Running Cost Caps Takes Discipline
The most under-appreciated skill required to successfully running a cost cap account is discipline.
This is going to be a shorter post.
Something we have been thinking about a lot over here is how discipline is one of the top ingredients when baking a successful cost cap campaign.
Other ingredients include setting the right bids, knowing how to structure your campaign and obviously good creatives, offers, landers etc. But these do not matter nor will they work if you do not have discipline.
Discipline when it comes to cost caps means that you trust what you are doing, you trust your bids and you truly believe in the strategy you are adopting.
One of the worst things you can do when running a cost cap is toggling your bid around for whatever reason. I see it all of the time.
Something you like doesn’t spend? Bump up the bid.
Bad day of performance? Scale the bid down.
Not spending the full budget? Open up your bid.
When you touch your bid, you are essentially nullifying the entire strategy. You might as well be running auto-bid if you do this because that is what it turns into.
Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t adjust bids over time. For example, when you launch a new campaign, it is totally rational to start with a higher than normal bid and work it down over time. When you launch a new offer, same thing.
But in the day to day and in an account that is spending well and performing, you should not be touch bids for whatever reason. There are better and more disciplined solutions than toggling the bid. I also believe that messing the bid ultimately messes with your account and the signals you send to the algorithm.
Changing your bid from $50 to $55 radically changes who Meta can and will bid on in your account. Same with bringing your bid down; there are more consequences than appear on the surface when you touch your bid emotionally.
You have to be disciplined and stay the course when running cost or bid caps. If you have a goal, and have a bid in Meta, stick with it and stay the course. Look at things on a longer timeframe and then make decisions. Don’t blow yourself up by looking at things on a 24-48 hour window and start toggling around. It’ll get you into a bad spiral and if lasts more than a day or two, can ruin your momentum and in turn your month.
Things To Do Instead
New creative not spending? Launch new creative. Move on in the pipeline. Look to retest it in a few weeks or months when things in the environment, time of the year etc has changed.
If it is a piece of creative that you are particularly excited about, then launch it with new hooks, new text overlay, new ad copy, a new profile (i.e. try whitelisting it). But do not touch the bid just to get it to spend. If it spends at a $60 bid, but your account runs on a $50, then why would you want a creative that works at a $60 CAC to live with creatives that work at a $50?
Performance is down and above your cost cap? Look at your last 7 and last 14 days. I bet you that performance is in line and you are just looking at noisy data. Zoom out and make sure things are bad on a longer timeframes before you do anything drastic.
Performance is good and you want more spend? Then raise your budget and make sure the bid is still the guide. You don’t want your budgets to be spending fully each day because that signals that your bid is too high or not right. You want your bid to be the one restricting spend and volume, not your budget.
That’s all on this.