Advertising you can read.
- Mon
Started the new vertical ad on a small slice — new ads prove themselves before they get real money.
- Tue
Moved part of the budget to Meta — clicks were cheaper there all morning.
- Wed
Paused the square ad — the vertical one sells more.
- Thu
Widened the audience a little — results held, so the wider net stayed.
Every entry appears the day it happens, reason attached. Disagree with one? Reverse it from right here.
The audience starts as a sentence.
Before any money moves, SiteOps writes down who it intends to show your ads to — in words you can read, not a wall of interest checkboxes. For Fernly, the little invoicing app in our examples, that first sentence was “freelancers who were just looking for a way to send invoices.” You approve it as written, or edit it before anything runs.
The sentence keeps getting edited as evidence arrives — a word wider when cheap signups show up at the edges, a word narrower when clicks come in but customers don’t. Every edit lands in the log, and your version always wins: rewrite the sentence yourself and SiteOps works inside it from then on.
Budget moves in small, explained steps.
“Shifting budget to the winner” has a concrete meaning here. Each ad gets a fair share of the day to prove itself. When one starts bringing in customers more cheaply than the rest, tomorrow’s plan hands it a slightly bigger slice — one step at a time, never everything at once— so a single lucky afternoon can’t take over the week.
The judge is your own revenue, not the ad network’s scoreboard. An ad that collects applause but no customers loses its slice, and the log entry says exactly that.
Your daily budget is a ceiling, not a suggestion.
All of that movement happens inside one number: the daily budget you set. Slices get traded between ads and between networks, but their total never grows on its own. Raising the ceiling is a decision only you can make — SiteOps will suggest it when the results argue for it, and then wait.
There’s also a brake. Tell SiteOps to hold everything where it is, and the moves stop: ads keep running, the log keeps recording, and nothing changes until you say otherwise.
Decisions you can read — and reverse.
The log is the point. Every change is written down the day it’s made, in plain words, with its reason attached — and next to each entry, what it produced. A week later you don’t have to guess whether widening the audience paid off: you read Thursday’s entry and see what Friday brought.
It’s also where you overrule. Each entry can be undone from right there — un-pause the square ad, pull the audience back in, pin a split you like. SiteOps treats your reversal as the new rule, and writes that down too.
Fair questions.
What happens when an ad suddenly stops working?
What a careful media buyer would do, minus the delay. Its slice shrinks the next day, and if it keeps sliding it gets paused — with an entry in the log saying when and why. Nothing is deleted: the ad, its history and its settings stay put in case you want to try it again later.
Can SiteOps ever spend more than I set?
No. Your daily budget is a hard ceiling, not a target to optimize past. Every move trades money between ads and networks inside that number — nothing is ever added to it. When SiteOps believes a higher budget would pay for itself, it says so in the log and waits for you to raise the ceiling yourself.
Do I have to approve every move?
No — reading a short log is not a job; approving forty small changes a week would be. You set the budget and the audience boundaries, and SiteOps makes the daily moves inside them, writing each one down as it goes. Anything bigger — a new campaign, a higher ceiling — waits for your yes.