(7) Wave Surfing: Intraday Scaling

(7) Wave Surfing: Intraday Scaling

1. Definition
2. Visible Examples
3. 5 keys to do Wave Surfing and stay Profitable
4. How to calculate the budget increases

5. Case 1: Spending 100-500/day on BFCM
6. Case 2: Spending 500-2,500/day on BFCM
7. Case 3: Spending >2,500/day on BFCM
   
8. Stop loss mentality

Definition

Scaling technique for major events (Black Friday) that consists of:

• Managing the budget by the hour,
• maximizing ad spend
• while maintaining good ROAS
• Following historical patterns

For Black Friday:

I DO NOT KNOW how much I will spend on Black Friday.

I am not interested in that.

I am interested in knowing at what hours I will increase the budget.

The market and the ROAS will dictate how much I can scale.

IMPORTANT → On the 29th,30th,1st and 2nd: You will have the perfect cocktail for aggressive intraday scaling:

✅ The 4 days of the year with the highest purchasing volume ($4 million in 1 minute)
✅ Great offer, irresistible

✅ Predetermined waves: Friday evening/night, Sunday

✅ Clear urgency: on the website, in ads, in emails, etc.

✅ Coordination of platforms: All in one

✅ Winning creatives in a scalable account structure

✅ Diversified Creatives and Media Buying

Visible Examples

Another example,

4k per day in ad spend, 17k revenue, 6k profit

Minimum tolerable blended ROAS is 4,

Past Mastermind Member

5 keys to do Wave Surfing and stay Profitable

• FUNDAMENTALS
  Great Offer that applies to a mass market

Make it easy for impulse buying and objection handling
(AI chatbot, FAQs, …)

Urgency, has to feel like now or never

Cart recovery email

Upsells

• Know your demand WAVES
  Do my sales peak in the morning, afternoon or night?
  More like 6pm or 10pm?
  
• Know your numbers
  Minimum tolerable ads manager ROAS?
  Minimum tolerable Blended ROAS?
  
  Target ads manager ROAS
  Target Blended ROAS
  
  Maximum CPA

How to calculate the blended ROAS

• What approx percentage of my sales come from email
• What approx percentage of my sales come from social media
• (...) Google Ads
• Example:
  30% email, 20% social, 50% ads
  
  Then if the ads manager ROAS must be at least 2.5,
  
  Your blended ROAS must be at least 5.
  

If Meta ads represents 80% of purchases,
And you want a ROAS of at least 2.5
Then your blended ROAS will at least be 3.12

• Hourly management / 2h-5h
  Every “7:01pm” I refresh the tabs
  

The 3 tabs you’ll need open all the time:

1. Ads manager
2. Shopify -> report -> sales over time -> “Today”
   
3. Meta Report “Today”
   Ad account time zone
   Amount spent, CPM, CPC

How to calculate the budget increases
As a general thing, 2x.

Depends on:

• Wave surfing behavior during Black Week (practice)
• How much room to play do you have (if ROAS is very very tight, that means you’re at the limit, so you can’t be as aggressive)

SO, BY APPROXIMATIONS

• "I'm going to double the budget on my top 3 campaigns and see what happens."

Look after 1 hour -> How much the ad spend increases and how much the revenue increases.

Look after 2 hours -> How much the ad spend increases and how much the revenue increases

If I see that I have a LOT of margin/room to play, I'll increase it again.

Look after 1 hour -> How much the ad spend increases and how much the revenue increases.

Look after 2 hours -> How much the ad spend increases and how much the revenue increases.

If I see that I have a LOT of margin, I'll increase it again because it’s being profitable.

If you've overdone it, just correct it, no problem!!

• We can fail !!
• A 1-hour fail is great
• The idea is to find where the limit is

You should practice this during Black Week.

Case 1: Spending 100-500/day on BFCM

1. Practice during the Black Week
2. The proportional of 300€/day is 12.5€/hour
   (Of course 1am-6am you almost don’t spend, but.)
3. To see an impact from 12€/hour I will need to at least check 2-3-4 hours
   
4. So instead or hourly management, you do it by window
   

00-10am: low volume, not good CPC

10am-4pm: high CPMs, not many purchases
4pm-00: low CPM, lots of purchases, historical wave

Case 2: Spending 500-2,500/day on BFCM

1. Practice during the Black Week
2. The proportional of 2k per day is 83€/h
   
3. If my CPA is 20, I have 4 purchases per hour
   If I increase the daily budget from 2000 to 3000, which apparently is a lot,
   I only increase the hourly ad spend from 83 to 125
   Which === go from 4 purchases per hour to 6 purchases per hour

==the budget increases must be aggressive, but of course escalated over the hours since you start.

**Manel = CBO at €40,000 (ended up spending 8k 24h)

Case 3: Spending >2,500/day on BFCM

1. Practice during the Black Week
2. The proportional is >100€ per hour

In general,

Before a big budget increase, I wait 1-2h to see confirmation of the wave starting.

Confirmation good, green light,

This won’t be a surprise in BF, everybody wave surfing by 5pm !!

________________________________________________________

Just think that to go from

• 100 to 300€ per hour in ad spend
• You need to triple ALL budgets in the ads manager
• But we don’t do wave surfing with all campaigns
• That means that the key campaigns sometimes will need to be MORE THAN TRIPLED in order to spend 3x per hour

¿Learning phase?

• People spending 100k on BFCM in 10 hours don’t give a f*ck
• It compensates
• I just want more clicks in key hours

Stop loss mentality

NO RISK

When you check per hour, you might have maximum 1-2 bad hours.

Then correct and done.

ERROR:

ERROR:

First case 585€/h to 5294€/h

Second, $88 to $824/h

It’s a solid scaling,

I need to find the limit.