Why fresh BMs die in week three
Most account deaths aren't random. They're scheduled — three weeks after the first dollar of spend. Here's why, and what to do about it.
If you've ever run a fresh BM through its first month, you've felt the week-three slump. Spend ramps cleanly through the first 14 days, then the BM starts throwing soft flags — rejections on creatives that worked yesterday, audience caps showing up out of nowhere, costs that double overnight.
It's not random. It's a review checkpoint. Most ad accounts go through an internal trust evaluation roughly 21 days after first spend. Accounts that look like they're growing too fast, scaling too aggressively, or running too much novel creative get throttled.
The fix is partly creative discipline and partly account hygiene. We'll write up the full playbook in next week's brief.