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Facebook, Instagram, Apple and Google Apps Search Ads Secrets – Make Money From Your Products
A bit about search ads first.
There are billions of Apps and products out there and it is becoming harder and harder to stand out. You don’t want to spend countless of hours developing your dream app or products just to have close to zero sale per month.
This blog is an aggregate of the best secrets of Apple and Google Apps search ads for successful App developers.
This blog also includes tips and tricks for successful Google Search Ads, Facebook Search Ads and Instagram Search Ads for any product.

Apple Search Ads uses a Cost-Per-Tap (CPT) model, meaning that advertisers need to pay Apple every time someone “taps” on a Search Ad listing after performing a keyword search. While on other traditional mobile ad networks such as Google UAC or Facebook Ads, the advertiser usually pays per app install (Cost-Per Install model, or CPI) after a user saw or interacted with an ad.
Apple offers 2 types of search ads – basic and advanced. Which one should you choose?
I guess it depends upon the type of app and installs you want. Basic is CPI based vs Advanced is CPT based. This might make you think that Basic is better because you only pay when you get an install BUT that’s not the best way of looking at it. Basic has a much higher cost per install CPI than the cost per tap CPT you have from the advanced one. So unless your user either buys an IAP or paid app which makes more money than the CPI you paid to acquire that user, you might lose money.
Also, advanced lets your focus on specific keywords whereas Basic is mostly Apple’s own hidden algorithm showing your ads. Focusing on specific keywords is important because you don’t just want user to download the app, you want them to open and use it too. Since we don’t know how Apple will show your ad for basic, you have no clue whether your app is getting perfectly targeted.
So you may or may not be paying more money for the install using Basic vs Advanced as advanced can get you a lot more impressions of the ad (and more downloads if your metadata is on point).
Apple Search Ads is an intent-based channel
This is important in the post-IDFA era because Apple looks at the context of a particular search to target ads based on keywords. By its very nature, ASA does not rely on IDs to target individuals. Attribution models already have an advantage over other channels that rely on IDs for individual behavioural targeting.
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With Apple Search Ads, you can tap into user intent signals that match your offerings and attract higher-quality users. That’s why Apple claims such impressive performance numbers, such as 50 percent average conversion rates and 65 percent download rates.
A bit about search ads first.
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I personally would never run Basic for a free app (even if it has IAP) as the CPI is very high and unless I have a high conversion rate for the IAP, I would be losing money. For a paid app, it might work well though.
I have mostly tested Advanced. I did run Basic but the CPI was way too high so I stopped it. For advanced, I would advice:
AI Jobs and Career
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Start small but not too small. Like don’t set a daily budget of under $5 or over $20. Start with lets say $10 and keep it like that for 1-2 weeks and see how it works. Adjust the keywords in the search ad, adjust your screenshots, icon and other metadata to make it look more attractive if you notice people are clicking on the ad but not tapping the download button etc.
Before running search ads, make sure you have your freemium app monetization and DAU (active users) absolutely down. Like if you only have banner ads in the app and no way for user to buy the in app purchase, don’t bother with search ads yet if your cost per acquisition is too high. For example if your CPA is $2 in an extremely competitive app category, and you spend $2 to acquire a new user or you waste $2 on a user who taps on the ad but doesn’t hit download. You may never make your money back from your ads in the app. Banner ads aren’t even worth it imo unless you have thousands of active users. They hardly make a few pennies per 1000 impressions. Interstitial ads are better and make more money and Rewarded ads are even better. But still, you need to look at numbers to see whether you are at least breaking even.
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Apple and Google gives you $100 credit for free to try it out, so use that to test it out and look at numbers, make changes etc.
Set the search ad settings correctly. There is an option for targeting audience – whom would you like to see your ad and options are “People who already have your app“, “People who don’t have your app” etc. Of course you don’t want to select the first option because they already have your app. You want to acquire new users. You can also choose the age of the audience. So for example, if you have an app which you is meant for people who own houses, you don’t want to target people under 25 or even 30 years old because most of them won’t own houses.
If you are getting taps (you spend money per tap) but not conversions (downloads), that means people are finding something on your app store page which they don’t like. This could be bad or missing reviews, bad screenshots, bad metadata etc. So get honest opinion from non-friends to see what they think of your app store page.
Search ads for paid apps OR apps with in app purchases is different than search ads for free apps. You should make sure your paid app OR IAP is priced right so that you can at least break even and preferably make a profit for every cost per acquiring the customer. For example – if your cost per acquisition is $5 (this can be pretty high for paid apps as a lot of people will often click and ad but then decide not to download the app maybe because of the pricing or some other metadata) and you have priced your app at $2.99, you are just burning money. Be intelligent.
Using keywords of other app names in same category might work for you. But I won’t suggest setting keywords for trademarked apps OR of popular apps which have nothing to do with your app category. This can get you called out for IP/Copyright/Trademark violation. This also won’t convert well because when people are search for a specific app (let’s say Facebook) and your calculator app shows up in the ad, no body is going to click on it as the user obviously is only looking to download Facebook.
I personally don’t like running ads in developing countries as – Admob pays very little in those countries, people don’t buy IAP much, people don’t buy paid apps much.
Don’t bid for keywords which have high competition OR very high CPT. Companies with deep pockets will kill you.
I am not a fan of the option “Search Match” (Automatically match my ad to relevant searches) which Apple gives you. I always disable that option.
Search ads are good if you can afford it and if you have an app which fits the profile. It may or may not work for every app. Always look at numbers.
I’m guessing search ads are the ads you see in the App Store when you are searching for specific apps?
Yes, search ads are for the app store search. So if someone searches for a keyword which you have targeted your ad towards and you win the bidding battle for the ad space for the same keyword against someone else, your app’s ad gets shown.
Is there an average price per click that you pay?
