Where the audience went

The dip arrives on a night in the last third of the month, and every reflex the dashboard produces is the wrong one.

These are the last ten nights. Eid is expected within days, depending on the sighting. And on some of these nights the evening traffic that has carried the whole month simply is not there.

I have watched what happens next from the platform side, across a great many accounts, and the sequence barely varies. Somebody sees the drop before lunch. Bids go up, because the auction is described as competitive. The creative gets swapped, because the creative is described as tired. By the afternoon somebody senior has asked for an explanation, and by the evening there is a document with three hypotheses in it, and not one of them is the answer.

The answer is that the audience is at the mosque.

The last ten nights are the most attended nights of the year. Whole families go, and they go late, and the households that do not go are hosting the ones that do. No bid strategy wins that hour. Every riyal spent trying is spent at the top of an auction, against other advertisers making the same mistake at the same minute, for people who are not holding a phone.

A dashboard cannot show an absence with a reason attached to it. It shows the absence and leaves the reason to whoever is asking, and the person asking is usually the person who has to explain the week.

Some dips are a problem to solve. Some are a sign that the audience has somewhere better to be, and the account that leaves them alone reads better on Eid morning than the account that spent the week fighting them.