Algeria AgencyDigital marketing
A live campaign: the moves of the first week
The budget is set and the money is going out. What to look at, what to change, and above all what not to touch yet.
Setting a budget is a decision; spending it is a craft. Between the two lies the week in which most campaigns are damaged, not through lack of attention but through excess: it gets checked hourly, corrected, and every correction resets the system.
An advertising campaign is not a tap you open. It is a system learning who to show your adverts to, and that learning needs volume and stability. The main danger of the first few days is not setting things badly, it is setting them too often.
This article is about the moves: what to look at on the third day, the single thing to change at a time, the budget that refuses to spend, the advert that tires, the leak that is nearly always after the click, and how to stop cleanly. The companion article covers the budget itself — what it buys, benchmark costs, and why those figures are not yours — and none of that is repeated here.
One figure appears in it, and it exists to correct a widespread misreading about the device your visitors are using.
The first day means nothing
Every advertising platform begins with a learning period: the system tries combinations of people, times and placements to discover what works. During that period, costs are unstable and systematically higher than they will be.
This produces a scene that repeats everywhere. The campaign starts on Monday, by Tuesday morning the cost per lead is three times the target, somebody worries, the budget is cut or the audience changed — and the learning period restarts from zero, which guarantees a second expensive day.
The rule that saves the most money is a rule of abstention: touch nothing for the first three days, unless something is broken in the literal sense — the advert points at a page that does not exist, the wrong country is targeted, the budget is ten times what was intended.
That rule is hard to keep because it requires watching money leave without doing anything, and because the interface offers a button for everything. Better to decide it in advance, and the best moment to commit to changing nothing for three days is before the campaign starts.
What to look at on the third day
After three days there is enough material for a first reading, and it fits in four numbers: how much was spent, how many clicks, how many leads, and what a lead costs. Nothing else is needed at this stage.
Those four are read in a precise order, because the order locates the problem. If the budget is not spending, the problem is upstream — audience, bid, format. If it spends and there are few clicks, the problem is the advert. If there are clicks and few leads, the problem is not advertising at all, it is after the click.
That last case is the most frequent and the most badly diagnosed. A campaign bringing two hundred visitors and three leads is almost always accused of having brought the wrong visitors, when the page they landed on has never been looked at on a phone by the person judging it.
You also have to accept that three days is not enough to conclude on a small budget. With a few dozen clicks, the cost per lead you are reading is statistical noise: two more leads would halve it. The third-day reading exists to find what is broken, not to assess performance.
One thing at a time
When a campaign does not deliver, the temptation is to adjust everything in the same sitting: audience, image, text, budget. It is understandable and it makes what follows unreadable, because after a multiple change no improvement and no deterioration is attributable.
The discipline is to change one thing, wait for the system to settle, then read. It is slower in appearance and faster in practice, because three weeks of simple changes produce knowledge of your market, while three weeks of bundled changes produce an opinion.
The order matters and follows from the previous section: fix what blocks delivery first, then the advert, and last the landing page — not because it counts for less, but because it is the only element whose modification often requires somebody else.
One exception deserves naming: obvious corrections do not count as changes to be spaced out. A spelling mistake in the advert, a wrong phone number, a broken link are fixed immediately. The one-change rule is about settings, not about errors.
The budget that refuses to spend
A disconcerting case is when the money does not go out: the daily budget is set and the campaign spends a fraction of it. The platform does not say clearly why, and the usual reaction is to raise the budget, which obviously changes nothing.
The causes are almost always in a short list. The audience is too narrow for the budget — by far the first in this market, where targeting by town, by age and by interest quickly reduces the public to a few thousand people. The bid is too low to compete. The chosen format has few available placements.
Diagnosis runs from broadest to finest: widen the geography first, then the ages, then remove the interests. That last step often surprises, because it feels like abandoning precision — and it frequently improves results, the system being better than we are at finding people from whoever has already converted.
A budget that does not spend is not a saving. A campaign consuming a third of its budget never has enough volume to leave the learning period, so it stays expensive and unstable indefinitely. A smaller budget fully spent on a wide enough audience beats a comfortable one that finds nobody.
When the advert tires
An advert that works stops working, and that is not a failure: the same people have seen it several times and no longer see it. The sign is a slow rise in cost with no setting having moved, alongside a falling click rate.
The pace depends mostly on audience size. National targeting holds for several weeks; targeting a medium-sized town can exhaust itself in ten days, because the same public comes round quickly. That is the price of fine targeting, and it is rarely anticipated.
