How Brands Undercut Their ROI with Fixed-Budget Flight Campaigns

When onboarding new clients, especially those working with media agencies, the biggest ROI blocker I see is fixed-budget flight campaigns. Yes, I understand that most brands need short-term flight campaigns to promote new products, sales, and other promotions. However, the real issue isn’t in running a flight campaign itself, but in setting a fixed budget and timeline instead of defining a daily budget and making manual decisions on when to stop or adjust the campaign.

Why Brands Use Fixed-Budget Flight Campaigns

Flight campaigns are popular because they’re designed to run for a specific period, usually to support a product launch, seasonal promotion, or special event. The idea is simple: allocate a set budget, run the campaign for a designated timeframe, and aim to make as much impact as possible within those limits.

For brands, this approach often feels safe and manageable. It gives predictability and aligns well with traditional budgeting processes. For media agencies, it’s an easy way to package and sell a campaign: a fixed cost for a fixed duration, with clear expectations.

The Risks of Fixed-Budget Flight Campaigns

But here’s the catch: the simplicity of this model hides some significant risks that can really hold back your campaign’s potential:

1. Lack of Flexibility: Fixed-budget flight campaigns lock you into a specific spend and timeframe, no matter how well or poorly the campaign performs. If it underperforms, you’re stuck spending the entire budget with no way to reallocate those funds to something that might work better. On the flip side, if the campaign is a hit, you’re capping your potential returns by sticking to the fixed budget and timeline.
2. Missed Opportunities for Optimization: Digital marketing is all about being able to tweak and optimize as you go. Fixed-budget campaigns limit your ability to do that. By the time you realize a particular channel or tactic is killing it, it might be too late to adjust, and you end up missing out on extra gains you could have made.
3. Potential for Wasted Spend: Not all campaigns are winners right out of the gate. Some need tweaking, and others might require a full-on pivot. With a fixed budget, you risk throwing good money after bad just because you committed to a certain spend. That’s money that could’ve been put to better use elsewhere.
4. Inability to Scale: When a campaign shows strong incremental ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), you should be scaling it up. But with a fixed-budget flight campaign, you can’t easily boost the budget or extend the campaign beyond what was originally planned, even if it’s performing really well.

The Case for Flexible, Performance-Driven Campaigns

Instead of getting locked into a fixed-budget flight campaign, a smarter move is to start with a daily budget and make real-time decisions on when to stop, scale, or tweak the campaign based on its performance—just as you would do with your evergreen campaigns. This means applying the same budgeting and optimization strategy across the board. Here’s why this approach makes more sense:

1. Responsive Budget Allocation: By setting a daily budget, you give yourself the flexibility to react to performance data. If the campaign’s a winner, you can gradually increase the daily budget or extend its run to maximize ROI. If it’s flopping, you can cut your losses early or pause the campaign to regroup and reallocate the budget to something that’s working better.
2. Maximizing ROI Through Continuous Optimization: With a flexible approach, you’re constantly optimizing. You can make adjustments based on what the data’s telling you, ensuring your marketing spend is working as hard as it can. This also lets you jump on unexpected opportunities, like a viral moment or a sudden surge in demand.
3. Better Alignment with Business Objectives: Flexibility in budgeting and timing lets your campaigns be more in tune with your business goals. Instead of being tied to arbitrary dates or budget limits, your marketing efforts can evolve based on what’s happening in the real world, making sure they’re always contributing effectively to what you’re trying to achieve.
4. Leveraging Evergreen Campaigns: When promotional campaigns don’t hit the mark, it’s often better to shift resources to evergreen campaigns that consistently deliver. These ongoing campaigns focus on long-term goals like brand awareness or lead generation and can be scaled up when your promos aren’t delivering as expected.

Conclusion: A Smarter Approach to Flight Campaigns

The best way to launch flight campaigns is to start with an initial daily budget for the first 1-2 weeks. This gives you enough data to make smart decisions. If the campaign shows good incremental ROAS during this period, let it be picked up by the optimizer to drive as much revenue as possible. If it’s not performing well, scale it down or re-launch it with a fresh value proposition.

Instead of setting a strict deadline (unless your promo is truly time-sensitive), think about stopping the campaign only if it starts performing worse than your evergreen campaigns, if the product sells out and the promo expires. This mindset shift alone can boost your revenues from such campaigns by 2-3 times and protect you from both overspending and underinvestment. By staying flexible and letting performance guide your decisions, you’ll get the most out of your marketing budget and see better results.

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