Plan for a seasonal peak

Three questions, and the third is the one that decides the plan.

Which campaigns carried the spend across that window, and how concentrated was it?

Give me the brief for that ad account.

What did the fortnight after the peak look like compared with the fortnight before it?

The account brief covers the last ninety days with a comparison against the previous twenty-eight, the objective mix, spend concentration, the rankings by return and by cost per acquisition, and the weekday rhythm. It is computed rather than live, carries its own age, and is flagged once it is more than seven days old, so say when it was computed before quoting it.

Four reading rules apply harder here than anywhere, because peak numbers are the ones most often quoted from memory.

An empty ratio is not a zero. It means the denominator was zero and there is nothing to divide by.

A total spanning several currencies is a labelled estimate carrying the date of the oldest rate it leaned on, and where a rate is missing the total is refused rather than guessed.

A range ending today includes a day that is not over, which is how a bad final week gets invented.

And the numbers may have moved since you last looked. The stored history of a period is not frozen — late conversions and platform corrections keep arriving against days already counted, and a connection whose sync rewrote a lot of that history carries a restated mark. Check for the mark before concluding last year was worse than you remember, because on a peak it usually was not.

The peak plan's constraint is rarely the budget. It is what the account will carry.

Every ad account has a daily ceiling in Tempio derived from what that account has actually done: three times the highest single-campaign daily spend in its last twenty-eight days, floored at a default stated in the account's own currency. The peak is taken over one campaign's day rather than the account's total, because that is the shape of the number a draft asks for.

Two consequences for a seasonal plan, and they matter in opposite directions.

An account that has been quiet has a low ceiling. Twenty-eight days of trickle means the ceiling reflects the trickle, and a plan that jumps straight to peak-week rates will be refused at materialisation. The remedy is a ramp that is a real ramp — the account's own recent history rises as it spends, and so does the ceiling.

Applied increases are also summed. Increases on one connection are added over a rolling twenty-four hours, and the sum plus the raise being approved has to stay under the account's ceiling. That is the check that refuses a change every earlier check allowed, and a peak week driven by many small raises is exactly the shape it exists to stop. Fewer, larger, deliberate moves both read better on the record and survive the aggregate.

An account whose busiest campaign-day is already near its ceiling carries a warning on reads that return it, so the ceiling being close is something you are told before drafting rather than at the refusal.

The ramp. Starts before the peak, at a rate the account already supports, rising. Its job is to have delivery settled before the days that matter, not to earn on its own.

The peak. The short window with the highest daily rate. Split across several lines if one line would exceed the ceiling, which is usually the case and usually also the right structure anyway.

The tail. Returning to everyone the peak generated. Its economics are often the best in the plan and it is almost always underfunded, because attention has moved on by the time it starts.

The exit. A dated ramp-down rather than a pause somebody remembers. The worst-returning days in most accounts are the four after a peak, spent at peak rates into demand that has gone.

Each item's budget is the whole-flight total rather than a daily rate, and the daily figure is derived at materialisation over the inclusive length of the flight — so a short peak line carrying a large total produces a large daily figure, which is exactly where the ceiling bites. The flight plan template is where four overlapping flights stop being a thing you hold in your head, and the budget allocator template is the division as a sheet.

A peak week is the worst possible time to be making judgement calls about how much is too much, which is an argument for writing the limits down in advance.

Two of them are yours to set. What you will do if cost per result rises past a stated point — usually the honest answer is nothing, because a peak is when you accept a worse rate for volume you cannot get otherwise, and saying so in advance stops somebody undoing the plan at two in the morning. And which line you will fund first if there is money left, decided while you can still think.

Two of them are the product's and cannot be raised: the account's ceiling and the movement rule, which holds a budget to no more than a hundred per cent of its current value in one change. Upward, doubling is the most a single change may do; downward, a hundred per cent of the current figure is the whole of it, so one change can take a budget to zero. A peak plan that assumed a single change could quadruple a budget discovers this at the gate.

And one control is worth knowing exists before you need it: pausing a connection stops syncing and blocks every apply written against it, whatever is queued and whatever rule would otherwise have cleared it. Nothing is rejected — the drafts stay where they are.

Materialising the plan turns every item into a create-campaign draft at the gate, one batch per connection, validating everything before writing anything and drafting nothing at all if any step fails.

Stated once, because a peak is when people most want to believe otherwise: your connections read your accounts, a change is written as a draft on the record with the state it would change from and the checks it passed, applying it is gated on approval — by you, or by a rule you wrote — and no platform write reaches a customer account until that platform has granted write access. Applying a cleared change to a platform is in private beta.

The useful property for a peak: every create lands paused. The whole plan can be built and approved weeks early — four flights, all the structure, nothing spending — and each phase started on its own date as its own change through the same gate. That converts the peak week from a build into a decision, which is what you want when the week arrives.

Turn a media plan into campaign drafts is that step in detail, and Set a monthly budget across channels is where the peak's money comes from in the first place.