Three Bad Days

One of the least useful things you can do in ads. Panic after three bad days of performance.

I see it a lot, and honestly, I understand why. If you're running your own ads, you're checking performance daily. You've built the products, you know the margins, it's your money. A couple of rough days and it feels urgent to fix something.

But three days rarely tells you anything real.

Platforms often see signals before we do. Campaigns need time to settle. And plenty of dips have nothing to do with your ads at all. Payday, school holidays, the weather, whatever's going on in the world that week.

The advertisers who do well long term aren't the ones reacting fastest. They're the ones who can tell the difference between a genuine trend and a normal blip and who are comfortable holding their nerve and leaving things alone until the data actually says otherwise.

That patience is often the optimisation. Not every problem needs a fix. Some just need a few more days.

I went deeper into how I actually decide whether poor performance is a blip or a real problem, including the questions I ask myself before making any changes, in my latest newsletter.