Pacing Overview

Pacing defines how a campaign’s allocated impressions are distributed over its active duration. Zitcha currently supports even pacing, which ensures impressions are spread evenly across the campaign timeframe.

This mechanism prevents rapid depletion of the campaign budget and avoids early overserving.

Even Pacing in Zitcha

When a sponsored product Adset goes live, advertisers are purchasing a fixed number of impressions that are based on your networks floor price. Zitcha’s pacing engine controls delivery so that impressions are distributed uniformly over time.

Example

• 3-day campaign → ~3,333 impressions/day
• 14-day campaign → ~714 impressions/day

If there were 10,000 eligible impressions available per day for your Adset, Zitcha would serve the Adset to roughly 33% of eligible instances if purchased over 3 days or 7% if purchased over 13 days.

System Behavior

Pseudo Frequency Capping

While Zitcha does not use identity-based frequency capping, even pacing reduces the likelihood of repeated exposure to the same user within a short time frame. This results in a similar outcome to frequency-capped delivery systems.

Dynamic Recalculation

The pacing engine dynamically adjusts based on real-time campaign modifications:

• Budget Increase → Accelerated delivery
• Campaign Extension → Slower delivery rate to meet the new duration

Ad Serving Cadence

Ad delivery operates through rapid toggling. Ads are turned "on" and "off" in real time based on pacing calculations. Each API call may return different results depending on whether the ad is active at the moment of the request.

Integration Considerations

Avoid Reusing API Responses

Some retailers call the Zitcha Ads API once every 5 minutes and cache the response for multiple ad slots. This can lead to:

• Overserving: Excessive impressions in a short timeframe
• Compensatory throttling: The engine withholds ads later to correct pacing, leading to uneven delivery
• Implementation Recommendation: By reducing the length of ad caching, the pacing algorithm can work unencumbered to evenly pace the serving of impressions.

Summary

• Zitcha implements even pacing to distribute impressions uniformly across a campaign’s duration. This prevents early budget exhaustion and mimics frequency capping behavior.
• Delivery automatically adjusts to changes in campaign settings.
• To ensure consistent pacing, ad responses should be fetched in real time from the API.