Yes, Apple search ads are CPT based. Cost per tap. So if someone taps your ad, you pay what you won the bid for against some other person’s ads bid. For example – If you bid for a keyword “car” and you have set the maximum CPT at $0.20 and Bob who is also an app developer and is running ads and has set his “car” keyword at a CPT of $0.10, you will pay $0.11 because that’s what it took to win. Of course there are more factors – level of competition for that keyword, higher levels of CPT being bid by others etc which can drive the average CPT higher for you. That’s why you get to set the maximum you are willing to pay per keyword.
How many people searching for apps, see my game as an ad, and click on it per day for $10?
There is no general range of how many people might. You can use the maximum CPT to control the amount you spend per tap and you can also set an optional CPA (cost per acquisition) to ensure you don’t run at a loss. However, the first 2 weeks should usually be experimental and test it out with low budgets.
A very important thing to remember – you pay per tap – NOT per download. So if someone taps your ad and notices your screenshots look like crap and doesn’t download your app, you just lost money. This is why you need the metadata to be perfect and use the CPA field after 2 weeks to make sure you don’t run at loss.
Along with that, do you only pay for clicks? Do you pay more if they download your app after the click?
Yes you pay per click (tap to be technically correct). You don’t pay more if they download.
I’m assuming you are constantly tracking How many active users you have and how much revenue you are generally getting to be able to ball-park any change in these numbers based off your ads being displayed.
Yes, I always monitor my ad spend and compare it to how many downloads I got (if this is for a paid app) or how many people bought the IAP and how much revenue I am making per day via Admob. I do this every morning. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to let me track how many of those ad conversions converted into buying the in app purchase. So this throws me off a bit.
So, your CPA. Is this your cost for running the ads per download?
Regarding CPA. They let you set an optional CPA goal when running your ad campaign. Determining it is a bit of work. Like when I am starting out, I don’t have any numbers to look at, so I leave the CPA blank or set it as the same price as my IAP or paid app price. Basically I don’t want the cost per acquisition to exceed the IAP or paid app price because that would mean I am burning money and running at a loss instead of profit. However after running the campaign for 1-2 weeks and looking at the numbers for each day, I can guess a better CPA and if I think I definitely don’t want to exceed a certain number because it would make me lose money instead of break even/profit, I will set it. You don’t want to set the CPA too low – at least initially because then you won’t even get any impressions of your ads. For example: Looking at one of my ad campaigns right now, I have default CPT of $0.10 (cost per tap as you pay every time someone taps your ad – doesn’t matter whether they download or not). They let you set CPT on a per keyword basis too which overrides the default CPT. NOTE that CPT is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the tap. This means that if you are at a battle with someone else who also wants the same ad space, you can win the battle if your CPT is even a cent higher. You only pay whatever amount it takes to win the battle, not the highest one which you have set your CPT at. So often, your Average CPT will be lesser than what you set it at which is good. So for this campaign, my default CPT is $0.10 and I have a few keywords with custom CPT of $0.20. After looking at my numbers for the past few weeks, I see that for most of my keywords, I have Average CPT of $0.15, $0.16, $0.19 and average CPA of $0.15, $0.33, $0.29. So if I want, after testing it for couple weeks, I can lower the CPA to $0.50 so that I never run it at a loss.
So if I spend 10 dollars in 1 day and 5 people downloaded the app, that would be a $2 CPA? Yes.
And I will repeat my previous statement: I always monitor my ad spend and compare it to how many downloads I got (if this is for a paid app) or how many people bought the IAP and how much revenue I am making per day via Admob. I compare and set the CPA based off of these. I do this every morning. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to let me track how many of those ad conversions converted into buying the in app purchase. So this throws me off a bit.
Have you been able to verify your numbers and whether or not you are profiting based off these ads? Why not bump your ad spending even higher?
I have made money from certain types of apps and lost money by doing stupid stuff (running ad campaigns for a free with ads app but not having an IAP to remove ads, running ad campaigns for apps with only poverty banner ads and no full screen/interstitial/rewarded video ads which at least make some money, running ad campaigns for apps with generic keywords which are very high competition and gets out-bid by much bigger players with much deeper pockets, running ads where my CPA was higher than the money I was making off of the IAP or Paid app, running ad campaigns with a keyword which was for an app not even in my category which made users tap my ad, lose money and then they won’t download, running campaign with a keyword which was trademarked etc).
Basically, be intelligent, research, start slow and experiment with the $100 credit Apple gives you.
A few people asked me about rewarded ads vs interstitial ads for monetization. This is a bit off topic but I will throw this in.
Rewarded ads have a higher eCPM than regular interstitial ads, meaning you get paid more. Of course how high depends upon the type of app, number of users, placement of ads etc. I use Admob’s rewarded ads to mostly unlock features or number of XXX item usage in the app. There are other companies which offer them too. You can read a few points here for example:
source: reddit
The high eCPM is good. What’s even better about them than regular interstitial is that they just provide a better user experience and less negative reviews. This is because the user is willingly choosing to watch an ad instead of their game getting randomly interrupted. And in return, the user gets some type of in app reward – more coins, unlock some feature etc. So this is a win win for the developer and the user.
How do you determine your CPA for an app with IAPs? (Like does iTunes Connect tell you this information?)
They let you set an optional CPA goal when running your ad campaign. Determining it is a bit of work. Like when I am starting out, I don’t have any numbers to look at, so I leave the CPA blank or set it as the same price as my IAP or paid app price. Basically I don’t want the cost per acquisition to exceed the IAP or paid app price because that would mean I am burning money and running at a loss instead of profit.
However after running the campaign for 1-2 weeks and looking at the numbers for each day, I can guess a better CPA and if I think I definitely don’t want to exceed a certain number because it would make me lose money instead of break even/profit, I will set it.
You don’t want to set the CPA too low – at least initially because then you won’t even get any impressions of your ads.
