Before you hit ‘go’ on your digital marketing campaign, it’s good practice to decide on a total and daily ad budget for your campaigns, and to work out the potential split in spend across different channels or strands of the campaign. 

 

You may want to spend the same amount across each channel, to provide you with straightforward comparisons of spend vs. acquisition. Alternatively you might decide that (based on experience) one channel tends to perform better on average for your brand, so it makes sense to prioritise spend to that particular channel. Either way, you will need to have an idea of your total ad budget for marketing, and an idea of how long you want the campaign to run for. A good rule of thumb is to run a marketing campaign for at least 7 days, otherwise you won’t get a sense of the different response levels across the days of the week (and the weekend.) 

 

Additionally, many machine learning algorithms used in paid advertising platforms can take a couple of days to start to return the right audiences for your campaign.

Ideally, an ad campaign of at least 2 weeks in duration is advisable, this gives the ad platforms enough time to generate some data and a bit of time for you to tweak your campaign if you find some insights that could help to improve your cost per acquisition, return on investment or conversion rate.

 

It’s often a bit of a balance between campaign length and daily budget when it comes to campaign planning. Running a campaign for 100 days with a £1 a day budget probably won’t yield much in the way of results or insights, but likewise spending £100 on one day may well be a waste of money. This is because a potential customer may need to see ads from you multiple times over multiple days to click or convert, but also because the insights you will get from that spend will be minimal due to the variance of day of the week / initial audience / lack of changes to optimise the campaign.

 

That’s why you need to experiment with ad campaign lengths and daily ad budgets to find the sweet spot for your marketing needs vs. your ad budget.

To ensure that you can effectively analyse campaign performance and make improvements during a campaign; you need to have a high enough budget to deliver enough traffic to determine the effectiveness of your campaign.

 

A budget of $50 on any platform will be spent quickly (and depending on your targeting could be spent within its first hour.) 

 

A campaign that is limited by budget will not come to maturity, and will not deliver you the conversions you need for your effort to be rewarded. Estimates vary, but from our experience, a campaign budget should be at a minimum of $250, and ideally running for 2 weeks. At this level you would have a daily budget of around $18. Which for a budget that is running all day and across timezones would equate to less than $1 an hour. 

 

When you think about it that way, $250 for 2 weeks of marketing is actually very little!