Flighting
Flighting is running ads in set bursts with a start date and an end date, then turning them off in between. Each burst is a flight. You do this to put the budget into weeks that matter, instead of spreading a small amount across the whole year.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
How flighting works
You pick flight dates, load a budget into that window, and let the campaign end when the window closes. A year might have four flights, or one long flight around a peak season plus a short one for a launch.
Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. The shoe workshop has dozens of styles, colors, and sizes. Each September it launches a limited autumn collection: darker leather, burnt-orange loafers, things people buy as the weather turns. Those colors do not move in March. The shoe workshop runs a flight from September 1 to October 12. Six weeks, $24,000, about $4,000 a week.
Some teams use pulsing instead: a small permanent base with flights layered on top. That keeps some of the benefit of always-on while still concentrating spend. A shoe workshop in Mexico could keep a $2,000 monthly catalog campaign live and still run the $24,000 autumn burst on top.
When flighting is the right call
When demand is seasonal, when the budget is too small to make an impression if spread across twelve months, or when there is a fixed moment: a product launch, a sale, a conference. Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. Spread that shoe workshop's $24,000 autumn budget across twelve months and you get $2,000 a month. That $2,000 a month might buy 15,000 people a month, none of whom see the collection often enough to remember it. Concentrated reach (distinct people who saw the ad) inside six weeks, with the same people seeing it a few times, is the whole point of the flight.
The costs of going dark
Restarting a campaign resets algorithmic learning (the platform's guess about who will buy), so early days of a flight are usually inefficient. Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. That shoe workshop's week 1 spends $3,000 and gets 12 orders. Weeks 2 to 5 spend $4,500 a week and get about 28 orders a week. Retargeting pools (people who visited the collection page) also drain while you are off. And a flight that is too short never accumulates enough frequency (times each person saw the ad) for anyone to remember it.
Watch pacing (whether spend is landing evenly across the dates). If week 1 underspends, week 6 inherits a pile of leftover budget, dumps it in three days, and frequency spikes. Front load enough that the flight is not still learning when it ends, and do not leave half the spend unused on the last weekend.
Common flighting mistakes
- Flights so short the campaign is still learning when it ends. A ten-day burst is often that.
- Building a brand new campaign for every flight instead of reusing the proven one, so learning starts over every September.
- No plan for the gap, so demand created in the flight has nowhere to land. A shoe workshop in Mexico still needs a product page and a cart reminder after October 12.
Lemonado
How Lemonado helps with flighted campaigns
Flights (scheduled bursts with start and end dates) fail on the boring parts: a launch that starts underspending, an end date nobody moved, a burst that never reached enough people. A Task (a job you hand the AI co-worker) can watch each flight from day one and tell you while there is still time to fix it, rather than after the dates have closed.