For example:
Looking at one of my ad campaigns right now, I have default CPT of $0.10 (cost per tap as you pay every time someone taps your ad – doesn’t matter whether they download or not). They let you set CPT on a per keyword basis too which overrides the default CPT. NOTE that CPT is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the tap. This means that if you are at a battle with someone else who also wants the same ad space, you can win the battle if your CPT is even a cent higher. You only pay whatever amount it takes to win the battle, not the highest one which you have set your CPT at. So often, your Average CPT will be lesser than what you set it at which is good.
So for this campaign, my default CPT is $0.10 and I have a few keywords with custom CPT of $0.20.
After looking at my numbers for the past few weeks, I see that for most of my keywords, I have Average CPT of $0.15, $0.16, $0.19 and average CPA of $0.15, $0.33, $0.29.
So if I want, after testing it for couple weeks, I can lower the CPA to $0.50 so that I never run it at a loss.
So essentially with $2,000 its possible to have 10,000+ people click on your ad? That seems like a solid conversion rate if at least 1/10th of them download the app.
Depending upon the type of app, your CPT can vary. For me most of them have been about 20 cents. So yes, 10000 taps from $2000 is a good estimate. However – these are taps – not downloads. For downloads, you need to make sure your metadata is on point! Also you need to have monetization is place – IAP, paid apps etc to make sure you are actually making money off of these users which you are spending money to acquire.
How long did it take for you to start seeing impressions? We have pretty competitive keywords so i’m using extremely high CPT. $10+ and i’m still not seeing any impressions. It’s been 24 hours.
If you haven’t setup scheduled ads, it should be quick. I had mine within an hour if I remember right. I would suggest trying for less competitive keywords though.
What’s your experience and tips for driving iOS game app downloads via paid ads platforms like Facebook Ads, Apple Search Ads, Youtube ads, etc…?
No experience but as a iPhone user i often see myself downloading apps while browsing instagram. So I’d assume you’ll be spot on with instagram/snapchat/tiktok or maybe even youtube shorts.
App Store search ads keyword match types
Search Ads involve three different types of keyword matches.
They are ways for you to tell Apple whether you want to bid on keywords exactly as you enter them or more broadly. This is influenced by campaign goals and will ultimately determine campaign results. So you must first understand the different types of keyword matches Apple offers.
Broad Match
Broad match is the default keyword match type. By selecting broad match, you are telling Apple that you want to bid on the keywords you select and other keywords that are broadly related to them.
Broad match includes misspellings, plurals, closely related words, synonyms, related searches, related phrases, and translations.
For example, when you type “Friends,” Apple also considers variations of “Friend,” “Amigo,” “Freind,” and more.
Exact match
Exact match helps you narrow your ad bid spread. By choosing exact match, you’re telling Apple that you want to bid exactly as entered for the selected keyword.
Common misspellings and plural forms will also be taken into account.
For example, when you type “friends,” Apple will consider “friends” and “friends.
Search matching
Search matches are best suited for keyword discovery. By selecting Search Match, you allow Apple to use its metadata to automatically match your app to relevant keywords and search terms.
For Search Match to work, your app’s metadata needs to be up to date and optimized. This means that App Store optimizations have been completed and recently updated. In this way, Apple can easily pull information about your app and generate the best and most relevant keywords.
App Store Search campaign types
When creating an account to start keyword bidding, ASA best practice is to split your keywords into four different campaign types: Generic, Branded and Competitor, and Discovery.
Generic Campaigns
Typically set to broad match, generic campaigns use keywords that are relevant to your app. For example, if you have a fitness app, you should include keywords such as “fitness” or “exercise” in this campaign. The purpose of the general campaign is to attract high intent app store visitors.
Branded campaigns
You will want to use a brand campaign to reach a more specific audience searching for your brand in the App Store, drive reinstalls and brand protection. Your keywords in this campaign will be keywords related to your brand name or a variation thereof. By bidding generously on your branded keywords, you ensure that your competitors don’t take this valuable space away from you.
Competitor activity
Set up exact matches, competitor campaigns to target App Store users who are searching for competitors. Keywords for these types of campaigns include your direct competitor’s name or a variation of their name.
Discovery campaigns
You need to set up a discovery campaign to discover new keywords or find alternative keywords that you are not using in other campaigns.
To maximize the effectiveness of a Discovery campaign, new keywords from Discovery should be added as exact match keywords to the other three campaign types, and all keywords from branded, generic, and competitor campaigns should be added as negative keywords in Discovery.
Best practices for using Apple Search Ads
Getting started with Apple Search Ads isn’t a problem. But you need to make sure you adopt some best practices that will ultimately help you make the most of your investment. Here are some App Store advertising best practices you should follow when using Apple Search Ads.
Review app metadata before launching a campaign
Before launching a new campaign, you’ll want to visit App Store Connect and take a closer look at app metadata. The appearance of your ads will be based on your app’s metadata, and you won’t be able to change it later. Keep in mind that the same ad is unlikely to be shown to every user. Some people may get a simple description of the app, while others will see screenshots and preview videos.
USP-based targeted keywords
This is very important for marketers using ASA Advanced. You need to do some research and identify keywords that will increase installs. For example, if you have a fitness tracking app, use keywords like “fitness tracker” or “diet plan” as keywords. You must understand the search patterns of your audience because it can greatly improve your conversion rate.
You can always expect higher competition with general keywords, but if you can find more specific keywords, they will not only be cheaper to bid on, but will also have a higher conversion rate.
Tip: Use the keyword research in your ASO strategy to understand your options and sync your goals!
Use the 80/20 budget allocation method for App Store promotions
When comparing keywords, you must split your keywords between broad match and exact match. 80% of your spend should go to exact match and the remaining 20% should go to broad match. Both will be used primarily for discovery campaigns to identify keywords that perform better than others.
Exact match keywords will allow you to attract and convert interested users. They will be easier to convert and more likely to generate more revenue. They may cost more, but they will also pay off. Ideally, you should allocate an 80/20 budget to get the maximum return. Once you start generating interest, you can also reduce your budget allocation.
How to leverage your app business within ASO and ASA on iOS app store?
