Unlimited Ad Budgets

Your Performance Marketing Campaigns should have unlimited budgets. You should attempt to spend as much as possible as long as you can get the first-order profitable returns you are looking for. Fixed budgets are stupid because you give up potential upside:

• If things are going well, you should spend more.
• If things are going badly, you should spend less.

Your budgets should just be guidelines. How much you actually spend should be based on performance.

Money Printer Go Brrr…

If things are going well, and you are turning each $1 of ad spend into $5 of revenue, then you want to keep doing that all day long. Spend as much as possible and make profits.

Don’t artificially limit yourself with a fixed budget. This is particularly true for high volume periods such as Black Friday.

Never Lose Money Knowingly

It doesn’t make much sense to knowingly lose money.

Once you hit your profitable performance limits, and can no longer spend money profitably, then just STOP.

Save the remaining budget for another day, redeploy it elsewhere, use it to run some tests, but don’t knowingly waste it on unprofitable spend.

Keep Attribution Tight

If operating within an unlimited budget, it is super important to have extremely tight revenue attribution. Otherwise you might go bankrupt.

Tight attribution means:

• Use GA4 for revenue attribution and profitability calculations (or a tool like Northbeam). Never trust the ad platform.
• Don’t use View Attribution. Only use click-based attribution, ideally with short conversion windows.
• Measure each channel’s profitability independently from other channels. Each channel needs to stand on its own two feet.
• Don’t include Branded Search revenue in your paid search profitability calculations.