You will produce a budget plan you can defend to a boss, client or yourself.
At some point someone will ask you why you are spending this much on ads. It might be a boss, a client, a business partner, or you at 11pm looking at your bank balance. Without a plan, the honest answer is that it seemed about right. With one, you can say what the money is for, what it has to prove, when you will check and when you will stop.
This exercise produces that plan for your first campaign. It brings together lessons 8.1 to 8.3 into a single page you can defend. Allow about twenty-five minutes.
Write down how much you will spend on this test and over how many days. Size it from two directions. From your side: what can the business afford to spend on learning without strain, as lesson 6.5, Build your first social campaign, asked? From the campaign's side: how many results would you need to see before you could judge it?
There is no standard number for the second question, and you should be wary of anyone who gives one without knowing your business. Read the learning phase guidance from lesson 8.3, The learning phase: why results wobble at first, for the platform you are using, and aim for a budget that can produce a reasonable number of conversions at your target cost over the test period. If that budget is far beyond what you can afford, that is useful to know before you start. It may mean optimising for a more frequent event, or running the test for longer at a lower daily spend.
Then write in one sentence what the test must prove. Not that ads work, which is too vague to answer. Something like: whether Google Search can bring trial bookings at or below S$100 each.
Take your break-even numbers from lesson 8.1, Start from what a customer is worth. Write your maximum cost per customer and, if you sell in two steps, your maximum cost per lead, with the close rate you used. Then write the target for this campaign, which may sit a little below the maximum to leave a margin of safety.
If your campaign is measured by return on ad spend rather than cost per result, write your break-even return and your target return instead, as Farah did in lesson 8.2, Bid strategies: manual, automated and targets.
For each campaign in the test, name the bid strategy and the conversion data it depends on. Use lesson 8.2. If the strategy needs reliable conversions, name the event and the date you tested it. If you are using a cap or target, write the figure and where it came from. If your conversion data is thin, say so and choose accordingly.
Write the date of your first review. It should come after the learning period has had a fair chance, not on day two. Write down that you will not make big edits before that date unless something is broken, such as a wrong link, a disapproved ad, broken tracking or spend going to the wrong place.
Then write a stop rule, decided now while you are calm. A stop rule says what result will make you pause the campaign. A common form is a spend threshold: if the campaign has spent some multiple of your target cost per result and produced no results at all, stop and check tracking, the offer and the page before spending more. Write your own version with real figures.
Here is Priya's plan for a Google Search test. All figures are examples.
Test budget: S$20 a day for 28 days, S$560 in total, which she can afford to spend on learning this month. It must prove whether Google Search can bring trial bookings at or below S$100 each.
Target: her maximum cost per student is S$300 and about one in three trial bookings enrols, so her maximum cost per booking is S$100. She is aiming for S$80, which would mean about seven bookings over the test.
Bid strategy: maximise conversions on her tested Lead event from the booking form, without a target at first because she has no booking history on Google yet. She will consider a target cost per action of S$100 after the test, once the campaign has recorded a few weeks of bookings.
Review and stop rule: first review on day 14, no big edits before then unless something breaks. If S$300 has been spent with no bookings at all, three times her S$100 maximum, she pauses and checks the tracking, the page and the search terms report before spending more. At the end of the 28 days, she keeps the campaign if bookings came in at S$100 or less on average, and rethinks the offer or keywords if not.
When you finish, you have one page with the test budget and duration, what it must prove, your target cost per result or return, the bid strategy and its data, a first review date and a stop rule with real numbers. Someone reading it would know what you are spending, why, and what would make you stop.
The activity below asks you to write that page for your own first campaign.
Write a one-page budget and bidding plan with test budget, duration, targets, bid strategy, review date and stop rule.
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