you wanted to scale budget hard right before a sale, ended up resetting the learning phase and missing the best days

YUNJI Agency

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Came up during a post sale review, writing it down.

Two days before a big sale, you wanted to triple the budget ahead of time to build up momentum for sale day. delivery got noticeably off the same day the budget changed, cpa nearly doubled, conversions didn't really go up, and it happened to land right on the two days you needed volume the most, worst performance of the whole period.

First thought was just that everyone bids up during a sale so cpm was naturally higher, figured it'd settle. by the time the sale was half over it occurred to me to actually check the backend, campaign had gone back into the learning phase, tied to how much the budget jumped. a big one time increase can trigger relearning, and delivery stays unstable through that stretch, which lined up exactly with the most critical days of the sale.

Fooking back the idea of scaling budget ahead of time wasn't wrong, the issue was the timing and the size of the change. tripling it in one shot was a lot, and doing it that close to the sale meant the learning phase hadn't settled before hitting the peak.

Now the advice is if you're scaling budget for an event, start about a week out and do it in smaller steps, don't push it hard one or two days before, otherwise you can end up hitting relearning right when you need volume the most.

Anyone else gotten caught by this before a big sale, how do you usually time your budget changes?
 
Came up during a post sale review, writing it down.

Two days before a big sale, you wanted to triple the budget ahead of time to build up momentum for sale day. delivery got noticeably off the same day the budget changed, cpa nearly doubled, conversions didn't really go up, and it happened to land right on the two days you needed volume the most, worst performance of the whole period.

First thought was just that everyone bids up during a sale so cpm was naturally higher, figured it'd settle. by the time the sale was half over it occurred to me to actually check the backend, campaign had gone back into the learning phase, tied to how much the budget jumped. a big one time increase can trigger relearning, and delivery stays unstable through that stretch, which lined up exactly with the most critical days of the sale.

Fooking back the idea of scaling budget ahead of time wasn't wrong, the issue was the timing and the size of the change. tripling it in one shot was a lot, and doing it that close to the sale meant the learning phase hadn't settled before hitting the peak.

Now the advice is if you're scaling budget for an event, start about a week out and do it in smaller steps, don't push it hard one or two days before, otherwise you can end up hitting relearning right when you need volume the most.

Anyone else gotten caught by this before a big sale, how do you usually time your budget changes?
It was a valuable lesson, and I've had a similar experience; I had to create a new ad account because of this impatience, and since then I've gradually increased my budget a little bit each day, so my accounts are much more stable now.
 
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