Understanding and Calculating Cappings

Cappings help you manage your campaign pacing and avoid budget overspending. They allow you to control how much of your budget is delivered per day and per hour, ensuring a smoother and more strategic delivery throughout the campaign period.

What Types of Cappings Exist on the DSP?

You can choose between two types of cappings when setting up a line item:

• Manual Capping: Manually setting budgets per period.
• Automatic Capping: The platform automatically calculates and distributes budget limits based on remaining time and broadcasting hours.

Where to Find and Set Up Cappings?

You can configure cappings directly in your Line Item settings, under Step 3: Buying. Here, you’ll be able to choose between manual or automatic capping and set or review the suggested values.

 

How Automatic Capping Works

Automatic capping distributes the remaining budget evenly, considering the remaining campaign duration and the number of broadcasting hours (dayparting).

Calculation Frequency

Cappings are recalculated:

• Once a day at 01:00 (Paris time) for daily capping.

• Every hour at minute 0 for hourly capping.

Key Variables

• hours_of_dayparting_today: Number of active broadcasting hours for the day (max 16 hours).

• days_until_end_of_line_item: Number of broadcasting days remaining for the Line Item.

Calculation Formulas

Daily Capping:

 daily_capping = (line_item_budget - line_item_spent) / days_until_end_of_line_item

Hourly Capping:

 hourly_capping = (line_item_budget - line_item_spent) / days_until_end_of_line_item / hours_of_dayparting_today

 

 

 

How Manual Capping Works

With manual capping, you directly set spending limits based on the specific needs of your campaign.

You can set your own values for the daily and hourly cappings, but you will see a suggested number under each field.

Suggested Manual Cappings

When switching to manual capping, the platform suggests default values based on the automatic capping algorithm, but with a more forward-looking logic than just today's settings.

Here's how it works:

• The system calculates daily and hourly cappings for each active day over the next 7 days (sliding week).
• For each day, it considers:
  • Remaining budget = line_item_budget - line_item_spent
  • Remaining active broadcasting days
  • Broadcasting hours that day (max 16h)
• Among all these days, the platform picks the day with the highest hourly capping value — usually the one with the least number of hours, as this concentrates the daily budget over fewer hours.

💡 This logic ensures that even if your broadcasting hours vary throughout the week, your suggested capping won’t under-pace your budget on “short” days.

Weekly Variation Handling (Sliding Week)

If your day-partings vary by day of the week, the platform calculates the cappings for each day of the upcoming week and proposes the maximum values found. This ensures that the suggested capping reflects the highest potential exposure.

Example:

Suppose your dayparting is configured as follows:

• Monday: 10h
• Tuesday: 10h
• Wednesday: 10h
• Thursday: 4h
• Friday: 10h
• Saturday & Sunday: 0h

Let’s say:

• line_item_budget = 7000€
• line_item_spent = 0€
• days_until_end_of_line_item = 5 (Mon–Fri = 5 active days)

daily_capping = 7000 / 5 = 1400 €

Then hourly capping per day:

In this case, the platform might suggest €350/h as the default manual hourly cap, to account for the day with the least broadcasting time (Thursday), thereby ensuring budget is never under-paced.

 

Agency Mark-up & Cappings

When an agency mark-up is applied to a campaign, it is also factored into the capping calculations. This means the platform calculates cappings based on the total budget including agency fees, not just the committed budget.

So when the platform computes automatic or suggested manual cappings, the agency markup percentage is applied accordingly to ensure that spend pacing includes both media costs and agency margin.