On the 13th of October 2023, Meta introduced the concept of template pacing for all WhatsApp marketing templates.

What is template pacing?

Template pacing is a mechanism that allows customers to provide early feedback on newly created or un-paused marketing templates. Templates sent as part of a messaging campaign are sent normally until a certain threshold is reached, after which further sending of this template is held to allow for customer feedback. This feedback allows businesses to adjust their templates before sending them to too many clients and mitigates the risk of negative feedback impacting their business.

Customers can give positive or negative feedback on the initial batch of templates sent in a campaign. The rest of the templated messages are paused while this feedback from customers is processed:

• Positive feedback: If feedback from the customer base is positive (i.e., the template's quality rating changes to high), the remaining held templates are released and sent to the rest of the customer base.

• Negative feedback: If the feedback is negative (i.e., the template's quality rating changes to low ) the template message status will be set to Pause and no further templates will be sent out. Learn how to unpause these templates here.

• No/not enough feedback: If no or not enough feedback is received from customers on a template campaign within 15 minutes to change its quality rating to high/low, all held templates will be released and sent to customers as normal.

How does template pacing impact my business?

Meta aims for minimal disruption to businesses and to target only poor-quality campaigns.

• Template pacing primarily applies to businesses with a recent history of low-quality campaigns.

• Template pacing only applies to Marketing messages (not Utility or Authentication).

• Template pacing is only applied once per template. After the quality is validated for a template, it will not be paced going forward.

• Template pacing will not impact campaigns with low volumes.

For more information, also see Meta's documentation:

• Template pacing

• Template pausing

• Quality rating