Scaling Meta Spend During BFCM

BFCM presents a great opportunity for e-commerce brands to scale aggressively even though it may be more costly to advertise during this high-volume time of year. Here are a few things to consider when planning your scaling strategy on Meta during the BFCM time frame.

Be mindful of the rate at which you scale.

Most frequently, seasoned media buyers and advertising experts are going to recommend raising spend in 20% increments. Between those 20% increments of spend, you may be looking for a certain number of conversions or looking to get out of the learning phase. The importance of getting out of the learning phase before increasing spend aggressively depends on where you are in your businesses journey and how much you're spending on the platform.

However, during BFCM, you still have the same downside risk. If you scale too fast you can potentially start getting unfavourable results. On the flip side though, this season for most brands also presents the most opportunity. Therefore if you’re not being aggressive enough, you also risk missing out on potential opportunities that are not only realized during Q4 but also into Q1 and beyond with the compounding effect of return customer revenue from the influx of customers you acquired during BFCM.

Throughout the entire year, the BFCM period is the one where it is worthwhile to break some of your standard scaling rules. Evidently, you still want to manage the risks to some degree and be conscious of both the downside and upside risks. Our general framework during this period is to be very mindful of day-to-day results in order to monitor the effectiveness of scaling the budget. We are generally against being too focused on day-to-day results throughout normal periods. However, a situation like BFCM is an exception to this with aggressive spend scaling and the breaking of “standard” scaling rules.

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There are scenarios where scaling your budget every single day makes sense.

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If you’ve run your BFCM sale for long enough (ex: starting mid-November and running it through to early December), you've likely scaled spend a large amount so that when BFCM weekend actually transpires that you've likely generated a solid amount of profits and in an ideal world are hitting your KPI’s. If you’re in this situation going into BFCM weekend, you can double or triple your budget for the BFCM weekend period.

2-3x your budget for BFCM weekend.

If you’re in this situation going into BFCM weekend, you can double or triple your budget for the BFCM weekend period. This of course depends on how above your KPIs you are and how much profit you’ve generated in the previous 3-week period. But those are discussions that can be had in preparation. The moral of the story, breaking spend scaling rules during this time of year is warranted if you’re monitoring your full-funnel metrics and hitting your main KPI’s.