Numbers · Published 2026-08-21 · 2 min read
The spend ceiling: a footnote to Artemy's post
Artemy published an excellent post about the spend ceiling. Sharp, concise and with a case study. Let me just add a few things.
Daily spend
Clients often arrive saying "we are ready to spend $1k to $5k daily". We go into their account and find several campaigns on budgets of $500 to $1.5k that do not pay back in the prediction. That is not how to do it.
How to do it: to spend $1k a day you have to work out whether the capacity of the niche, and the creative, allow you to spend $1k a day.
- Niche capacity can be roughly estimated from the number of queries in Google Keyword Planner. Multiply CPC by the number of queries and you get the size of the niche in dollars — this deserves a long post of its own. Often we will not see enough queries to support $1,000 a day.
- It may be that this creative's spend ceiling, while it still hits the KPI, is no more than $100 a day.
An important conclusion: there is no point running tests at more than $100–$200 a day per ad set or concept. Above $200 a day, only what has already shown a predicted ROAS above 100%.
Hitting the KPI is seasonal
There are cases where we break even for several months with no profit, then ROAS reaches 150%, that lasts a month, and then it is back to zero. Intuitively it feels as though success means finding a creative once and everything being fine from then on. In reality it is an uneven process with a lot of variance.
How do you tell whether the creative is not performing or it is simply out of season? If predicted ROAS is 10–60%, seasonality is unlikely to be the explanation. We are unlikely to rescue a creative like that.
And one more: the size of the daily spend is a powerful instrument for working on CPA.