Marketing Operators Podcast — Episode Summary

Episode Title: How We Track Revenue and Ad Spend Hourly During Cyber Five
Date: November 25, 2025
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Guest/Co-Host: Aaron Orndorff
Episode Theme:
In the thick of Black Friday / Cyber Five (BFCM), how leading marketing operators track, manage, and optimize revenue and ad spend on an hourly basis for maximum performance and efficiency.

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the high-stakes tactics, operational details, and lived realities of managing revenue and ad spend during the most critical sales period of the year: Cyber Five. The hosts share their systems for intraday revenue tracking, dynamic ad budget allocation, team rhythms, and war room stories, providing actionable insights for brand operators and media buyers navigating the same high-pressure weeks.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Hourly Revenue and Ad Spend Tracking Matters

• Pressure of Cyber Five: Everyone is focused on extracting maximum opportunity and minimizing misspent budget in a period where millions are on the line and traffic performance fluctuates by the hour.
• Major Change: Teams are moving away from loose, daily check-ins to real-time, granular, hour-by-hour tracking with updated dashboards and accelerated data pulls.

2. How Teams Track Hourly Revenue & Ad Spend

• Simple, But Not Optional:
  • Most teams use Shopify/Amazon for real-time revenue, tracking hourly to monitor daily targets and performance dips/spikes.
  • “It's very simple… keeping tabs on how we're trending hour over hour and trying to understand, based on our current pace…and how we expect this to tail off…” — Aaron Orndorff, 10:53
• Spreadsheet-Driven Accruals:
  • Ridge’s approach involves pulling hourly revenue and spend into spreadsheets, comparing this hour and total accrued to last year, by market.
  • “We’re looking at the accrual…so far from midnight through 10am, PST, we are up 5% year over year. We’re spending 2% more…” — Connor, 12:11
• Automation & Data Warehousing:
  • Increasing frequency of ETLs and data warehouse updates: every hour, not just a few times a day, for ad spend and CAC.
  • “That’s the big change we’re making—having our data warehouse just pull those updates quicker so we can see how we’re pacing more granularly with all key metrics.” — Aaron Orndorff, 15:56

3. Setting Budgets: Aggression, Caution, and MER

• Forecasting:
  • Forecasts pull from historic pacing, subjective changes, and monthly targets, but are always directional and require mid-stream adjustment.
  • “I'd rather overspend, hit it hard from the beginning, and then pull back.” — Cody, 14:00
• Degree of Aggression:
  • Depends on brand, margin targets, and incremental efficiency. Some err on the side of caution (like Ridge this year), others go hard early to capture demand.
  • “Sometimes we'll be more aggressive and I'll tell my team: let's go, I'd rather miss on the side of being more aggressive…” — Cody, 20:46

4. Preventing Horror Stories: Pacing & Efficiency on the Fly

• Adjusting Spend Midday:
  • Use dashboards/North Beam/Sara to monitor hourly. If pacing 5% above target, consider raising budgets 10%.
  • Two-hour stand-ups for real-time pivoting.
  • “Every two hours with the paid media team…if we spend 10% more, it's extremely important that in two or four hours we are now beating our projections by more than 5%…” — Connor, 29:33
• Quick Tests for Incrementality:
  • Scale-up holdout tests (often with Haus) during Cyber5 to validate if more spend is truly incremental during peak hours.
  • “Could we spend a million less on Black Friday and still hit our revenue targets? The answer was no—based on the cost per incremental we saw, that spend is actually very incremental during those peak moments.” — Aaron Orndorff, 26:55

5. Media Mix, Channel Scaling, and Bid Cap Tactics

• Channel Scaling Realities:
  • Meta is always the biggest lever, capable of being tripled overnight, while linear/out-of-home/TV are slow and become a smaller share.
  • Programs like AppLovin or YouTube can scale, but less rapidly than Meta. TikTok, influencer, and podcast may be meaningful or marginal depending on scale.
• ABS/Bid Cap Meta Strategy:
  • Running high-budget bid cap campaigns on Meta (Accelerated Bid Strategy), especially for peaks, removes pacing and gives access to early market demand.
  • “I'm not comfortable enough to go, like, lowest cost, million dollars, set it and forget it…I like this to capture more upside, be aggressive…” — Cody, 10:10 & 39:07
• Inventory Constraints and Cashflow:
  • Bid caps, media priorities, and even MER targets are dynamically adjusted for perishable or limited edition SKUs, often trading off short-term profit for long-term inventory health or cash recovery.
  • “You’ll pay more for a customer buying your limited edition kit so you can move through it…” — Connor > Cody, 33:50 - 34:06

