Abstract:
Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for providing advertisers with a mechanism to dynamically adjust budget constraints in order to take into account the advertisers' preferences for targeting users associated with specific dimensions within the segments targeted by a campaign. In particular, advertisers can specify a line specification that sets forth soft and hard constraints, where the hard constraints set caps for spend and the soft constraints set forth desired range of spend for categories in one or more dimensions and a relative importance of the spend in each category. The line specification can then be used to derive spending preferences that can be used to guide how spend is allocated over time.