The great thing about Apple Search Ads is that you can use the search match feature to identify new keywords. When Search Match is enabled, your ads are automatically matched to new search terms based on metadata in your App Store listings, information about similar apps of the same type, and other available search data.
The ability to check keyword relevancy is an invaluable part of Apple Search Ads. In just a few hours, you can run a small test campaign to collect data and get a complete picture of which keywords to optimize for in your ASO efforts. By analyzing Tap Through Rate (similar to Click Through Rate on the web), in-store conversion rates, and actual downloads, you can begin to develop a more effective ASO strategy. In addition, you can use attribution tools to explore the LTV of each keyword for campaign analysis.
ASA can help you narrow down your ASO strategy, but it’s not a gold mine; ASO is a long-term strategy, and your goal should be to keep increasing natural downloads. A key learning point is to look at ASA data from a longer-term perspective so you can see the true trends and performance of each keyword.
Apple Search Ads only work if you know how to properly target your keywords. To ensure maximum app visibility and download rates, you need to target specific and general keywords and carefully determine how much you are willing to bid for each keyword. An easy way to find keywords is to use a tool that automatically compiles a list of targeted keywords. You should increase your bids until you reach your cost-per-acquisition target and start winning downloads from popular keywords related to your niche.
Unfortunately, simply outbidding your competitors for high-volume keywords isn’t enough to win the number one spot, because Apple also considers the relevance of your app to the keyword. To ensure you always rank #1, you need to combine winning bids with ASO optimization. Factors that affect your ASO include app name, URL, description, reviews, and ratings.
Source: How to Leverage ASA to Boost Your App Visibility?
So, how should you optimize your Search Ads campaigns for profitability?
1. Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Goal:
The first thing you need to determine is how much you can afford to spend for every Search Ads install, so how much your target CPI (Cost-Per-Install) or Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Goal — as Apple names it — should be. Note the difference in naming here: unlike other networks, Apple uses the word “Acquisition” and not “Install” because they actually only measure when users hit download and not when they have actually fully installed the game (we will hear more on that important difference later in this article).
To do this, if you are already running campaigns on other networks, you know your customer LTV (lifetime value), or how much every user will spend on average in your game.
Let’s say your game net LTV is $6 for iOS users in the United States.
On Apple Search Ads, you can either set your bids based on a Max CPT (Cost-Per-Tap) you are willing to pay or choose a CPA Goal, which means Apple will try to display your ads automatically and maximize conversions. But we don’t recommend that option because, while it will make sure you don’t go above your target CPA, it will limit your impressions quite a lot so you will miss out on several opportunities to convert.
So, for Max CPT, we usually apply a 30% ratio of the LTV of the game we’re promoting, because we normally observe an average 30% conversion rate (from taps to installs) on Search Ads.
In that case, we would be using:
Max CPT Bid = $6 x 30% = $2
Source: Medium
Measuring your ROAS:
Now comes the most important part: What’s the revenue generated from your Search Ads campaigns?
Apple doesn’t track (or share) any detailed activity coming from the Search Ads installs they have provided you. So you will have to use your MMP for that.
Depending on the LTV curve of your game, you’d be looking at your Day 7, 15, 30 etc. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) on a campaign, ad group or keyword level.
Cohort Reports for Search Ads Campaigns in Adjust
Let’s say you use Day-7 as a goal, you will then be doing this calculation:
Day-7 ROAS = Day-7 MMP Revenue / Search Ads Spend
And then compare that your Day-7 ROAS goal. If it’s above that, that’s a good sign and you should keep your campaigns/ad-groups active but make sure you monitor the retention of these users in the long run to validate their good performance.
If it’s below your goal, let’s say by more than 25%, then you should consider pausing or reducing the spend on these ad groups or campaigns.
That’s the formal way of assigning and reporting revenue coming from Search Ads.
But you have to take into consideration the installs that are not seen by your MMP and which may have also generated revenue.
ROAS = ((Revenue) * (1 + LAT Rate x 50%)) / Search Ads Spend
Bid Optimization:
Once you have launched your campaigns, give it a few days and then look at the performance of the ad groups you have created.
The first thing you need to check is if the keywords you have selected convert to installs. If there are ad groups with a Conversion Rate below 25%-20% it means that the keywords you have chosen are either too broad or not relevant. You should then consider pausing or reducing the bid on these ad groups.
On the contrary, for ad groups and keywords that have a high Conversion Rate, for example anything above 30%, you should increase your bid for as long as it’s aligned with your projected ROAS. In order to know how much is necessary, in the Search Ads interface, Apple suggests a bid range to have an indication of how much you should spend to match or beat your competitors. You should adjust your bids for every keyword that are are below the suggested bid ranges (as long as it stays within your target CPA goals).
Many factors affect how your Apple Search Ads Basic app promotions perform, including relevancy, your maximum cost-per-install (max CPI) amount compared to your competitors, and user response to your ad. The following best practices can help improve your app promotion results.
- Review your metadata in App Store Connect to ensure it’s the best representation of your app. Your app title, descriptions, and keywords are all considerations Apple Search Ads uses to assess your app’s relevance for specific search queries, so you should take great care in crafting them. Apple Search Ads Basic also uses the app name, subtitle, description, preview videos, and screenshots approved for your App Store product page to create your ad. Take the time to review your app metadata in App Store Connect before you start using Apple Search Ads Basic.
Review App Store metadata best practices
Note that if you change your App Store metadata, it can take up to 24 hours to be reflected in the ad preview within your account, and up to two hours to be reflected in your ad on the App Store. - Take a look at your ad creative. It can play a key role in your app promotion performance. Because Apple Search Ads uses the app name, subtitle, description, preview videos, and up to the first three screenshots approved for your App Store product page to create your ad, you may want to consider adjusting these assets if your ad isn’t performing well.
- Consider your product page, too, as it can also help drive installs. With three app previews, 10 screenshots, and new text fields, product pages offer more opportunities to showcase your work.
