After A Decade Of Running Ads, One Of The Hardest Thing To Teach Clients Is Patience.

I've been running paid media for about a decade now, all of it with Facebook and Instagram ads. I've managed millions in ad spend across hundreds of accounts, working with brands ranging from early-stage startups to companies doing $100k+ per month in sales.

The personality types I've encountered with the business owners have come in many different forms.

One thing I've noticed across a large majority of them (especially ones new to running ads): the instinct to react quickly to a day or two of bad performance is almost always wrong.

Earlier this year, I was managing campaigns for an e-commerce client. Things had been going well for a few weeks. ROAS was above KPI, we were increasing ad spend over time, and the client was happy.

Then one Monday, the results were not too great. Tuesday was the same. The client messaged me Wednesday morning asking if we should pause everything and regroup.

I told them that I don't recommend doing that and to instead give it a couple more days, or wait until Friday or Saturday to assess.

They were a little hesitant but they trusted my expertise and decided to keep the campaigns running.

On the topic of client management, because I come in as a contractor and not an employee, when I am given specific actions to take I don't just do it without careful consideration. I have to think "will this increase results or hurt them" which can sometimes create a little conflict between myself and the business owner.

A lot of the time I spend managing a new client when they are very needy is telling them why their ideas would not improve results. Thankfully, when the results are good and they see that I accurately predict what will happen, they start to let me do my own thing.

The main reason people hire me is not to perform tasks and work through a to-do list. It's to get results. If I don't get results, I lose the client. And I've learned from experience that almost every time I just do exactly what the client wants (decisions typically fueled by emotion) the results drop and I get let go.

There have been times where I've had a client be so reactive and micromanage so much that I just end our working relationship and suggest they hire a part-time employee because it doesn't make sense to hire someone like me if you're going to just tell me exactly what to do.

Here's the thing about paid media, especially on platforms like Meta: day-to-day fluctuations are almost meaningless. The algorithm doesn't optimize on a 24-hour cycle. It needs time to find the right people, test placements, and adjust delivery.

When I looked at the data, I wasn't looking at Monday vs. Tuesday. I was looking at the trailing 7 days vs. the 7 days before that. And the trend was still stable. Nothing had fundamentally broken.

I've seen this pattern hundreds of times. A campaign performs well for a couple of days, then the next day or two look terrible. The client panics. But then the next 2 to 3 days are very good, and when you zoom out, the week was actually profitable.

So for this hesitant client, we left everything running. By Thursday, performance had not just gone back to normal. It was very high. We finished the week better than the week before.

If we had paused on Tuesday or Wednesday, we would have killed a winning campaign and wasted time rebuilding something that didn't need to be rebuilt.

I think this applies beyond paid media for business owners. They want to always fix things any time there is a slight sign that something looks wrong. But sometimes the best move is to wait and let the data tell you what's actually happening.

The accounts I've seen struggle the most are the ones where decisions get made emotionally. A bad day triggers a panic. A good day triggers premature scaling. There's no patience for trends to develop.

The accounts that do well tend to have a simple rule: don't make big decisions on small data.