Budget Pacing and Reallocation Template
Two documents and three sheets that catch a channel drifting off pace before the blended total hides it.
Free download · No account needed
Spend Pacing by Channel
Weekly Pacing Checkpoint
Recomputed from platform exports every week. A blended total can hide a real miss underneath it.
| Channel | Budget | Spend to Date | Actual Pace | Index | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total |
Ideal pace: days elapsed divided by days in the period. Index below 0.90 or above 1.10 gets flagged.
A quarter's paid budget rarely misses evenly across channels. One channel runs hot, another runs cold, and the two mistakes cancel out in the monthly total long before anyone reads the account-level detail. Google's own documentation paces a single account's daily budget against a 30.4-day cycle precisely because day-to-day spend swings on its own; the miss worth catching is a channel still off pace at a weekly checkpoint, not a single loud day. By the time a monthly report catches a real miss, most of the runway to fix it is already spent.
On this pack's own worked quarter, a fictional company running three channels checked pacing at day 42 of a 90-day period, 46.7% elapsed. The blended index across Google Ads, Meta and TikTok sat at 1.095, only 9.5% ahead of schedule. Underneath it, Google Ads carried a 1.276 index, 27.6% ahead, while Meta carried a 0.777 index, 22.3% behind, in the same week. Left running, that pointed to a $60,714 overspend on Google and a $35,714 underspend on Meta, a $42,857 net miss the blended number made look almost nothing.
Spend Pacing by Channel and Forecast to Period End catch the miss and price it in dollars. Pacing Policy decides what happens next: check the evidence first, the way the search term report shows whether a channel has hit a real ceiling, before moving a dollar between channels instead of just adjusting a daily cap. Reallocation Log keeps the reason next to the number. This pack runs on top of the budget the marketing plan and budget pack sets and the exports the cross-platform paid report already normalizes.
What's in the pack
Pacing Policy
The pace math, the 0.90 to 1.10 tolerance band, and the rule for deciding whether a miss needs a same-channel cap fix or a real cross-channel move.
Reallocation Note
The three-part format for writing up why a specific reallocation was made: the miss, the evidence checked, and the new targets.
Spend Pacing by Channel
Every channel's budget, spend to date, and pacing index, recomputed at each weekly checkpoint against the blended total.
Forecast to Period End
The projected end-of-period spend per channel at its current rate, and the dollar variance against its budget.
Reallocation Log
Every dollar actually moved between channels, the evidence that justified it, and the resulting new period targets. Pacing gets a channel spending at the right rate; it says nothing about whether that spend is reaching the right people, which is the separate check in the paid social audience and exclusion pack.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack and send your period budget and channel list, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and build the model yourself.
- 2
Run the weekly pacing check
Recompute Spend Pacing by Channel from your latest exports and flag anything outside the 0.90 to 1.10 band, even if the blended total looks fine.
- 3
Forecast before you move anything
Build Forecast to Period End for a flagged channel and check the evidence, a search term report, an audience frequency report, before deciding it needs a reallocation.
- 4
Log the reason with the number
Write the decision in Reallocation Note's format and add the row to Reallocation Log so the next checkpoint knows what already changed and why.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes, and the download is not cut down. The zip holds all five files in Word and CSV, no signup and no card. Edit with AI is the other branch: send your period budget and current spend per channel, and River builds your own pacing index. More packs in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word documents (.docx) for Pacing Policy and Reallocation Note, and CSV (.csv) for Spend Pacing by Channel, Forecast to Period End and Reallocation Log, all in one zip. They open natively in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets.
How is this different from the cross-platform paid report?
The cross-platform paid report explains what already happened across a full period, for a leadership audience. This pack watches the period while it is still running, so a channel drifting off pace gets caught and corrected before the report has to explain why the quarter missed.
How often should we check pacing?
Weekly, same day each time. A single day's swing is normal, even inside Google's own daily budget system, which allows up to double the average daily budget on a high-traffic day. What is worth acting on is a channel still outside the tolerance band at the next weekly checkpoint, not a one-day spike.
What if we don't have three channels, just one or two?
The mechanism works the same at any channel count, though the blended-total problem this pack is built around only shows up once there are at least two channels that can miss in opposite directions. With one channel, Spend Pacing by Channel is just that channel's own pacing index.
What does Edit with AI actually do?
It creates a free account, installs these five files as a private workspace, and opens by asking for your period, your channel budgets, and current spend. Then it builds your own Spend Pacing by Channel and flags anything already outside the tolerance band.
Catch a channel drifting off pace before the blended total hides it
Send your period budget and current spend by channel. River builds the pacing index, flags what is outside the band, and prices the miss in dollars.
Edit with AI