- If your ad isn’t delivering results, try raising your max CPI to increase the likelihood of your ad being shown. You can use the suggested max CPI in your dashboard as a guide to help determine the right amount.
- Consider running your app promotion in all the countries and regions where your app is available. This will give you more opportunities to reach interested customers. Check your monthly budget to make sure you’re reaching as many customers as possible. You may need to increase your budget, especially if you’re running app promotions in multiple countries and regions.
- Make sure you’re using the right business model. The right business model for your app balances your goals with the expectations of key audiences, and can also affect the performance of your app in App Store search, including with Apple Search Ads. If you’ve tried the above and still aren’t seeing results, it’s a good idea to review App Store best practices. Learn more here…
Google Search Ads Optimization Techniques
Tips for Scaling a performing Google Search Campaign
Don’t dedicate an entire campaign for a top-performing keywords.
How long did you “test[ed] simply raising budget” for? Are we talking about a week, month, multiple months?
Here are some other options for you:
- Review your Impression Share and top of page rate metrics (Impr. (Top) % and Impr. (Abs. Top) %). Are these trending in the right direction? Are you losing out due to budget on high-performing campaigns? How do your ads perform when you’re placing above organic search results vs below (aka “Other”)?
- Look at 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows for things like audiences, demographics, and locations. Are there options here that are high-spending but underperforming, and could be excluded? This would allow, moving forward, al of the budget to be spent on better-performing targeting options.
- Consider testing new ad copy. If you can achieve stronger CTR, this allows you to generate traffic within the existing impression volume.
- My preferred setup is to group keywords by a shared intent. I have B2B SaaS clients, so the majority of my campaigns are all focused on very high-intent searches that contain both context (around my clients’ services/solutions/vertical) and intent (keywords matching to search terms including “software”, “platform”, “solutions”, etc). To scale traffic, I’ve created a separate campaign that bids on keywords that contain just the contextual terms, but not the software-intent, with lower (manual) bids, using negative keywords to appropriately filter traffic. Considering splitting out your campaigns/ad groups by high-intent vs low-intent keywords, with budget given to higher performers.
- Example: Let’s say your client offers a software for enterprise businesses to manage their cybersecurity. A high-intent keyword would be something like “enterprise cybersecurity software”, whereas a low-intent keyword would be just “enterprise cybersecurity”. We still require the user to use “enterprise cybersecurity” in some context, but that short-tail keyword does not require any specific intent like looking for a third-party tool/platform.
The keyword “enterprise cybersecurity software” will likely be significantly more expensive, and likely lower search volume/impressions, but has a clear, higher intent. The shorter-tail keyword will get you a larger number of impressions, but has a higher likelihood of leading to potentially lower-quality searches and clicks. I’d recommend starting out with trying to capture the high-intent searches first, but when you’re looking to scale, that’s where I’d add in the low-intent keywords, but separated into their own campaign, or at least a separate ad group.
On average, you spend a good amount of money on Google Ads, but still not worth the money results. So, spending the money without having the proper knowledge is a waste! And spending money with no results hurts, right? Don’t worry! We will tell you how you can get the value of your money. We will discuss tips and tricks to improve your Goggle Ads conversion rates.
Follow the ways below to improve your Google Ads Conversion Rates:
• Lead With an Attractive Offer or Value
The book cover is the Book’s first impression. And, you might have heard- “don’t judge a book by its cover”. Well, that’s exactly what we all do. We take a look at the book cover if it doesn’t please our eyes, we move on to the next.
Similarly, the headline is the first impression of your content. If it doesn’t please the eyes of your visitor, he/she won’t take an action on it. Hence, use some catchy phrases to create an attractive headline that will lead your content.
• Refine your CTAs
You need to tell your visitors what to do, otherwise, they won’t turn act! Yes, that’s true! It’s you who have to direct your website to take an action by generating a need for it.
Studies show that the most used CTAs by top-notch brands are- “get”, “buy”, and “shop”. Phrases like these, create an urge to take action, and that’s what improves your conversion rate.
• Boost your CTRs
Create content copy that can convince a reader to click right through your product. Write blogs or Ad copies that can convince your visitors to click. And for this, understand your audience. Convince them that they are missing something big and your product can fulfill that crack.
Don’t try to hurry them up to buy your product. Remember, in this step you just have to convince them to walk through your content and not buy your product. Use soft tone phrases like “get a quote”, “get more details”, etc.
• Align your Ad with an Accurate Landing Page
The general mistake we do sometimes is not checking up on our landing page. Whether we aligned our ad to the right landing page or not! Or, is the ad redirecting to the correct landing page or order! If you won’t do this right, you can lose a large audience.
For example, Your ad is about American diamond earrings, but the ad is aligned to a bangles landing page. This is not fulfilling the purpose of your Ad, and you will lose your potential customer here only.
Create a landing page for every segment and align them with the Ad properly.
• Work on your Quality Score
When you create or run a Google Ad, your Ad gets a ranking which is called Quality Score. This score is given based on the performance of your product. How much your Ad is impacting the audience, how it is performing in the market, how effective it is, and what value it’s giving out!
All these factors decide your Ad’s quality score.
According to studies, the more the quality score the lesser the overall CTR cost. This quality score can be improved by three factors- the landing page, the CTR, and Ad relevance.
• Don’t Miss out on your Social Proofs
People trust reviews. They are afraid of being the first one to use or buy anything. They look for the assurance and experience of others to rely on! Hence, putting out your social proofs is very important. Include the brands or firms you have worked with, put their reviews, and that will make you look authentic and preferred. This will attract and convince the visitors to be your potential loyal customers.
• Step-On your Competitors
Sometimes, not getting enough conversions via Google can be a targeting issue. And to sort that, you should focus on the audience’s intent. Like, what they are looking to buy, what is their need, etc. And, a clear way of doing this is branded keyword search.
Branded keyword search is when a person looks for something brand specific.
