The first month is mostly about patience, so here's what to watch, week by week.
The first month is for learning what works, not for tuning every setting in week one: the platform needs time to surface creators and creators need time to submit, so the rate, the brief and the budget all stay put until the first week's numbers are in. The one thing you do every day from the start is clear the review queue.
Week by week
Week | Watch , and do |
Week 1 | How fast submissions arrive, which is the earliest read on whether the rate and the brief make sense together, and what the submissions look like. Effective CPM starts high and falls as views compound, so read it as a trend from week two rather than against your target.
Read every submission, including the ones you reject, and leave the rate, the brief and the budget alone. |
Week 2 | The hooks that land, the source material the top clips use that the rest ignore, and the creators who have submitted more than once.
If submissions are still slow, raise the rate before touching the brief: a rate change applies to clips submitted from then on, while a brief change takes days to show up in the work. |
Week 3 | The review loop.
Keep first reviews fast, and spend your attention on the cards with a high bot likelihood, where the call belongs to a person. See Flagged and botted submissions. |
Week 4 | Effective CPM against your target, repeat performers, and whether you can describe the winning hook in a sentence.
Scale what is working: add budget where effective CPM is at target and creators are repeating, and change the rate, the brief or the review pace where it is not. The signals are in Fund your account. |
The habits that carry a campaign
Creator content behaves like a portfolio: a small group of creators drives most of the views, and you cannot pick them in advance, so the job is to set the conditions where they can emerge, a clear brief, a fair rate and a fast queue, rather than to hand-craft every submission. Pick the model for what you want to learn, since CPM shows you which hooks travel, per post shows you how your brand sounds in other voices, and retainer shows you what happens when a creator lives with your product for weeks; Which Pricing Model Should I Use? compares them. Write a brief creators can act on, tight on the hook and the checkable rules and loose on execution, which is the whole of Write a brief creators will follow. Set the rate to the market rather than to an internal number, by checking comparable campaigns on Discover before you publish, because a rate set to fit a budget produces silence that is easy to misread as a supply problem. Review fast and reject only for what the brief says, with a reason the creator can act on. Watch four numbers, which Which numbers to watch on a campaign explains. Rotate the source material every two to three weeks, and after every new stream or episode, because when creators cut the same 30 seconds for weeks audiences see the same opening and views fall off; the teams behind the most active campaigns announce new footage to their creators about that often. And by day 30, keep the winners: move the creators who fit onto per post or a retainer, and let the CPM campaign keep finding the next ones.
What not to do
Pull the budget at the first quiet day, rewrite the brief inside a live campaign, or reject for rules that are not in the brief. Each one costs you the creators you were about to find.
Give it the month. Everything you change in week one, you change blind.
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