The answer is not to redo everything. Changing the image and keeping the text, or the reverse, is enough in most cases and additionally shows which of the two was carrying the result. A complete rebuild changes too many things at once and returns you to the previous section’s problem.
Good practice is to prepare the replacement before needing it. Three adverts ready on launch day cost an extra hour and avoid the flat week where performance falls while somebody looks for a new photograph. It is the only part of this work that gains from being done in advance.
The leak is nearly always after the click
When the clicks arrive and the leads do not, the problem has left advertising. The visitor showed real interest — they clicked — and something between that click and the form made them close the page. The advertising did its job, the page is not doing its own.
The causes are dull and check in ten minutes, on a phone: the page takes eight seconds to appear, the price is nowhere to be seen although the advert promised an offer, the form asks for nine pieces of information, the submit button sits under the on-screen keyboard. None of that is visible on a desktop screen.
Here a costly confusion has to be cleared up, because this site itself quotes both figures. Mobile coverage in Algeria — the share of internet subscriptions that are mobile — is 88.71%, and that is an access figure. The share of pages actually viewed from a phone is a different quantity, and it is 50.79% in July 2026 against 48.02% from a computer. Both are true and they answer different questions.
What to take from it for a campaign is simple and runs one way only: a click from a feed happens inside an application, therefore on a phone, whatever your site-wide split says. An advertising landing page is judged on a phone, even if your overall statistics show half your visitors on desktop — because that half is not the half you are paying for.
Statcounter Global Stats, Algeria, July 2026
The lead nobody ever calls back
A campaign can produce leads at a good cost and return nothing, because nobody calls them back fast enough. It is the link advertising does not control and which nevertheless decides the commercial result.
The mechanism is simple: somebody filling in a form at nine in the evening showed an intention at that moment, and that intention decays quickly. Called back the next morning, they have often contacted two competitors; called back three days later, they do not always remember the enquiry.
We publish no decay figure, and the explanation is the one the first article gives for its costs: the available studies are American, they cover sectors and basket sizes with no relationship to this one, and an exact percentage imported here would be right in its source and wrong in its use. The direction, however, is not in doubt.
What gets settled before launch is therefore organisational rather than advertising: who receives the leads, on what channel, and within what time they commit to answering. A campaign launched without that answer produces enquiries arriving in an inbox nobody opens at the weekend, and cost per lead becomes a measure with no object.
What the Algerian calendar does to a campaign
Activity in this market is not uniform, and a campaign tuned in February does not behave the same way in April. Ramadan, Eid, the start of the school year and sale periods shift both people’s attention and advertising competition.
Two effects combine and are often confused. Behaviour changes — viewing hours move markedly towards the evening during Ramadan — and the price changes, because more advertisers are bidding on the same people. A rise in cost during those periods is therefore not a sign that the campaign has deteriorated.
The practical consequence is not to compare one week with the previous one across one of those boundaries. Comparing the first week of Ramadan with the last ordinary week gives a drop in performance that teaches you nothing, and regularly leads to stopping a campaign at the moment it should have been adjusted.
What gets adjusted is the delivery schedule rather than the budget. Shifting display hours towards the evening, or concentrating the budget on the days your business actually takes orders, costs one modification and makes the rest of the setup valid again.
The three questions that decide to stop
Stopping a campaign is a legitimate decision and it is nearly always taken too late or for the wrong reasons — most often because one week was worse than the one before, which is not information.
Three questions suffice, in this order. Has the campaign spent enough to be judged, meaning produced enough leads that one or two more would not change the conclusion? Is the cost per lead stable or moving? And is that cost compatible with what a customer is worth to you?
The third is the one most businesses cannot answer, and it is the real obstacle. Without an idea of what a customer returns — even approximate, even over the last twelve months — cost per lead is a number compared to nothing, and the decision to stop becomes a matter of mood.
Stopping and pausing have to be distinguished. A campaign paused for a few days then restarted goes through learning again and pays that start-up cost twice; better to lower a budget than to pause, unless you are stopping for good. It is a mechanical detail that is expensive to be unaware of.
What not to look at
Platforms display dozens of indicators, and most of them serve only to occupy attention. Impressions, reach and likes on a sponsored post describe exposure, not result, and they rise when you spend more, which makes them reassuring and useless.
Two indicators are worse than useless because they point the wrong way. Cost per click taken alone pushes you to chase the cheapest clicks, which are often the least intentional; click rate alone rewards intriguing adverts rather than clear ones, and an advert that is too vague brings visitors who leave.
