October is scaling month. You know which creative works from September's tests. Now you increase budget on the winners, generate more variants of the winning concepts, and build the retargeting audiences that will drive conversions during peak week.
Scaling the September winners
Take the top 5-10 winning creatives from September and increase their daily budget by 20% every 2-3 days. Follow the scaling rules from the Creative Fundamentals course: no more than 20% budget increase at a time, monitor CPA stability after each increase, roll back if CPA degrades for 48 hours.
The goal is to find each creative's budget ceiling: the maximum daily spend where CPA remains acceptable. Some creatives will scale to $500/day. Others will hit a wall at $100/day. The ceiling tells you how many people the algorithm can find who respond to that specific creative. Creatives with high ceilings become your BFCM peak-week workhorses.
Generating winner variants
For each September winner, generate 5-10 new variants using Mani's "Create more like this" feature. These variants preserve the winning concept (same hook type, same format, same messaging angle) while changing execution details (different headline text, different visual arrangement, different CTA wording).
Test these variants alongside the originals. Often, a variant of a winner outperforms the original by 15-30% because it applies the same proven concept with a fresh execution. The combination of a proven concept and a fresh execution is the most reliable recipe for high-performing BFCM creative.
Building retargeting audiences
Every person who engages with your October ads becomes a retargeting prospect for November. Engagement includes: viewed 50% or more of a video ad, clicked any ad, visited your website from an ad, added to cart but did not purchase, or viewed a product page.
These retargeting audiences are warmed up. They know your brand. They have seen your creative. During BFCM peak week, retargeting these audiences with deal-specific creative produces 3-5x higher ROAS than cold prospecting. The October scaling phase is simultaneously a revenue driver and a retargeting audience builder.
The pre-BFCM creative library
By the end of October, you should have: 10-20 proven creative assets (originals + variants) with known performance data, retargeting audiences of 50,000+ engaged users (varies by brand size), a documented creative playbook (which hooks, formats, and offers work), and budget allocation per creative based on scaling ceiling data.
This library is your BFCM weapon. When peak week arrives, you are not scrambling to create ads. You are deploying proven winners at maximum budget to warmed-up audiences. The work was done in September and October. November is execution.
Continue to Peak week execution.