Here at DimNiko Agency, we do a lot of tests everyday.
In each test, 50% of the time I try Lifetime budgets vs. Daily budgets
If I have an account that mainly runs good on daily CBOs, I’ll test every few weeks to see what will happen with LFT campaigns.
Sometimes LFT will over-perform daily budgets, and they won’t.
I saw my first success with LFT around 2017.
At that time not a lot of people we’re using LFT, but I decided to act on it and I got amazing results.
How I tested LFT vs. Daily is as follows:
I duped all my best performing campaigns and put them on LFT.
If the CPA dropped by 20% on average, that would be marked as a big success.
I still remember the dropshipping account.
We were getting CPAs under $5 for a product that was selling for $29.99.
Today, the era of under $5 CPA is gone, but LFT campaigns still work pretty well.
The thing is, you never know when LFT campaigns will work, so you need to always test them.
In the past year, LFT success came in a few different waves.
Every 2 months they will outperform daily budgets, and it will last for a week or two.
Sometimes more. Up to a month, maybe two.
But for a week or two CPA will be as much as 10-30% lower on exact same audiences!
And that is a big win for me.
It’s good to test LFT here and there, regardless if you had bad experiences with them in the past.
Big Win Example
My recent big test was a few months ago, where I had a good LFT result in an account.
I am spending $10-15k per day in this account, and at that time almost 2/3 of all cold traffic campaigns were set on LFT.
Performance was much better across the whole account.
Then over the New Year, daily budget campaigns started to perform much better. So, we turned off a majority of LFT campaigns.
Here and there I still had one or two LFT campaigns left running, but the majority was back to Daily CBOs.
And few LFT cost cap bids that I don’t place in the same bucket.
Why You Need to Test
But for the last test I duped 20 of my best performing daily budget campaigns, and put them on 9k for 30 days. ($300 per day)
I didn’t touch them for 3 days, then I started to slowly optimize the adsets.
After a week, 1/3 of LFT campaigns were switched off, but 2/3 of them were still under my KPI.
Then I was just doing my daily optimization routine across all accounts, and didn’t analyze which is good and why. I just took care of the average account KPI.
After 2 weeks I decided to analyze what happened, and the results were to my big surprise – exactly the same!
LFT campaigns performed on the same average CPA as my Daily campaigns!
But I could double the spend and get the same results which maybe I wouldn’t if I would put all on daily budgets.
This account runs mostly on a broad audience and very big interests 20+ MM, so no overlapping issues were reported.
At some of my campaigns, I had the exact same audience (3xbroad), but different dynamic or ID creative.
So my recent test showed me again, that all you need to do to have some success in your account, is to TEST.
LFT vs Daily budget, Cost cap vs Bid cap, CBO vs ABO, and IDs vs Dynamic.
Sometimes general things will work, but the very next day something else you tested will surprise you, and you could scale the account much easier because of your test.
How to Optimize LFT Budget Campaigns
Lot’s of people ask me how to optimize LFT budget campaigns.
I do them exactly as I do my daily budget campaigns. I lower or scale up the budget every 1-2 days.
Sometimes I also do an end date change, but then you need to remember that date and it’s a little harder for me as I have 50-75 campaigns in the account.
Even if I put an end date in my campaign name.
And the main point is that I didn’t see much of a difference.
So I like to use more ‘budget changing’ in my LFTs.
Maybe you have another process that works better for you.
If you have, please share it under this post!
Let us know your experience lately if you did some tests.
Also if you have any questions about LFT or Daily budget campaigns, please comment below.
If you want us to run your ad account for the best ROAS, you can book a call with us here ==> https://dimniko.com/msp-apply
Have a great day,
Matej
