This is the checklist we run internally, adapted for anyone to use. It is not a strategy piece about whether to discount. It assumes you have already decided to run a promotion and want it executed properly, which in our experience is where most of the value is won or lost. The middle of a promo is the part everyone watches and the part that needs the least attention. The setup and the teardown are where the money goes.
Size the budget to the promotion, not to the month
A promotion is a demand event, and funding it out of your ordinary monthly budget guarantees you underspend at exactly the moment conversion rate is at its highest. Set daily budgets that support what the brand actually expects from the promo before anything else is built. Everything downstream, the creative, the copy, the campaign structure, is wasted effort if the money is not there to deliver it. We have written before about what happens when tentpole promotions become afterthoughts, and underfunding is almost always the first symptom.
Hold the alignment call two to three days out
Not the week before, and not the night before. Two to three days out is late enough that the offer is final and early enough that mistakes are still fixable. Walk the timeline, the budget and the actual ads. The single most common failure we see is a promotion where the landing page and the ad promise slightly different things, and nobody compared them side by side until traffic was already running.
Run the promo as its own campaign
Flight a standalone promotional campaign rather than swapping the offer into your always on structure. You get a clean read on what the promotion did, the platform gets an unambiguous signal to optimise against, and the teardown afterwards is a single action rather than an archaeology exercise. Promotional creative can sit inside business as usual campaigns as well, but only for a specific reason you can articulate, not as the default.
Shorten the attribution window
This is the rule most brands have never heard and the one that changes the most outcomes. Use 1-day click attribution on promotional campaigns. A promotion is a short, urgent event, and a long lookback window teaches the platform slowly at precisely the moment you need it to learn fast. With a seven day window the algorithm is still crediting conversions from decisions made before your sale started, and it will not understand what is working until the promo is nearly over.
The trade is that your reported numbers will look smaller. Accept that. You are optimising for the platform's learning speed during a compressed window, not for a flattering screenshot.
Before the promo goes live
- Daily budgets set to support the expected promo volume.
- Alignment call held two to three days out on timeline, budget and ads.
- Promotional ad copy written and signed off, with all other copy variations paused.
- Promotional sitelinks live on search, and discounts applied to the product feed.
- Promotional assets added to your automated campaigns, with non-promo assets paused.
- Standalone promo campaign flighted on social with 1-day click attribution.
- Destination URLs and tracking parameters checked against the live landing page.
Pace spend on a reverse bell curve
Most brands spread promotional budget evenly across the period, which is the one shape that matches no consumer behaviour. Weight spend toward the first and last days instead. The opening days capture the buyers who were already waiting, and the closing days capture the far larger group who needed a deadline. The middle of a promotion is reliably the softest part of it, and funding it flat means overpaying for the quietest days.
Copy what already works instead of making something new
The instinct before a promotion is to produce fresh creative. The better move is to duplicate your top performing evergreen assets and change the message to the offer. Those assets have already proven they earn attention from your audience, and a promotion is not the moment to test whether a new concept lands. Save new creative for the weeks either side, where a failure costs you a normal day rather than a peak one. For the ranges your media should be judged inside while all this is running, our Meta advertising cost benchmarks for beauty brands are the reference.
The teardown is where the money quietly leaks
Every brand plans the launch of a promotion. Almost none plan the end of it. The result is promotional copy still running a week later against full price products, sitelinks advertising a discount that no longer exists, and feed entries showing a percentage off that will not apply at checkout. That is not just wasted spend, it is a trust problem, because the customer who clicks a stale offer and finds full price does not come back.
Put the teardown in the calendar at the same time you schedule the launch, with a named owner. It takes twenty minutes and it is the highest return twenty minutes in the whole exercise.
After the promo ends, same day
- Promotional ad copy removed and evergreen copy restored on every campaign.
- Promotional sitelinks paused.
- Discounts removed from the product feed.
- Promotional assets paused in automated campaigns, evergreen assets switched back on.
- Standalone promo campaign paused, not deleted, so the data survives.
- Attribution window returned to its normal setting.
What to measure once it is over
Judge a promotion on three things, none of which is promo week revenue. First, contribution after the discount, because a sale that moves volume at a margin you cannot afford is not a win. Second, what happened in the two weeks afterwards, since a promotion that simply pulled demand forward shows up as a trough, not a lift. Third, how many of the buyers were new, because a discount redeemed almost entirely by existing customers is a margin giveaway rather than an acquisition event.
Write those three numbers down before the promo starts and compare afterwards. Deciding what success looks like once you have seen the result is how brands talk themselves into repeating an unprofitable sale every quarter.