Smart Fast Finish: Preventing Overdelivery via Daily Budget Pacing at DoorDash

Abstract: We present a budget pacing feature called Smart Fast Finish (SFF). SFF builds upon the industry standard Fast Finish (FF) feature in budget pacing systems that depletes remaining advertising budget as quickly as possible towards the end of some fixed time period. SFF dynamically updates system parameters such as start time and throttle rate depending on historical ad-campaign data. SFF is currently in use at DoorDash, one of the largest delivery platforms in the US, and is part of its budget pacing system. We show via online budget-split experimentation data and offline simulations that SFF is a robust solution for overdelivery mitigation when pacing budget.