Every company I have ever worked with either had stronger weekend sales and weaker weekday sales, or vice versa. It’s just the nature of selling things digitally. Some products are great to buy when you are at work, some products are great to buy on the weekend.
I have found businesses with very strong weekend sales to be particularly tricky to manage on Meta. I have also witnessed firsthand that Meta finds these businesses particularly challenging as well.
Why are Strong Weekends Hard for Meta & Growth Marketers?
A two day spike(the weekend) is not that long…
A five day lull (the weekdays) is pretty long!
Over-managing campaigns (“touching them too much”) is a great way to kill performance. 2x touches every week just for weekend management burns pretty much all the touches you should allow yourself in a given week.
Increasing budgets significantly at any time triggers the dreaded “learning mode” which hurts performance.
I do think that the reverse scenario (strong weeks, softer weekends) is a much easier scenario to manage. With a five day strong period followed by a two day lull, the majority of your week is strong. However sometimes the challenge with these businesses can be when Monday is the strongest day of the week and campaigns need to “wake up” after a sleepy Sunday.
OK then what are our choices?
Do nothing and pray to the Meta gods 🙏
Adjust budgets up every Friday/Saturday AM and down every Sunday PM/Monday AM
Stable budgets with high bid caps. Keep the budgets high throughout the week and weekend and give Meta evergreen CPA targets ideally with campaigns spending more on weekends than weekdays while hitting your CPA targets.
Use “The Budget Tool”, the wonderfully named tool released in fall 2023 that allegedly avoided triggering learning mode with large budget swings.
Launch Weekend-long “Lifetime Campaigns” overlaid on top of existing campaigns.
Other options? Let me know!
Well, what is the best option?
Do nothing and pray to the Meta gods: I have found this not effective particularly with businesses that have very strong weekends. Right now, Meta just cannot react fast enough to spiking demand. I am sure they will fix this someday. But it’s not fixed yet. If your weekends are only slightly stronger than your weekdays, this could work for you though! Remember, when in doubt, touch it less.
Adjust budgets up every Friday/Saturday AM and down every Sunday PM/Monday AM: This is a lot of thrash in the campaign and we all know we need to touch our campaigns less. Plus you need to navigate with sending campaigns back into learning mode with +20% changes, although I believe any change causes some re-learning to occur. This could be OK with small changes but I would try to avoid it. This is very scary with big changes because you risk destroying your evergreen workhorse campaign performance.
Stable budgets with high bid caps: While this in theory should work, in practice I have seen across multiple companies these campaigns work for a couple of weeks but then just wither and die. They don’t keep spending for mysterious unknown Meta reasons.
Use “The Budget Tool”: When Meta launched this tool it sounded like weekend management would would be a perfect use case, but then after using it with mixed results this way, then heard that it should only be used once in a while like getting ready for Black Friday…which is a scary way to get ready for Black Friday…not adviseable.
Weekend-long “Lifetime Campaigns” overlaid on top of existing campaigns: This I have found to be the best option! Overlaying weekend long Lifetime campaigns on top of your existing campaigns allows you to not touch your workhorse evergreen campaigns while also allowing you to spend more on weekends. However, its July 30, 2024, and this could be a horrible option next week because these things change so fast. But for now this is the best option I have found recently.
What other options are out there that I missed? As always, reach out to me at rob@growthish.com with any thoughts.