What optimisation cadence means
Optimisation cadence is the rhythm of changes to an advertising account: what gets reviewed, how often, and what is allowed to change at each review. It covers the daily checks that are really only monitoring, the weekly session where most decisions belong, and the monthly or quarterly work on structure, budget and strategy.
Under manual bidding, frequent adjustment was rewarded. Under automated bidding it is not. The system needs a stable set of instructions and a run of conversions to learn from, so cadence is now partly a discipline of restraint — deciding in advance when you will not touch the account.
Why cadence matters
Without one, changes are triggered by whoever looked last and by whatever they happened to see. That produces reactions to noise, overlapping edits nobody can untangle afterwards, and campaigns kept permanently unsettled by learning phase disruption. A fixed rhythm turns account work into something a client can be shown and a colleague can take over.
It also protects measurement. If changes only land on a known day, the period between them can be read cleanly and you can say what a change did. Continuous tinkering makes every result an argument nobody can win.
Where cadence goes wrong
Too fast is the usual direction. Daily bid nudges and budget shuffles keep the account unstable while the person making them feels productive, and the campaign never settles long enough to show what it can do.
Too slow is a genuine failure as well, and it is easier to miss because the account looks calm. Disapproved ads sit unnoticed, budgets stay flat through a season, a broken conversion tag reports nothing for weeks, and a competitor moves into the auction unanswered. Cadence is a schedule, not an excuse for absence.
The third mistake is one cadence for everything. A brand new campaign, a seasonal push and a stable evergreen campaign do not need the same amount of attention or the same gaps between changes.
How to set a cadence
Write down what happens at each interval and keep to it. Daily is monitoring only: spend pacing, disapprovals, tracking still firing, anything obviously broken. Weekly is where search terms, negatives, budget shifts and creative decisions belong. Monthly is for structure, audiences, landing page work and the conversation about targets.
Agree in advance what may be changed outside the rhythm — a real fault, a policy problem, a campaign spending far ahead of plan — and let everything else wait for the next review. Keep a change log so a later result can be traced back to a decision. And match the pace to volume: an account with few conversions a week needs longer gaps between changes than a busy one, simply because it takes longer to know anything at all.