For example: “dresses on Myntra”, “Sports shoes on Reebok”, etc.
When a person will search the above keywords, he/she will not only get the results for the brands above but the Ads of alternatives too. That’s what stepping on your competitors is! Run your Ads on the brand keyword research of other competitive brands. I know, it’s something that sounds illegal but isn’t!
• Enhance your Landing Page
Optimizing Ads is not just enough! You need to work on everything else. One of the major things is the landing page. By having visitors directed to your landing page, you will have a task to fulfill what a visitor is expecting from you. Your landing page should have all the information needed in an organized manner. Don’t fill it heavily, but keep it on point.
Put product videos or video testimonials of the product or service, they tend to have greater chances to hook your visitors. And, the videos can help you better with conversion rates.
• Run Mobile-Friendly Ads
With the world going mobile, it’s important that you run mobile-friendly Ads. Keep the dimensions of your posters or Ad copies that can fit a mobile screen efficiently. Make it easy to access for the visitors. The only-desktop specific Ads will not look good on the mobile screen, and you might lose a great set of audience as most people access things through their mobiles.
Hence, move with the trend.
• Use Remarketing
We often forget how important remarketing is! Many times, a customer leaves the product in the cart or wishlist and forgets about it! Remarketing can help you catch back such customers. Look for Ads that performed great and are older. Run then again, they will lead your old visitors as well as create new leads as well.
Google Ads can be a whooping asset to convert your visitors into customers. You just need to do things right! If you will implement the above tips in the right manner the Google Ads conversion rate will definitely go up!
If anyone of you bright people has more tips to add, please feel free to add your opinions and suggestions. It’s always great to learn.
Read More: Conversion Rate Optimization Services
Another way to get good quality score on your ads these days is to write really awkward headlines that include the keywords, and then pinning any discounts. Kinda sucks but it’s been working better for me than traditional CTAs.
Quiz1: Jim Has Created A Google Search Ad With A Bid Of $5. Two Other Advertisers In An Auction Have Bids Of $2.50 And $2. How Much Would Jim Pay For The First Spot In The Auction?
Answer1: $2.51
Quiz2: True Or False? Google Audiences Are Updated On Every Impression, So Advertisers Can Reach Only The Most Relevant Consumers On YouTube Answer.
Answer2: True
Quiz3: On which social network should you share content most frequently? Correct Answer
Answer3: Twitter
Quiz4: You Want To Find New, High-Value Customers Using Their Data. Which Audience Solution Should You Use
Answer4: Similar Audiences
Meaning of key terms used in this blog:
Avg CPA: The average amount you’ve been charged for a conversion from your ad. Average cost per action (CPA) is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the total number of conversions.
- For example, if your ad receives 2 conversions, one costing $2.00 and one costing $4.00, your average CPA for those conversions is $3.00.
- Average CPA is based on your actual CPA (the actual amount you’re charged for a conversion from your ad), which might be different than your target CPA (the amount you’ve set as your desired average CPA if using Target CPA bidding).
- Use performance targets to set an average CPA target for all campaign in a campaign group.
Avg CPT: This is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a tap on your ad.
Your default max CPT bid applies across all keywords in your ad group unless you specify a max CPT bid at the keyword level.
When calculating the amount of your max CPT bid:
- Decide what amount you can afford to spend on a new customer or action. Let’s say it’s $2.50 (U.S.).
- Estimate the percentage of customers who tap your ad and who you think will download your app or take your desired action. In this case, you estimate 40%.
- Calculate what you can afford to pay up to 40% of $2.50 (U.S.) — or $1.00 (U.S.) — for each tap. Therefore, set your starting default maximum CPT bid to $1.00 (U.S.).
Avg CPM: Average cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) is the average amount you pay per one thousand ad impressions on the App Store.
CR: The conversion rate (CR) is the total number of installs received within a period divided by total number of taps within the same period.
Dimensions: A dimension is an element of your Apple Search Ads campaign that can be included in a custom report. For example, campaign ID or CPT bid. Dimensions appear as rows in your custom reports.
Impression Share: The share of impressions your ad(s) received from the total impressions served on the same search terms or keywords, in the same countries and regions. Impression share is displayed as a percentage range, such as 0-10%, 11-20%, and so on. This metric is only available in predefined Impression Share custom reports and on the Recommendations page.
Impressions: The number of times your ad appeared in App Store search results within the reporting time period.
Installs: The total number of conversions from new downloads and redownloads resulting from an ad within the reporting period. Apple Search Ads installs are attributed within a 30-day tap-through window. Note that total installs may not match totals of LAT Off and LAT On installs, as additional downloads may come from customers using iOS 14 or later.
LAT Off Installs: Downloads from users who are using iOS 13 or earlier and have not enabled Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) on their device.
LAT On Installs: Downloads from users who are using iOS 13 or earlier and have enabled Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) on their device.
Match Source: This identifies whether your impression was the result of Search Match or a bidded keyword.
New Downloads: These represent app downloads from new users who have never before downloaded your app.
Rank: How your app ranks in terms of impression share compared to other apps in the same countries and regions. Rank is displayed as numbers from 1 to 5 or >5, with 1 being the highest rank. This metric is only available in predefined Impression Share reports and on the Recommendations page.
Redownloads: Redownloads occur when a user downloads your app, deletes it, and downloads the same app again following a tap on an ad on the App Store, or downloads the same app on an additional device.
Search Popularity: The popularity of a keyword, based on App Store searches. Search popularity is displayed as numbers from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most popular.
Search Term: Search terms are keywords and phrases that people have used to find the particular type of app they’re looking for.
Spend: The sum of the cost of each customer tap on your ad over the period of time set for your reporting.
Taps: The number of times your ad was tapped by users within the reporting time period.
TTR: The tap-through rate (TTR) is the number of times your ad was tapped by customers divided by the total impressions your ad received.
Keywords: Keywords are relevant words or terms someone may use when searching for an app like yours on the App Store. With Apple Search Ads Advanced, you bid on keywords to trigger and include your ad within relevant App Store search results — so when an App Store customer types in a search query that uses one of your keywords, your ad could appear.