The chain that matters is short: spend, leads, cost per lead, and what became of those leads. The last link is nearly always missing and it is the one that gives the other three meaning — a campaign producing leads at half the cost that never convert is a worse campaign.
One exposure indicator deserves following, for a precise reason: frequency, the number of times the same person has seen the advert. It does not measure performance, it announces the fatigue of the earlier section, and it does so before the cost rises.
Taking over an inherited advertising account
The common case is not starting from zero but taking over an account used by several successive providers, holding paused campaigns, audiences whose definition nobody knows, and a history half of which is unusable.
The temptation is to clear it out, and that is the mistake. An account’s history has a value that is not visible: the system has learned from every past conversion, and deleting old campaigns or installing fresh tracking resets learning accumulated over months.
The first useful move is a read-only inventory: what is running today, what is spending, where the active adverts point, and whether conversion tracking still records anything. That last check is what most often reveals the real problem — tracking broken during a site rebuild, and months of flying blind.
Then pause rather than delete, and start one new campaign alongside on a modest budget, to have a clean comparison. Judging old against new requires the new to exist; rebuilding the whole account at once leaves nothing to compare.
What we do, and what we refuse
What we take on is bounded: the account structure, the adverts and their replacements, the weekly reading of the four numbers with you, and checking the landing page on a phone before the first dinar is spent.
We do not launch a campaign to a page we are not allowed to change. This is not a comfort requirement: when the leak is after the click — the most frequent case — we would be paid to send traffic into a leaking funnel, and we would know it. If the page belongs to somebody else, that somebody has to be in the loop before launch, not after the first report.
We do not promise a cost per lead before spending. The companion article publishes American benchmark costs while saying they are not your budget; using them to announce a figure to you would be exactly the use it warns against. The first honest number comes after two to three weeks of delivery, on your offer and your market.
Finally, we do not take a campaign without knowing who calls the leads back and within what time. That is not advertising, it is the condition for advertising to be worth anything: without an answer, we would produce a presentable cost per lead and no sales, and the monthly report would measure something nobody uses.
Frequently asked questions
Should a campaign be adjusted on day one?
No, unless something is broken in the literal sense — dead link, wrong country, budget ten times too high. Platforms begin with a learning period during which costs are unstable and higher, and every change restarts it from zero. Three days without touching anything is the rule that saves the most money, and also the hardest to keep.
What should be looked at after three days?
Four numbers, in this order: spend, clicks, leads, cost per lead. The order locates the problem. The budget is not spending — audience or bid. It spends with no clicks — the advert. Clicks and no leads — not the advertising, but what happens after the click. On a small budget this reading exists to find what is broken, not to assess performance.
Our budget does not fully spend. Should we raise it?
No, that changes nothing. The cause is almost always an audience too narrow for the budget — common here, where targeting by town, age and interest quickly reduces the public to a few thousand. Widen from broadest to finest: geography, then ages, then remove interests. An unspent budget is not a saving: with no volume, the campaign never leaves the learning period.
Which device should the landing page be checked on?
A phone, always. Two figures circulate and do not say the same thing: 88.71% of Algerian internet subscriptions are mobile — an access figure — while 50.79% of pages viewed are viewed from a phone against 48.02% from a computer. For a campaign only the first reasoning counts: a click from a feed happens inside an application, therefore on a phone, whatever your site-wide split says.
Why does cost rise during Ramadan?
Two effects combine: viewing hours move towards the evening, and more advertisers bid on the same people. A rise during those periods is therefore not a deterioration of the campaign. Do not compare one week with the previous across one of those boundaries — that is how a campaign gets stopped at the moment its delivery hours should have been shifted.
When should a campaign be stopped?
Three questions in order: has it produced enough leads that one or two more would not change the conclusion; is cost per lead stable; and is that cost compatible with what a customer is worth. The third is the one most cannot answer, and it is the real obstacle. Note that a pause followed by a restart pays for learning twice: lower the budget rather than pausing, unless stopping for good.
Where we come in
In the first week the useful move is to touch nothing. It is also the one nobody holds alone, with money leaving every day.
- We hold the weekly reading and tell you what is not yet legible.
- We change one thing at a time, and date every change.
- We establish before launch which person answers, and within what delay.
If nobody at your company calls back the same day, stop the campaign rather than optimising it: you are paying for messages that go cold.
Read next
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At this level the outcome is decided at your end more than at ours. Advertising is half an act, and you hold the other half.
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