The Nuances of Small Spending Meta Ad Accounts during Black Friday/Cyber Monday
No two Meta ad accounts are the same, regardless of size. We know this. But what makes two accounts even more different? Budget and how much you’re able to spend, especially during Q4 & BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend). If you’re on X, and in the trenches of DTC Twitter, you likely read about what’s working now, what you should test, crazy results from a recent test, and so on and so forth. But is that advice applicable to all accounts?
No - and definitely not applicable to small spending Meta ad accounts. Accounts spending under $50,000 USD per month during Q4 must operate from a different playbook than accounts spending six and seven-figures per month during that period. If you’re a small spending Meta ad manager, keep reading for the tactics and strategies you must pay the most attention to this Q4 and BFCM to operate your account to the highest ROAS and MER possible.
Want blogs like this one and other digital marketing tips & tricks sent straight to your inbox? Sign up for our email newsletter for free.
What is considered a small spending account?
This answer can vary, but usually a small spending account is an account spending less than ~$40k per month on just Meta ads. Small to medium sized accounts that can still benefit from operating as a small account would be any Meta ad account spending less than ~$80k/mo.
We’re all the time hearing what the ad buying “gurus” are saying, but how applicable is that for accounts that aren’t spending millions on just Meta per month?
The short answer: not that applicable.
The longer answer: It depends on so many factors … like these:
Attribution methods: Keep the same attribution setting you've been using in the account for most of the year the same during BFCM. Changing it will throw off the algorithm and targeting because it won't be sure who to target based on when they will convert, AND your data will be hard to compare to previous timeframes because of the change. If you’ve been running 7-day click (7DC) or 7-day click/1-day view (7DC/1DV), and especially if your sale is running longer than 1 day (which is recommended), stick with what you’ve been doing.
One caveat here that many advertisers are talking about or say is a best practiceis for brands that are scaling more than 100% over their business-as-usual monthly spends, you can launch a 1-day click optimized campaign on the side that targets lookalikes of previous years' BFCM shoppers. Some advertisers find that this setup helps the system in finding individuals who wont be captured w the traditional evergreen 7dc+broad targeting, but are specifically looking to buy only during this time period. HOWEVER, some small spending accounts are just too small for this level of horizontal scale, size of audiences, or data in a 1-day window, so keep that in mind and proceed with this idea with caution.
Scaling: Use audiences and creatives that have been working in the account all year (and specifically over the past 2-3 months) for scaling. BFCM weekend isn’t the time to try completely net-new concepts for creative. You can launch new creatives that are similar to the main theme or layout of top-performers that have holiday, gifting, or BFCM/sale messaging, but do not start from scratch with audiences or creatives for BFCM. Mostly focus on vertical scaling (increasing the budget on existing campaigns) and horizontal scaling (launching more campaigns/ad sets) only for proven audience winners. All audience and structure testing should be completed by the beginning of November. With small accounts having less historical data to optimize off of, consistency and stability are key here.
Creative testing: Similar to the advice for scaling, BFCM weekend (and the weeks in November leading up to it) are NOT the time to complete any creative tests. CPMs start to rise at the end of October and conversion rates, CTRs, and other metrics also begin getting worse as early as late September as people prepare for sales to come and start saving their money to get ready to spend. For small spending accounts, they generally don’t have the margin to be creative testing when many of these metrics due to macro-economic factors are working against them. Whereas larger spenders have the cashflow to lose money or be less than breakeven on Meta ads in October because they know they’ll make up for that revenue in December, small spenders many times don’t have that luxury.
Lead generation & warming up the account: Whereas reach campaigns may work in large accounts during high intent times like BFCM, we strongly recommend against this for small spending accounts. Small accounts not only have less budget to work with for conversions, they also have less data in the account to allow the pixel/algorithm to optimize to find more relevant customers. Small accounts also have less excess budget to “play with” and test out-of-the-box tactics, therefore usually should stick to purchase conversion campaigns only to maximize the most profit. HOWEVER - one exception here is if you want to run a purchase conversion optimized Meta ad campaign within 7 days of your BFCM sale starting pushing to a landing page that has an email/SMS sign-up widget to be notified when the sale starts. This way, you can pay to capture them once, (ideally) get their email, then convert them when the sale starts at no additional ad cost, AND since it’s within 7 days of the sale starting, you’ll still be able to see conversions come through on a 7-day attribution window once they purchase. Win, win.
Blogs, sales, ad buying best practices, courses, and so much more are included in our email newsletter! But we won’t spam you or send too many emails… promise :)
5. Account/structure consolidation: This one is a bit more gray area than other tactics that may be a hard YES or NO for small spending accounts. Small accounts don’t need to have just one campaign running to be consolidated, but they definitely don’t need 8+ campaigns live simultaneously, either. A happy medium here for small accounts is usually 1-4 campaigns. Also, for retargeting, you can run a retargeting only campaign or DPA especially during BFCM (it’s actually recommended), but watch the frequencies on the account. Frequency will go higher the more you spend on the campaign and the smaller the audience/retargeting window is. During BFCM, you likely don’t want your frequency over a 3.5-4x over a 7-day window. Anything at or above that, lower your budget or increase your retargeting audience window.
6. Sale best practices: The longer the sale can run, the better. All accounts need data to be able to optimize, and small spending accounts don’t always have a ton of data in the account due to spending less, which equals less data. Flash sales or sales running less than 7 days are not ideal for small spending clients. The longer that the sale can run, the more recent and highly applicable data the account can get, and continually improve its targeting over the course of the time that the sale is running. This is also a great time to vertically scale (increase the budget) on prospecting and retargeting audiences because even though CPMs are high during this time, conversion rates and CTRs are also higher due to higher customer intent to purchase.
7. Consider starting your sale early: Running a sale prior to Black Friday (and, if possible, communicating clearly that the sale is better than your Black Friday sale will be). This pushes urgency to buy now, CPMs are slightly lower prior to BFCM weekend, there's less competition, and also you get ahead of the curve for gifting to be one of the first gifts someone buys for someone else as opposed to being a last-minute gift or one that gets cut because they've already bought enough gifts. It also helps with fulfillment and spreading out the BFCM rush so that it doesnt come all in 4 days. And then also with a break between the better than BF sale and BFCM, the team can get caught up on fulfillment to start BFCM without being behind. Also, with small spenders, generally that also means it’s a small business and small fulfillment team, so spreading out the sale and incentivizing people to buy sooner instead of waiting until BFCM or until the day of the shipping cutoff, it can help with bandwidth of operations for small teams as well.
Ad buying friends don’t let ad buying friends do BFCM alone. Join us?
Currently 500+ ad buyers strong. Be our 501st?