For search platforms like Google and Bing, we recommend updating keywords and budgets every 7 days, and creative and copy every 14 days.
For display platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, we recommend testing and updating creatives every 3 days, following the 1 > 4 > 12 rule (1 campaign adjustment, 4 audience adjustments, 12 creative changes). Higher budgets allow for more frequent updates due to faster data collection. Campaign structures need fewer updates compared to creatives and audiences.
While these are good rules of thumb, the real answer to questions like these is always “it depends.” We believe in cutting the B.S. and getting right down to it, so the answer above is our typical approach for the accounts we manage.
That being said, here’s all the “it depends” factors you should consider when deciding how often to update your campaigns. content you probably expected to see when you Googled this question. It’s what we’ve learned after working with hundreds of brands and spending over $30 million on paid ads.
Search vs. Display Platforms
How often you update your ad campaigns depends on the type of platform you’re advertising on.
Search platforms like Google or Bing require less frequent changes because they rely on users searching specific keywords. Search platforms are often referred to as “intent based.”
Display platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, can be optimized more often because they are displaying ads throughout a user’s newsfeed, thereby interrupting their scroll. Hence the term “interruption based.”
Search platforms like Google and Bing are intent-based, meaning they rely on people searching for something in order for an ad to show up. This typically results in a smaller number of impressions than social media channels. Conversely, display platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok show ads natively in the feed and have billions of daily users, resulting in more reach.
Budget Considerations
Generally speaking, the higher your budget, the more frequently you can (and should) be making changes. This is because the speed at which you’ll collect data is much faster on a $1,000/day budget vs. a $100/day budget.
The Meta & Google examples below assume you are setting up your campaigns without any budget limitations. If your budget is between $50 – $250/day, consider making changes at half the speed.
Campaign Structure vs. Creative & Copy
The next consideration is what you are optimizing—your entire campaign or just the creative pieces of it.
Campaigns require less frequent changes since their primary purpose is to host audiences and ads. Beyond that, a campaign is only used to set your budget and choose your objective (i.e. impressions, clicks, purchases, etc.).
Creatives require the most frequent changes and have the largest impact on performance, since the creative is ultimately what will convince your prospect to click. Creatives also encompass more variables than campaigns or audiences. Within a creative, you have:
- Visuals
- Headline
- Description
- Call to action, or CTA
- URL destination
If the visual is a video, you have additional variables to consider such as the hook, body, and CTA of the video.
Target audiences lie between creative and campaign optimizations. They should not be changed as frequently as creatives, but more frequently than campaigns.
As a general rule of thumb, for every 12 optimizations you make to your creatives, you’ll likely make 4 optimizations to your audiences and 1 optimization to your campaign. We’ll call this the 1 > 4 > 12 rule. Similar to a clock, the seconds change faster than the minutes, and minutes change faster than the hours.
The frequency of optimization also varies between platforms. Let’s explore that next.
Meta: Facebook & Instagram
Since Facebook and Instagram are both interruption-based display platforms, creative testing will have the biggest impact on your performance.
We typically test 1 new creative every 3 days. For every new launch, we follow the same order of ABC testing.
Note: ABC testing means testing 3 variables at once as opposed to A/B testing which tests 2 variables at once. This is best practice for paid advertising in 2024.
In the first launch, we try 3 versions of the same creative, all with slightly different hooks (or the first three seconds of a video). After 3 days have passed we deactivate the 2 worst performing videos, leaving 1 video remaining. We then create 3 versions of that winning creative and test different headlines. This process repeats again for the URL and body copy.
In total, we run each new creative through 4 ABC tests:
- Hook
- Headline
- URL
- Copy
Each test lasts 3 days, meaning we’ll find a winning creative every 12 days (4 ABC tests X 3 days per test = 12 days to find winning creative).
Each time a new creative is launched, we use one audience.All the subsequent split tests also occur within that audience.
Bringing this full circle, within 1 campaign we have 4 active audiences, and 12 active creatives. Hence the 1 > 4 > 12 rule.
Moving to the intent-based platforms, let’s first talk about campaign structure. On Google, we typically set up 3 search campaigns and 2-5 performance max campaigns, depending on budget and number of product categories.
Using a company like Lululemon as an example, we might start with keywords such as:
- Athletic wear
- Lululemon leggings
- Nike activewear
This gives us a good mix of general, branded, and competitor keywords.
Performance max campaigns are broken up by category instead of keywords. Using the Lululemon example, we would have different campaigns for men’s and women’s activewear. This allows us to set different cost per purchase (CPP) or return on ad spend (ROAS) targets, or analyze specific demographics data.
Pro tip: you can create multiple search campaigns for different product categories to set different CPP or ROAS targets, and to observe performance between SKUs.
Google recommends making optimization changes every 14 days at most. We’ve found that making keyword and budget changes every 7 days ensures optimal performance, but ad creative and copy should be left alone for 14 days at a time.
Let’s Chat About Your Paid Ads
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Book a free, no-obligation strategy call with our team. We’ll dive into your business, answer your questions, and create an advertising strategy tailored to your goals.