Three times the budget

The first working week of the year is when accounts get their new number, and from the platform side I can usually tell by the middle of the month which of them will keep it.

The pattern repeats every January. An account has run at a steady level since the autumn. The founder gets a bigger budget approved, or simply decides that this is the year, and on the first working day the daily amount goes up. One level all December, three times that by Monday afternoon.

By Thursday the cost per result is worse. By the following week it is a lot worse, and the conclusion the founder reaches is that the platform got worse over the holiday.

What happened is that the money moved on a schedule the auction did not. A campaign that had settled into a narrow, cheap pocket of demand has been asked to find three times as many people in the same day, so it reaches further out, to people who were further from buying, at prices set by everyone else who also got a new number this week. The system that had learned who to look for is learning again, on the most expensive traffic of the quarter, and reporting the whole thing as one blended figure that hides which half is which.

The accounts that grow through a step-up do it in steps. Twenty or thirty per cent, held for the length of a normal purchase cycle, read, then again. It feels slow in the first fortnight. It is ahead by March, because nothing had to be rebuilt.

A budget increase is a schedule, not a setting. The accounts that grow come up the way the careful ones come down, in steps, with a week between them.