What happens after the training: month 3, 6 and 12

Training ends with a certificate or a final session. That is when the channel actually begins. What happens in the months that follows determines whether that investment pays off, and that goes wrong on a few predictable points.

Below is the period following a programme, broken down into the phases where the behaviour of your team and the behaviour of the algorithms converge.

Months 1 and 2: it feels slow, and that is correct

The campaigns are live, data is coming in, and it is nowhere clear yet whether it is working. That is not a bad sign, that is how it should be.

Most purchases are not impulse buys. Anyone advertising according to the customer journey must give people the time to complete that journey. Depending on the channel and your decision-making cycle, it takes 2 to 6 months before you can make a reliable judgment. In week one that feels slow, in month three it is precisely the reason it works.

Where it goes wrong here: intervening too early. Every adjustment sets the learning phase restarted. A team that adjusts something every day keeps a campaign permanently in the start-up phase.

Month 3: the moment of truth, and of the pitfall

Now you see something. Usually a proof of concept: a campaign that demonstrably works, at costs that stack up. That is the moment when most trajectories prove their worth.

It is also precisely the moment of the biggest mistake: keeping the budget the same. Starting small is sensible, but as soon as the proof of concept is there, budget must be added to stabilise and grow the result. If you don't do that, you take a nose dive during take-off. The algorithms lose their thread without enough data and budget, and you lose what you had just built up.

What helps: agree prior to the campaign on what result will trigger an increase in the budget, and by how much. Negotiating the budget afterwards takes weeks, and those weeks are precisely what the campaign does not have.

Month 6: the measurement starts to shift

Here we see the pattern that we also encounter with virtually every new client: conversions are taking place, but they are no longer being measured properly. They are attributed to an undefined channel, or everything ends up in direct traffic.

That happens gradually. A new form is added, a page is replaced, a consent banner is adjusted, a connection expires. No one notices, because the dashboard keeps showing numbers. Only those numbers are no longer correct, and the algorithm is therefore receiving false signals back.

What helps: schedule a recurring check in the diary. Check every quarter whether a test conversion is actually arriving in the advertising platform, and whether the ratio between channels still makes sense. That takes an hour and prevents months of optimisation in the wrong direction.

Month 12: the channel has become routine, or flatlined

After a year you see two outcomes, and the difference is rarely in knowledge.

In one case, a rhythm has developed. Someone looks at the same numbers weekly, decisions about the budget are made monthly, and new campaigns are set up according to the structure established during the process. The channel grows along with the company.

In the other case, the campaigns are still running, but no one is really looking at them anymore. The marketer has been given other tasks, the results are not bad enough to sound the alarm and not good enough to scale up. That is not a knowledge problem, but a diary problem.

What you can already record

Three arrangements made before the end of a trajectory make the biggest difference in the year after.

• Who watches what, and when. Not “we'll keep an eye on it”, but a name, a day of the week and three numbers.
• At which result does the budget increase, and by how much. Agreed in advance, so scaling up is not a discussion but an execution.
• Who is the second person. If all the knowledge is held by one person, the channel leaves with them when that person departs. Make sure what has been built and why is documented, and involve someone else wherever possible.

Our programme is specifically designed to enable your team to optimise and build further independently, without remaining reliant on external parties. If you would like us to keep an eye on things during periods when you are scaling up, that is possible by arrangement.