Figures below are Meta and Google combined, pulled daily from both platforms.
| August | Expected landing | Your plan |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | £184,392 | £225,032 |
| Ad spend | £50,082 | not in the plan |
| spent so far | £40,309 |
We reduced Meta budgets on 19 and 20 August, which takes daily spend from about £1,719 to £1,393 across both platforms. August now lands near £50,082 of ad spend.
One piece of good news on subscriptions. We can now read your Recharge billing schedule directly, so instead of estimating the subscription line we can see exactly what is due to bill and when. August subscriptions land near £46,477. September is the stronger month at about £63,033, which is £4,136 above your £58,897 target, because August was a heavy month for new subscription sign-ups and those first renewals bill roughly a month later.
Your goal is £268,147. Revenue splits into three parts that behave very differently, and only one of them responds to ad spend.
| Component | September | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription renewals | £63,033 | Already scheduled. Ads do not change this. |
| Returning customers | £49,500 | Email and your launch calendar. Ads barely move it. |
| New customers | £155,614 | This is the only part ad spend drives. |
That £155,614 of new-customer revenue is 84% more than August is running at, and needs roughly 2,152 new customers. At the efficiency the account is currently delivering, that costs about £94,312 in ad spend, against the £50,082 we are spending this month.
We do not recommend jumping straight to that number on 1 September. The account has never run at that level outside peak season, so we want evidence before committing to it. Instead we step the budget up weekly, and only move to the next step if the cost of acquiring a customer holds.
| Week | Meta per day | Total per day | Condition to step up |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 7 Sept | £1,700 | £1,940 | Cost per new customer stays under £55 |
| 8 to 14 Sept | £2,100 | £2,340 | Cost per new customer stays under £55 |
| 15 to 22 Sept | £2,500 | £2,740 | Cost per new customer stays under £55 |
| 23 to 30 Sept | £2,900 | £3,140 | Cost per new customer stays under £55 |
| September total | £77,000 | Averages £2,567 per day |
If efficiency holds, that lands September near £239,583, which is 89% of your goal. Closing the last 11% would need roughly £17,312 more on top, spent at a level we have no evidence for yet. We would rather earn that decision in the second week, once the ramp has shown us real numbers at £2,340 a day, than commit to it now.
Spending more in September does not meaningfully change September profit. Across every budget level we modelled, from holding steady to chasing the full goal, in-month profit lands between £28,295 and £31,413. Nearly doubling the budget moves it by about £3,118.
The reason is that a new customer roughly pays for herself on the first order and becomes properly profitable later, through repeat orders and subscription. So the extra spend is not a profit decision, it is a cash and growth decision: you are paying now, in the month, for customers who pay you back over the following months. The £127,050 of new-customer revenue in the plan above also brings in roughly £181,311 of contribution over the next three years.
That matters most because of Q4 stock. Money spent on ads in September is money not available for inventory, so the right budget depends on your cash position going into the busiest quarter, which you can see more clearly than we can.
Approve a September ad budget of £77,000, stepped up weekly as above. We will hold each step until the numbers justify the next one, and we will come back to you in the second week with a clear read on whether pushing further makes sense. If your Q4 stock commitments mean that number is too high, tell us the figure you are comfortable with and we will build the ramp around it.
One small thing to check in your own forecast: the running total column appears to stop a day early, so it reads £216,418 where the daily figures actually add up to £225,032.