Apple Search Ads knows a lot about your app and its genre, and will provide a list of keyword recommendations to save you time when you add keywords to a search results ad group. You can also add keywords of your own, and Apple Search Ads will suggest a further set of keywords related to the ones you’ve provided. To add any of them to your ad group, simply click the plus sign next to them.
I’ve managed +$10M in paid media over the last 8 years. Here are a few “less mainstream” FREE tools/websites/extensions I use. Hope this helps!
1. Adveronix
Adveronix is a handy Google Sheets add-on that allows you to export data from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or any other channel automatically into a spreadsheet daily. You can then connect this spreadsheet to Google Data Studio and have a free connector for most media channels.
Polymer Search has been one of my latest finds and a beneficial tool for creative analysis (and a few other things). For example, I usually test new creatives on Facebook Ads using dynamic creative testing campaigns.
I can then simply export my Facebook Ads data into a spreadsheet, connect it to Polymer Search, and immediately see which creative elements are working the best and which ones aren’t. The Auto-Explainer tool uses AI to immediately sort “Above Average” and “Below Average” creatives.
There’s also a ton more this tool can do – massive potential for media buyers.
3. BuiltWith
Before taking on any new client, one of my first steps is always to look at their website.
Suppose I don’t see anything like Klaviyo, Google Analytics, the Facebook Pixel, or any other marketing-related tech. In that case, this is usually a sign the client might be in a too early stage for me to help them out.
BuiltWith also helps you look into competitors and see what sorts of software they’re using.
The Ad Creative Bank is one of my top sources to find creative inspiration for new ads. It’s pretty simple: just look into the type of ads you want to create and browse through their well-organized library of great-looking ads.
5. Unicord Ads
Same as above, with the difference that you can sort by different industry/niche.
I find the ad quality slightly lower than Ad Creative Bank, but still a great library of ads to discover new brands and find inspiration for yourself!
6. One Click Extensions Manager
If you’re anything like me, your Google Chrome browser has +10 extensions cluttering your view. In short, One Click Extensions Manager allows you to organize all extensions into one single icon near your search tab, which makes everything feel a little more organized.
VidTao.com YouTube ads searchable by adspend over time. Perfect for modelling and competitive research.
And not forgetting:
Facebook Ad Library : Shouldn’t be overlooked.
Surferseo – it have free tier with a bit of tools
lsigraph.com – when you have no idea of keywords
I’ve audited a dozen Facebook campaigns this month. Here’s the common mistakes I’m seeing people make:
Most of these mistakes were from ad accounts that are in the early testing stage and spending under $100/day. The majority of these mistakes are related to what NOT to do during the testing stage in an ad account. I had a few people get audits that were spending higher amounts ($500/day and above) but their situation was very specific and the solution I provided was also specific so it most likely wouldn’t add much value to share that scenario.
- Multiple interests and/or behaviors in one ad set (aka stacked audiences)
Doing this defeats the purpose of testing because you don’t know which interest is bringing in the results. Many other reasons to not do this during testing including you could have a great interest stacked with a bad one and that could skew the potential results. There are some instances where maybe it would be okay to have 2 stacked interests if the audiences are very small, but what I was seeing people do often is stack over 10 interests and behaviors into a single ad set.
2. Using CBO (campaign budget optimization) too early
CBO is not recommended for testing stage in Facebook ads. I’ve seen a couple of people do fine with CBO for testing but it logically doesn’t make sense because you don’t have much control over the budget allocation. This is why ad set budget is better for testing because when you want to put $20/day into one and set and $20/day into another, you know that the test is even. CBO will most likely not even out that budget. Even with setting ad set budget minimums and all of those constraints, which is sort of redundant. Facebook will recommend doing CBO by giving you messages inside of the ads manager but most of what Facebook says in their ads manager is not based off your current situation. They don’t know that you are in a testing phase and don’t have enough data to do a CBO, they just see that you are trying to spend a certain amount per day and they recommend CBO. Facebook’s ad manager isn’t smart enough to say “I see you are testing headline combinations – you should switch to ad set budget” or “I see you are trying to scale your store – you should use a CBO campaign”. You should use CBO once you’ve properly tested at least 4 audiences with ad set budget optimization.
3. Creating Lookalike audiences with low-quality data as a hail Mary
Yes, lookalike audiences are pretty neat. When you don’t have enough purchases, there are other source data pools that you can create them with. Video views, website traffic, page engagement, etc. The problem is you are pretty much creating a lookalike audience based on people who DON’T buy. Especially if you don’t have anyone buying your product. There is probably something wrong with your targeting as it is and you need to stick to interest targeting and optimizing for purchase conversions. I’ve seen people run a traffic campaign, get a few hundred clicks, and zero sales. This is because you are getting very low-quality traffic from Facebook and creating a lookalike is just going to find more people similar to that low-quality data. If you have a sort of “niche product” and you think that you can’t target them based on interests then you are not thinking outside of the box enough to find interests to test (more on finding the right interests in a later section).
4. Spreading too little per ad set and running multiple ad sets (I’ve seen as little as $3/day budgets)
For the campaigns that I audited, I gave them each a different recommended daily spend per ad set depending on their budget, niche, etc. so I don’t want to say that you should spend X amount per ad set, but $3/day is way too low. If you have a small budget, then you are better off testing less and spending more per ad set. So if you are doing $3/day to over 10 different ad sets to try and test 10 different audiences, you are going to get better data from spreading that same amount across 2-3 different audiences.
5. Interests narrowing and exclusions
I’ve seen some exclusions that make sense like excluding AliBaba and dropshipping whenever they were getting comments on the ads, but I’ve seen this done where the audience they were targeting needed to have interest in fashion AND apparel. Doing this is trying to target better than Facebook which is usually not a good idea to do unless you’ve tested both audiences on their own and if they are different categories of interests (music taste w/ hobby, industry interest w/ behavior targeting, etc.). At a testing stage this will cause CPM to be higher than needed.
