Solved: Advice Needed for Managing Ads During Lunar New Year

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. It's a tricky situation to be in, and a really common one for eCommerce businesses, especially those relying on dropshipping. You've hit a purple patch with your ads, the creatives are working, the algorithm is finally on your side... and then operational reality hits you in the face. It's frustrating, I know. You're right to be cautious, as messing with a winning campaign can feel like trying to disarm a bomb.

You've basically asked if you can just pull the emergency brake, and the short answer is no, you probably shouldn't. But this situation is also a massive opportunity to build a more resilient advertising system for your business so you're not in this same panicked position next year. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how I'd approach this, both for the immediate problem and the bigger picture.

I'd say you need to tread very carefully with that budget...

First things first, let's tackle your main question. Slashing your budget by 80% overnight is a really bad idea. I can't stress this enough. The Meta ad delivery algorithm, for all its sophistication, is a creature of habit. It thrives on stability and predictable data patterns. When you've got a campaign performing well, it's because the algorithm has found a 'pocket' of users who are responding, and it understands how much to bid to reach them effectively with your current budget.

When you suddenly rip 80% of its funding away, you're not just reducing spend; you're sending a massive shockwave through the system. The algorithm interprets this as a catastrophic change in conditions. Its entire bidding model, which was based on the old budget, becomes irrelevant. It can no longer afford to compete for the same high-quality users it was getting for you before. It will almost certainly throw the ad set back into the Learning Phase, and there's no guarantee it will ever find that same sweet spot again when you try to ramp it back up. You'll lose all that momentum you've carefully built.

Think of it like training a marathon runner. They're in peak condition, running consistent times. Then you suddenly tell them to cut their calorie intake by 80% for a week. They won't just run a bit slower; their body will go into survival mode. Performance will plummet, and getting them back to their peak will be a long, difficult process.

So, the immediate tactical move is to apply the brakes gently. I would recommend reducing the budget gradually, day by day. A 15-20% decrease every 24-48 hours is a much safer approach. This gives the algorithm time to adjust. It learns to work with a slightly smaller budget, finds slightly cheaper users, and recalibrates its bidding without panicking. You're easing it down, not pushing it off a cliff. Even with this method, I'd be hesitant to go much below 50% of the original budget on your top-performing campaigns if you can help it, as you still risk degrading the performance significantly.

This is the safe, standard advice. But honestly, it doesn't solve the real underlying issue here.

We'll need to look at why this is such a fragile situation in the first place...

The fact that a predictable, annual event like Lunar New Year can threaten to completely derail your marketing says something important. Your problem isn't really about Facebook budgets. Your problem is that your offer and your operations are not aligned, creating a massive point of failure in your business.

I see this all the time. Founders build a product, find an audience that wants it, and get the ads working. But the offer – the entire end-to-end experience of a customer discovering, buying, and receiving your product – is built on a foundation of sand. In your case, it's a reliance on a supply chain that has a single, massive, predictable point of failure each year.

The number one reason ad campaigns ultimately fail isn't bad creative or poor targeting; it's a weak offer. A truly powerful offer is built on three pillars: a specific audience, an urgent problem, and a clear solution. You've clearly found an audience and a solution (your products). But the "urgent problem" part is what's interesting. For your customers, the problem is whatever your product solves. For you, the business owner, the urgent problem is a fragile supply chain that kneecaps your growth at a moment of peak performance. Your advertising can't be truly effective until this operational weakness is addressed.

This means we need to think beyond just turning the volume down. We need to change the tune you're playing entirely during this period. We need to build a strategy that turns this downtime from a liability into an asset. You need a plan that not only protects your current campaign momentum but actually uses this quiet period to set you up for an even bigger, more explosive return when your stock levels are back to normal.

You probably should rethink your funnel for when this happens again...

Okay, so instead of just cutting spend, let's think about reallocating it. Right now, all your efforts are likely focused on the very bottom of the marketing funnel (BoFu) – driving immediate purchases. That's great when you have products to ship. When you don't, continuing to hammer a "Buy Now" message is just burning money and frustrating potential customers.

The smart move is to shift your budget up the funnel. Instead of going silent, you're going to use this time to build your audience. Here's how I'd structure it, using the standard ToFu/MoFu/BoFu model:

ToFu (Top of Funnel): Audience Building

This is where you'll move the bulk of your reduced budget. The goal here isn't to sell anything. It's to attract new, relevant people into your ecosystem at a very low cost. Your winning creatives are clearly resonating, so use them! But change the campaign objective.

-> New Campaign Objective: Instead of 'Sales' or 'Conversions (Purchase)', create a new campaign optimised for 'Leads' (with an email signup form) or 'Video Views'.

-> The Offer: Instead of "Shop Now", the call to action could be "Get 15% Off When We're Back in Stock" or "Be the First to Know When Our New Collection Drops". You're capturing their email address, turning a fleeting ad impression into a long-term asset you own. If your creative is a video, running it for views will build a massive, warm audience of people who've watched a significant portion of it. This is gold dust for later.

MoFu (Middle of Funnel): Nurturing

This is about keeping your existing warm audience engaged. These are people who have visited your site, engaged with your page, or watched your videos but haven't bought yet. You don't want them to forget you.

