Why a full week
People use apps and websites differently on a Monday morning, a Wednesday lunchtime and a Saturday night, and the auctions are priced differently at each of those hours. A run that covers every day of the week shows you all of them once, which is the least you need to see which days and hours to buy more of next time. A run that covers three days shows you three days, and you cannot tell what the other four would have done.
Why not months
The same ad shown to the same people for weeks stops being noticed, and the world it was written for moves on — the season, the offer, the price of the slots. A long first run also delays the thing a first run is for: reading the report and changing one thing. Run for a week or two, read, adjust, and run again. Each run is short; the learning is continuous, because every run teaches the next.
Spread evenly across the days
A budget spent in the first morning tells you about one morning. Ailumic is built to pace the spend so the budget lasts the days you chose, which is what makes the week readable. If you want the ad to lean towards certain hours or days once you know which ones work, that is a change for the second run, not a reason to shorten the first.
When to stop early
- The link is wrong, the page it lands on is down, or the ad says something that is no longer true. Fix it first; a run is cheap to pause and cheap to restart.
- The ad is shown many times and nobody clicks, in every placement, after a few days. The ad itself is the problem, and a new headline or picture is worth more than the rest of the week.
Everything else — a quiet day, a placement that lags — is a reason to read the week, not to end it.
When to keep going
When a run clearly works, add budget to it rather than starting a fresh one. The next viewings are bid for with what the run has learned so far, and the report keeps one story instead of two. Our guide on reading an ad report says how to tell that a run is working.
With Ailumic
You choose how many days the ad should run when you set it up, and the price is shown before you confirm. The terms after that are two sentences. No long-term commitment: pause, change the budget or stop whenever you like. What you have not spent stays on your account.