separate rows.
Pacing alerts that fire too lateFix: Set daily variance thresholds, not weekly — a 15% daily overrun compounded over 4 days is a budget crisis.
Pacing alerts that fire too late
Fix:Set daily variance thresholds, not weekly — a 15% daily overrun compounded over 4 days is a budget crisis.
ROAS calculated on inconsistent attribution windowsFix: Lock every channel to the same attribution window (e.g., 7-day click) before comparing ROAS side by side.
ROAS calculated on inconsistent attribution windows
Fix:Lock every channel to the same attribution window (e.g., 7-day click) before comparing ROAS side by side.
No owner on a campaign going off paceFix: Require an owner field before a campaign record can be set to Active; unowned campaigns can't trigger alerts to anyone.
No owner on a campaign going off pace
Fix:Require an owner field before a campaign record can be set to Active; unowned campaigns can't trigger alerts to anyone.
Manual budget updates after reallocationFix: Log reallocation decisions as records so the dashboard reflects the new budget immediately, not after someone remembers to update a spreadsheet.
Manual budget updates after reallocation
Fix:Log reallocation decisions as records so the dashboard reflects the new budget immediately, not after someone remembers to update a spreadsheet.