-> Action: Keep your retargeting campaigns running, but at a much lower budget. Change the messaging from hard-sell to brand building. Show them different products, share user-generated content, or tell the story behind your brand. The goal is simply to stay top-of-mind.

BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): Minimal Maintenance

This is where you make the biggest cuts. You can't service new buyers, so stop trying to find them for now.

-> Action: I'd pause all your broad and lookalike prospecting campaigns that are optimised for purchase. The only thing you might keep on, at a tiny budget, is a dynamic retargeting ad for 'Add to Cart' or 'Initiate Checkout' from the last 7-14 days. These people are red hot, and a few might still convert, but this should be a sliver of your previous spend.

Here’s a rough idea of how that budget reallocation might look in practice:

By doing this, you're not just stopping. You're reloading. You're turning a period of forced inactivity into a strategic audience-building phase. When your supplier is back online and your inventory is full, you won't be starting from a dead stop. You'll have a huge, warm audience of email subscribers and engaged viewers ready and waiting. The subsequent ramp-up will be faster, cheaper, and more explosive than ever before.

You'll need to understand the numbers to feel confident about this...

Now, you might be thinking, "This sounds nice, but is it worth spending money on leads that I can't service right now?". This is where understanding your business maths becomes so important. You need to stop thinking about immediate ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and start thinking about the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer.

Most dropshippers have frightfully low margins. This makes advertising a constant, stressful battle for profitability. The only way to win is to get customers to come back and buy again. Let's run some hypothetical numbers. Be honest with yourself about your own figures here.

Average Order Value (AOV): Let's say it's £35.
Gross Margin: After product cost, shipping, fees, let's say it's 30%.
Profit Per Order: £35 * 0.30 = £10.50
Customer Lifetime (Avg. Purchases): Let's say on average, a customer buys 1.5 times over their life.
Lifetime Value (LTV): £10.50 * 1.5 = £15.75

This £15.75 is the total profit you can expect from an average customer. A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. This means you can afford to spend, at most, £15.75 / 3 = £5.25 to acquire a new customer.

Suddenly, your ad performance makes a lot more sense. If your CPA is hovering around £5, you're running on a knife's edge. This is why the downtime is so scary – there's no buffer. It also shows why building an email list is so powerful. Let's say you can get email signups for £1.00 each (which is very achievable with a good offer). And let's say that over the next 3 months, 10% of the people on that list make a purchase.

Your effective CAC for those customers is £1.00 / 10% = £10.00.

Wait, that's higher than your £5.25 target! This is the brutally honest truth many dropshippers don't want to face. With thin margins and low LTV, even "cheap" leads can be unprofitable. This is a flashing red light that your core offer – the product pricing, the AOV, the repeat purchase rate – needs serious work. This isn't an ads problem; it's a business model problem.

However, the strategy still holds. By capturing those leads, you give yourself a chance to make them profitable. You can work on increasing your AOV with bundles, you can improve your email marketing to boost that conversion rate, and you can encourage repeat purchases. Without their email, you have zero chance. With it, you have a shot. This downtime is the perfect opportunity to build that list and start working on the backend of your business to make every customer more valuable.

And here's how you come back stronger...

Once you get the green light that your supply chain is back to normal, it's time to execute the ramp-up plan. This is the payoff for all the strategic patience you've shown.

Step 1: Warm Up the Engine. Don't just flip your old purchase campaigns back on at full budget. Reverse the scale-down process. Start increasing the budget on your best-performing BoFu ad sets by 20-30% every 48 hours. Let the algorithm ease back into action.

Step 2: Unleash the Warm Audience. This is the exciting part. Create new ad sets specifically targeting the custom audiences you built during the downtime.
-> Target your new email list with an exclusive "We're Back!" offer.
-> Target people who watched 75%+ of your videos with your best-selling product creative.
These audiences are significantly warmer than any cold prospecting audience. They already know you, they've shown interest, and they've been patiently waiting. I would expect the ROAS from these ad sets to be significantly higher than what you were seeing before. We've seen this time and again. I remember one eCommerce client, a subscription box company, who we took through a similar process. When we finally launched their main sales campaigns to the pre-warmed audiences, they hit a 1000% Return On Ad Spend in the first couple of weeks. It works.

Step 3: Re-evaluate and Scale. As the data comes in from your new campaigns, you'll get a clear picture of what's working. You might find your new warm retargeting audiences are so profitable that you can afford to spend more on building your ToFu audience on an ongoing basis. You will have transformed your advertising from a simple, fragile on/off switch into a resilient, multi-stage funnel that constantly feeds itself.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To put it all together, here is the actionable plan I would put in place if I were in your shoes.

As you can probably tell by now, effectively managing a paid advertising account, especially in a business with real-world constraints like yours, is so much more than just tweaking budgets and creatives. It's about understanding the entire system – the ad platform's mechanics, your business's numbers, and your customer's journey. It's about building a robust strategy that can withstand shocks and turn challenges into opportunities.

This is where having an experienced hand can make a huge difference. An expert can not only navigate the immediate crisis but also help you build the kind of resilient, profitable advertising funnel we've discussed, freeing you up to focus on other parts of your business, like improving your LTV or sourcing more reliable suppliers. You're not just paying for ad management; you're investing in a strategic partner who can help you build a stronger business.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail and have us take a proper look under the bonnet of your ad account, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session with our team. It might be helpful to get a second pair of eyes on it.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh