Solved: Maximizing Short Sales with Meta and Google Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. It's a common problem, trying to capitalise on short, sharp sales windows without getting hammered by the algorithm's learning phase. Most people get this wrong and just throw money at the wall hoping something sticks for those 2-3 weeks.

The short answer is you're thinking about the problem the wrong way round. You don't want to *reduce* the learning phase during the sale; you want to have it *already completed* before the sale even begins. It's about building an always-on advertising engine that's just waiting for you to press the accelerator, rather than trying to build a new car every time a race starts. I'll walk you through how we'd approach this.

We'll need to look at your Audience Strategy first...

Right, first things first. The biggest mistake people make is thinking about audiences only when they need to sell something. For your strategy to work, your audience work needs to be continuous. You can't just switch on an ad to a cold audience for two weeks and expect Meta or Google's algorithms to magically find your perfect customers. They need data, and you're not giving them enough time or consistent signals to work with.

The way around this is to build an evergreen funnel that is always running, even at a small, maintenance-level budget. The entire point of this is to constantly feed your ad accounts with data, build up warm audiences, and keep the algorithm ticking over so it knows exactly who your customer is. When the sale starts, you're not starting from scratch; you're pouring petrol on a fire that's already burning.

I'd structure it in three layers: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu). This structure should be permanent.

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - The Prospecting Engine

This is your cold audience outreach, but it needs to be strategic. The goal here isn't necessarily to get immediate sales (though that's a bonus), but to identify potential customers and pull them into your world. This should be running 365 days a year, maybe with just £10-£20 a day.

• Detailed Targeting: Start here. Don't just target broad interests. Think specifically about the complementary product. Who are its biggest fans? What magazines do they read? Which influencers do they follow? Which other brands do they buy? Target interests like "[Complementary Brand Name]", their direct competitors, or publications that cover that niche. This is your primary way of finding new blood.
• Lookalike Audiences: This is where the real power is, but it takes time. Once you have enough data (at least 100 purchases, but you really want more to get a solid audience), you can create Lookalikes of your past purchasers, which are infinitely more valuable than broad interest groups. The power of building the right audiences is immense. For instance, with one medical job matching SaaS client, we managed to reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 down to just £7 by implementing a robust audience and campaign testing structure. You should be building these valuable audiences between sales periods.

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - The Nurturing Pool

This is where you retarget people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a high-intent action yet. This audience is warmer and cheaper to convert. Your MoFu campaign should also be always-on.

• -> Retarget website visitors from the last 30-90 days.
• -> Retarget people who have watched a significant portion (e.g., 50%+) of your video ads.
• -> Retarget people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.

This group already knows who you are. The goal is to stay top of mind and move them further down the funnel, so when the complementary sale hits, they're ready to pounce.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - The Closers

These are your hottest prospects. People who have added your product to their cart, initiated checkout, but didn't complete the purchase. You should be retargeting them aggressively with a seperate campaign, often with a dynamic product ad that shows them exactly what they left behind. This is your lowest-hanging fruit and should never be switched off.

By running this entire structure constantly, you're building valuable, data-rich audiences. The learning phase is happening every single day on a small scale, so you're not facing that painful, expensive ramp-up period when it matters most.

I'd say you need a permanent Campaign Structure...

Following on from the audience strategy, your campaign setup in Ads Manager needs to reflect this permanence. Stop creating new campaigns every time there's a sale. This is what triggers the learning phase from scratch and wastes your first few days (and a lot of money). Instead, you'll use what I call the 'Base & Surge' model.

You will create permanent campaigns that are never, ever turned off. For an eCom business, this might look like:

• Campaign 1: ToFu Prospecting (Conversion Objective)
• Campaign 2: MoFu/BoFu Retargeting (Conversion Objective)

Inside each of these campaigns, you create two sets of ad sets. One set is your 'Base' and the other is your 'Surge'.

'Base' Ad Sets: These are your always-on, low-budget ad sets. They use your evergreen creative (more on that later) and target the audiences we just discussed. Their job is to keep the data flowing. They might spend just £5-£10 a day each. They keep the campaign "active" and the pixel "warm".

'Surge' Ad Sets: These are duplicates of your best-performing 'Base' ad sets, but with a much higher budget and with creative specifically designed for the sale period. These ad sets live inside your permanent campaigns, but they remain paused for most of the year.

When the complementary product's sale goes live, you don't create a new campaign. You simply go into your existing, warm, optimised campaigns and un-pause your 'Surge' ad sets. You might also increase the overall campaign budget, but the key is that you're activating ad sets within a campaign that is already out of the learning phase. The algorithm already knows who to target; you're just giving it a bigger budget and a more timely message. The ramp-up is almost instantaneous, and you can take full advantage of the entire 2-3 week window.

This applys to Google as well. You'd have an always-on Performance Max campaign feeding off your product list and a brand search campaign. When the sale hits, you could activate a new asset group in PMax with sale-specific messaging, or launch a specific search campaign targeting keywords like "[Complementary Product] sale" or "[Complementary Product] accessories" to capture that direct intent.

You probably should rethink your Creative Strategy...

Just like your audiences and campaigns, your creative can't be an afterthought. Scrambling to get ads designed and written the day a sale starts is a recipe for disaster. You need a pre-built library of assets that are approved and ready to deploy at a moment's notice.

You should have two types of creative: Evergreen and Surge.

Evergreen Creative: This is for your 'Base' ad sets. It's your standard, non-promotional content that focuses on your product's core value proposition. It might be customer testimonials, UGC-style videos (we've seen huge success with these for SaaS clients), or clean product shots. The goal of this creative is to educate and build desire year-round.

Surge Creative: This is your sale-specific creative. It's designed to create urgency and directly tie your product to the complementary product's sale. The messaging here is key. You're not just saying "we're great"; you're saying "we're great *for people who just bought X*".

Here’s how you can frame the messaging using a simple but powerful copywriting formula, Problem-Agitate-Solve:

• Problem: Directly call out the context. "Just picked up the new [Complementary Product]?"
• Agitate: Highlight the missing piece that your product solves. "It's an amazing piece of kit, but you're only getting half the experience without the right [your product category]. Are you worried about [common problem your product solves]?"
• Solve: Present your product as the obvious solution. "Our [Your Product Name] is designed to perfectly complement it. Complete your setup now while the iron is hot and make the most of your new purchase."

This kind of contextual advertising is incredibly powerful. You're entering a conversation that's already happening in the customer's mind. For this to work, you need to have these ads designed, written, and uploaded into your paused 'Surge' ad sets weeks or even months in advance. Preparation is everything.

You'll need to master the numbers behind this...

This entire strategy hinges on understanding a critical metric that most small businesses ignore: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Too many people are obsessed with getting a cheap Cost Per Lead (CPL) or a high immediate Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). During a short, aggressive sales period, that can be a trap. You might need to accept a lower ROAS or a higher CPL during the surge, and that's perfectly okay *if* you know what each customer is truly worth to you over the long term.

The real goal of these surge periods isn't just to make a quick profit. It's to acquire a large number of new customers at a predictable cost, customers who will hopefully go on to buy from you again and again. Knowing your LTV tells you exactly how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer and still be wildly profitable down the line.

Here’s the simple maths:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much a customer spends with you on average (e.g., per month if it's a subscription, or per year).
• Gross Margin %: Your profit margin on that revenue.
• Monthly Churn Rate %: The percentage of customers you lose each month. (If you sell one-off products, you can estimate a 'repurchase rate' and work backwards to a churn equivalent).

The formula is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

For example, if a customer is worth £10,000 in lifetime value, you can comfortably spend £3,333 to acquire them and maintain a healthy 3:1 LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. Suddenly, paying £50 for a purchase during a two-week sale doesn't seem so bad, does it? It's an investment in future profits. This is the mindset shift required to scale aggressively.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. It’s a fundamental shift from a reactive to a proactive advertising model. It takes more work upfront, but the payoff is predictability and the ability to scale effectively when these opportunities arise. Tbh, it's the only way to consistently win in these short windows. One of our eCommerce clients selling subscription boxes saw a 1000% return on ad spend once we implemented a similar evergreen structure for them, because we were able to capitalise on seasonal trends instantly without the learning phase lag.

Here’s a summary of the whole process in a table:

Implementing a system like this isn't trivial. It requires discipline to maintain the always-on structure, expertise in audience segmentation and creative testing, and a deep understanding of the numbers to know when to push and when to pull back. It's the difference between amateur boosting and professional media buying.

This is precisely the kind of complex problem we specialise in solving. We help businesses move from sporadic, unpredictable ad results to building scalable, data-driven growth engines.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your ad account and map out what a 'Base & Surge' strategy would look like for you. It might be the most valuable 30 minutes you spend on your markering this year.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh