Whatever marketing you’re doing, there’s a common trap you risk falling into.  At the start, it seems so simple.  Spend a few quid, acquire a few users.  One simple division sum and – Hey Presto! You have your cost-per-acquisition.  But sadly, it’s really not that simple.  When campaigns scale, it’s very common to see significant drop-offs in performance as people see the same marketing, over and over again. Alternatively, performance drops occur as campaigns scale to less receptive demographic groups.
Burst testing means spending your campaign money in a tighter timescale, geographic area, etc. than might normally be the case. It’s only through doing this that you can understand how the performance of your sales and marketing efforts may fall as your spend increases.  For example, try and blow your daily adwords budget in an hour.  Still holding up?  Blow it all in ten minutes.  Eventually, your assumptions will break.  Finding this breakpoint is critical.
To give another example: if print media is performing well, try moving to media which is less well-targetted demographically.  Your copy may perform will in WIRED, but if you have to scale, how will that work?  Maybe test NewScientist as well, or even Cosmopolitan.  Alternatively, move from a national publication (Guardian) to a regional or local one (Manchester Evening News), to see whether the same budget works well when converted to more impressions and larger ad format.
Failing to burst-test your media spend will yield a sense of false confidence which can be highly damaging to your business. Essentially the problem is that you will expect a return on investment which is positive – and then in reality costs will rise so far that you will see a negative return on investment.  Once you’ve hit this limit, it’s extremely hard to scale your business beyond a certain point.  If that point doesn’t see you in profit, then you’re going to go bust.
So don’t get lulled into a false sense of security.  Spend a few quid and do the test.  It’s not complicated to find out where people’s boredom threshold is.  You’ll be kicking yourself if you only find this out when you’ve already scaled up, and your performance expectations turn to dust.
If you want more help on any of this, just get in touch through the “contact” tab.