6. Team Management: Blackout Dates, Culture, and Burnout

• Standups and Asynchronous Ops:
  • Most growth and paid teams are on blackout (no PTO) during Cyber5, with daily or twice-daily standups. Async sometimes works but more teams prefer synced huddles for rapid pivots.
  • “I never reject PTO throughout the year…I literally just rejected three this morning…if you're a media buyer, you're not taking off.” — Cody, 67:54
• Mental Toll:
  • Refreshing dashboards every 15 minutes, working in sprints, and—for some—dreaming of living in spreadsheets.
  • “Last year was one of my favorite dreams. I had a dream I was in a spreadsheet…I was like, the physical space around me was a spreadsheet.” — Connor, 72:07

7. Margin of Error and Acceptable Oversepend

• Expected Variance:
  • Most accept a 10% or less margin of error on daily spend targets, especially for Meta where flexible budgets can push or pull.
  • “If we are hitting our revenue target but spend is coming in over 10%, that’s the max margin of error…if we’re coming in 15% over…that’s the point where people just aren’t dialed.” — Connor, 58:09
  • For big holiday runs, 15-20% overspending is tolerable, but >$50k/day misses become escalation-worthy.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Running Meta with a Huge Bid Cap:

  • “I think we spent like almost a million, but like, I'm not comfortable enough to go, all right, lowest cost, million dollars…so I really like this. To capture more of the potential upside. Be aggressive, but hopefully you're not spending if performance isn't there.”
    — Cody, 00:10 / 39:07

• On Testing for Incrementality During Peaks:

  • “Could we spend a million less on Black Friday and still hit our revenue targets? I think the answer was no. Based on the cost per incremental… that spend is actually very incremental during those actual peak moments.”
    — Aaron Orndorff, 00:40 / 26:55

• On Hourly Revenue Sheets:

  • “We’re looking at the accrual…so far from midnight through 10am PST in this case we are up 5% year over year. We’re spending 2% more, something like that. So those are really the only two ways that we’re looking at it.”
    — Connor, 12:11

• On Mental Health in Q4:

  • “Last year was one of my favorite dreams. I had a dream I was in a spreadsheet…I was like, the physical space around me was a spreadsheet. I was in the cells.”
    — Connor, 72:07

Important Timestamps

• 00:10 — Cody on aggressive Meta bid caps for BFCM
• 04:24 — Connor on launching sales earlier and comping periods year over year
• 10:53 — Aaron on simple hourly pacing methods via Shopify/Amazon
• 13:28 — Connor on using spreadsheets for hourly YOY pacing
• 15:56 — Aaron on speeding up data warehouse refreshes for real-time pacing
• 20:46 — Cody on aggression vs. caution in budget-setting
• 29:33 — Connor on dynamic hourly standups and period-over-period incrementality checks
• 33:50 — Connor and Cody on inventory-driven bid caps
• 39:07 — Cody on Meta’s ABS (Accelerated Bid Strategy) and why it "works for us"
• 58:09 — Connor on acceptable variances vs. off-target spending
• 72:07 — Connor’s dream of living inside a spreadsheet

Episode Takeaways

• Systemic hourly tracking—via spreadsheets, dashboards, or data warehouses—is essential for controlling outcomes during Cyber Five/week of BFCM.
• Aggressive, early spend can supercharge results, but only if supported by real-time incrementality and margin tracking, with the flexibility to pivot fast.
• Bid cap strategies (ABS) are valuable on Meta for capturing “upside” early in the day, but require vigilance to avoid overexposure as conversion rates shift.
• Margin of error is real: 5–10% spend miss on huge days is normal, but diligence, accountability, and tight team syncs are crucial to avoid outsized errors.
• Teamware and resilience: Growth team is “on call” for the week, but leaders are mindful of burnout and mental load, even as everyone is spreadsheet-obsessed.

For anyone preparing for BFCM/Cyber Five, this episode offers a pragmatic, battle-tested playbook for hourly management of revenue and spend with real lessons from operators in the trenches.

“You’re in the thick of BFCM; I hope this episode helps things go as well as they can.”
— Aaron Orndorff, 00:00 / Closing

End of Summary