Skip to content
Academy
Marketing Academy · Field Work●Paid Ads
All projects·From: Retargeting
MiniSimulation· 30 minutes

Launch Week: Running a Retargeting Campaign's First 10 Days

FirstCry (Brainbees Solutions)

Objective: Practice the sequence of retargeting decisions a real launch requires — frequency cap, audience segmentation, and purchaser exclusion — in the order they actually come up, with no real ad account needed.

You're launching FirstCry's first retargeting campaign for its baby-gear category after a spike in cart abandonment from a new checkout flow.

Make the launch-week calls a retargeting manager makes for real: frequency settings at launch, when to split audiences, and when to add exclusions.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Meta Ads Manager
FreeWhere every decision in this simulation is actually made in a live campaign

Free to access; only ad spend costs money, and this simulation requires none

Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)

Triple Whale(optional)
PaidFaster cross-segment CPA and frequency dashboards than native Ads Manager reporting

Speeds up the same checks this simulation walks through, not required to complete them

The process

Simulation

Day 1, launch settings

Day 1 of 14

You're building the first ad set in Meta Ads Manager: 'All Site Visitors, 30 days.' The frequency cap field is optional and defaults to no cap.

Sample output
New Ad Set: Cart Recovery — Baby Gear

  Audience size (est.)   14,200
  Budget                  ₹2,000/day
  Frequency cap           [not set]
  Placements               Automatic
Spend to date:₹0 of ₹28,000
Budget remaining:₹28,000

The frequency cap field is empty. What do you do before launching?

Run this for real insteadOptional

The simulation above is a complete project on its own, free, no account or spend required. This is only for learners who want to test the same decisions against a real live account.

Minimum spend:₹15,000 (~$180)
Minimum duration:10 days
Setup steps
  1. Install the Meta Pixel and verify it fires on product and cart pages
  2. Build a 30-day site-visitor audience and wait for it to clear 1,000 people
  3. Create at minimum a cart-abandoner and a homepage-visitor ad set with distinct creative
Check-in schedule: Check frequency and CPA by segment every 2-3 days; do not judge results before day 7.

Final deliverable

A launch-week decision log: the choice made at each stage, the outcome, and which lesson passage justified it.

See a reference example
Sample output
Warby Parker, Retargeting Launch Log (excerpt)

Day 1: Set 8/week frequency cap at launch — avoided the fatigue spike seen in the uncapped branch
Day 4: Split into cart-abandoner (urgency) and homepage-visitor (trust) ad sets — CPA fell from ₹410 to ₹260 within 3 days
Day 10: Added 30-day purchaser exclusion — reported CPA became accurate, freed 12% of impressions for genuine prospects

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

  • Chooses the frequency cap at launch rather than reacting after fatigue appears
  • Recognizes the segmentation gap from the day-4 dashboard, not just the prompt wording
  • Adds the purchaser exclusion once the same-session purchase overlap is visible