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Forecast your bank balance, not your P&L
Profit and cash are not the same thing, and Q4 is where brands find that out. DTC payouts land days late. Amazon holds reserves. Wholesale pays on terms. Inventory deposits go out long before a single unit ships.
The 13-Week Cash Flow Template is a free Excel download built on the direct method, so it forecasts the bank balance week by week instead of the accrual P&L. The timing engine handles DTC and Amazon payout delays, wholesale terms, inventory, and capex, and converts your monthly budget into a weekly view. The liquidity summary shows your lowest cash point, when it hits, how many weeks you sit below your minimum, and implied runway on average weekly burn.
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1️⃣ Meta Adds a Second Automatic Events Feature
A new Automatic Events toggle showed up in the Settings tab of Events Manager. Turn it on and you let Meta's AI add and manage standard events on your website for you, with a dashboard where you can review what it created and delete anything you don't want. The confusing part: the old "Track events automatically without code" feature from four years ago is still there too, and Meta's own help pages describe both as if they were the same thing.
Source: Jon Loomer
My take: I still set my events up manually, and I'd tell you to do the same. You want to measure what actually matters to your business, not what an AI guessed from your button text.
2️⃣ Meta Auto-Fills Your Customer Exclusions Wrong
In Customer Lifecycle Strategy, picking "acquire new customers" now pre-fills the Existing Customers exclusion field with custom audiences you never chose. The list is both incomplete and wrong, and it pulls in audiences that are not your customers at all. Meta leaves the engaged audience field blank but fills this one.
Source: Jon Loomer
My take: This is the kind of default that quietly wastes budget for months before anyone notices. Open that field and check it by hand on every account, because excluding the wrong audience is worse than excluding nothing.
3️⃣ Ads Manager Adds a Creative Diversity Score
Meta added a Creative diversity column that rates each ad set Low, Medium, or High based on how visually alike your images and video thumbnails are. You find it under Columns, then Customize columns. Meta labels the metric as estimated and still in development.
Source: Search Engine Land
My take: Good idea, early execution. Accounts running statics, video, UGC and carousels are still coming back Low, so I wouldn't change a thing based on this score yet. Watch it, don't obey it.
4️⃣ Meta Tests Two Fixes for Bad Lead Quality
Meta is testing Sequenced Events for Instant Forms, which lets you optimize for a second action that happens after the lead, and credits your ad only if both events happen in the order you set. A separate test adds checkboxes on multiple choice form questions so you can mark which answers signal a good lead. Neither has official documentation, both were spotted by advertisers in their own accounts.
Source: Jon Loomer
My take: Lead quality is the hardest part of lead gen on Meta, and both of these go after it at the source instead of cleaning up afterwards. Marking preferred answers is the one I want, because conditional logic tells people they gave the wrong answer and they just go back and change it.
5️⃣ Frequency Control Arrives at the Campaign Level
Meta added a frequency control at the campaign level, which until now only existed on the ad set. The cap applies across every ad set in the campaign, so a cap of 3 impressions per 7 days means 3 in total, even for someone who sits in several ad set audiences. You need Advantage+ campaign budget turned on, and it only works on the Awareness and Engagement objectives.
Source: Bram Van der Hallen
My take: Overlapping ad sets hammering the same people is a real problem, and a cap set per ad set never actually solved it. The catch is Awareness and Engagement only, so the campaigns where I want this most, Sales and Leads, still go without.
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That's it for this week.
See you in two weeks with the latest Meta news.