How flight dates work
A flight is a defined run of advertising, and the flight dates are the day it starts and the day it stops. The term comes from older media buying, where a slot was booked for a fixed window, and it survives because the idea is still useful: a campaign with an agreed beginning and end can be judged as a whole rather than as an open-ended cost.
In the ad platforms, flight dates appear in two places that behave differently. A campaign start and end date simply turns delivery on and off. A budget attached to the whole period — a lifetime or total campaign budget — also uses those dates to decide how fast to spend, so the same pair of dates is doing two jobs at once. Changing an end date on a total-budget campaign changes daily spend as well as duration, which surprises people more often than it should.
Why flight dates matter
They make a campaign reviewable. A flight with a closing date forces a decision at the end: renew, change or stop. Without one, campaigns tend to run on quietly long after the offer they were built around has expired.
They also protect the reading of the numbers. Comparing one flight against another is only fair when both cover a comparable stretch of time and the same kind of days — a flight that happens to include a festival week is not comparable with one that does not. Recording the dates alongside the results is what makes later comparison honest.
Common mistakes with flight dates
The most expensive is a flight too short to learn in. Automated bidding needs conversions before it bids well, so a very short burst spends most of its life in the learning phase and reports a cost that is worse than the campaign would settle at. If the window is genuinely fixed, launch earlier at a smaller budget rather than starting cold on day one.
The second is an end date nobody notices. Campaigns stop on their date whether or not anyone is watching, and a promotion that ends on a Friday evening can leave a whole weekend dark. The third is setting dates in one timezone and reporting in another, which makes the first and last day of every flight look wrong.
How to set them well
Decide the dates when the offer is decided, not when the campaign is built, and write them into the media plan next to the budget they carry. Allow lead time before the period that actually matters, so the account arrives at the important days already trained.
Put a reminder in a calendar a little before every end date, so renewal is a choice rather than an accident, and check the account timezone once before the first flight of a client rather than after the first confusing report.