How to Run Paid Ads Effectively

Before you say, “Ads don’t work for us,” read this…

There are a million variables to think about when running ads.

👉 The targeting – who are you targeting, and how are you targeting them? The platforms are getting much better at finding your audience for you. Ensure you have adequate budget, have enough conversions, your ads have been running long enough to exit the learning phase, you have all the necessary exclusions. Ensure you have all the pixels set up, you have custom LAA audiences, retargeting audiences, are you concentrating your budget, or targeting the world…

👉 The platform – where is your audience? Are they on Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, Stack Overflow, etc., do you know all the intricacies within each platform from the different objectives, exclusions, audience building, are you running just digital ads, what about influencers, OOH, radio, TV…

👉 The creative – what message are you putting in front of them? Does it resonate with your audience, have you talked to your audience, does it convey a solution to their pain in a clear and concise way, is it a video (how long, what does that look like), is it a SIA, a carousel, dynamic, are you A/B testing…

👉 The strategy – what types of ads are you running? Are you targeting different funnel and awareness stages differently, are you A/B testing, are you using an omni-channel approach, and you targeting the right keywords, are you targeting competitors and branded keywords, are you retargeting, do you know your CAC, LTV, hook rate, are you constantly testing and refining, are you capturing and analyzing data effectively…

👉 The budget – what is the size of your budget, and the duration? Ad budgets that are too small, or are spread too thinly across multiple audiences and platforms won’t be effective. Again, are you concentrating your budget or targeting the world…

👉 The landing page – What does the design look like? Do you have VSL, social proof, how many form fields do you have, what is the length of the page, are you providing adequate value in exchange for their info, are you demonstrating how effective your solution is against substitutes or alternate states, are you A/B testing and optimizing for conversion…

👉 The offer – what are you offering? What price point, do you have a free tier or free trial, is it priced accurately in the market, have you talked to customers…

And the list goes on and on…

As you can see, there is so much to think about when running ads – a million ways for it to go wrong.

It also requires many different skillsets from design, strategy, CRO, technical setup, etc.

So before you outright dismiss ads, you may have to just re-evaluate your approach.