6. Trying to target high-income people
This is on par with the previous mistake, but I wanted to make this its own blurb. Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean they are going to shop at your store. You aren’t going to have better luck targeting the top 10% of zip codes based on income for your $20 sunglasses. Higher income people resonate better with name brand products that have credibility behind them so you would probably need to build up credibility, stellar branding, and high-quality products before attempting to target high-income people on Facebook.
7. Targeting interests that are too obvious
Your target demographic has many layers to their personality and social media behavior. When you sell a certain product and you only target the interest that is literally named the same thing that your product is, then you are limiting yourself to interests that your competition is probably targeting as well. Some of the best interests I’ve ran ads towards with Facebook ads are two or three degrees of separation from the product. I’ve sold supplements that were geared towards people who engage in certain activity, so instead of just targeting “supplement” I targeted “activity” interests. I’ve targeted music interests based on certain elements of a product that I’ve ran ads for, and the product wasn’t a music related product at all but people who liked that product typically listened to a certain type of music as well.
8. Focusing on cheap link clicks instead of purchases
The amount that you pay for a click does not matter if you are getting little to no sales. You want to pay more for expensive clicks from people that Facebook deems as likely to make a purchase or whatever action you are wanting them to do. I’ve audited a few campaigns where they ran two ad sets and the owner of the ad account concluded that “Ad Set 1” was better than “Ad Set 2” because it got clicks for half the cost. But neither of them got a sale, so neither is better than the other. Or I’ve audited campaigns where the store owner says “this ad did well, it got over 1,000 clicks” but it got zero sales. Typically this was done with an improper campaign setup anyway so none of those clicks were going to convert either way.
9. Not testing ads/audiences long enough
One campaign that I audited turned off an ad after just a few hours of letting it run because Facebook was spending the money too fast. I recommend letting a test run for at least 5 days. If the ad is setup properly then you will have some good days, some bad days, and some okay days. I’ve seen many times where the best day ever is right after a very bad day. Know that a bad day is still data for Facebook because it is learning what NOT to do.
10. Hanging on to an audience that stopped working
Audiences, ads, and campaigns can eventually stop working after a certain amount of time, regardless of how well they worked at one time. There are many reasons for this to happen which would be a whole post on its own, but if you’re struggling to get an audience to work then just move on and try again in the future. I audited a campaign that was running ads to a specific lookalike audience that was setup very odd and it wasn’t producing them very good results recently anyway, so I obviously recommended that they turn it off and try setting it up a different way that would be more likely to work. The user did not take the advice because that was their best performing audience many months ago. This is why you want to be diverse with your targeting so that when an audience stops working, you don’t cling onto it like overly attached girlfriend meme.
11. Setting up a funnel that is filled with low quality data
Running traffic campaigns is just going to get you a ton of traffic that is most likely not going to turn into a purchase. You are more likely to get a purchase from 100 high quality clicks than you would 1,000 low-quality clicks. Traffic campaigns give you the absolute bottom of the barrel traffic that Facebook has to offer. What I see people do is setup a funnel with traffic campaigns at the top, and retargeting at the bottom with a campaign optimized for conversions. This makes sense in theory, but in practice you are just continuing to retarget the low-quality traffic. And it just costs too much money to spend going after those low-quality clicks over and over again when you could just go straight for the purchase conversions campaign traffic. Those are the ones that are more likely to purchase without needing to see the ads 5 times. There are a lot of impulse buyers within those campaigns. Do this even if your store has zero purchases.
12. Worrying about 4 steps ahead when they are still on step 1
“I’m spending $50/day but what should I expect when I am scaling and spending $1,000/day?” That is going to be different for everybody but this is one of those situations where they are trying to solve a problem that hasn’t even happened yet and you’re essentially taking focus away from the step you are at right now and projecting it into a future scenario that may or may not happen.
13. Thinking the cost per purchase that they got on their own is what they’ll continue to see
If you are doing things incorrectly with Facebook ads, then you should expect to see results that are not very good. It’s one thing to have a frame of mind like “I’m not getting good results on my own but I think they could be better” as compared to “I’ve been running ads for two weeks with little to no experience and I’m paying too much to get a customer so Facebook isn’t worth it”.
3 Lessons After Spending $350K Since iOS 14.5 Hit
1. Account Structure
For me, it feels as if Facebook likes to have the account even more structured than previously. I rarely ever now use Cost Caps because of the delayed sales coming in and generally tend to have an account structure like this:
1 – TOF Scaling Campaign
2 – TOF Testing Campaign
3 – MOF/BOF Campaign (Try combining MOF/BOF in 1 Campaign if possible)
All in all, I try to consolidate my spend into as few campaigns as possible, and I still leverage Broad Targeting (No targeting at all). It has been working quite well for me on most accounts.
If you’re spending less than $500/d, I’d say Look a likes also are impacted. They are not getting as many data points as they were getting before, and therefore generally now have a lower value than before.
If you’re at the sub $500/d range, try Big Interests or just Broad Targeting if your look a like audiences are struggling.
2. Retargeting
Retargeting has changed a lot for me.
Especially at lower budget accounts, I broadened that retargeting window. Where I previously had 14D ATC, it is now 60 days. I also often combine multiple retargeting audiences, such as Add to Cart and View Content.
All in all, I try to have as few exclusions as possible since even if you e.g., exclude purchasers, those people see the ads. I’ve noticed this because a lot of new TOF Ads are getting comments from people who bought within the last 1-2 weeks from the brand.
So, with exclusions not being as effective, you want to prevent overlaps in retargeting audiences, which is why I consolidate.
3. Patience
Overall, tracking purchases has never been more challenging, and it feels to me as if Facebook is only tracking 40%-60% of all purchases from Facebook. This is why it is now super essential to look at your overall ROAS (Revenue / Ad Spend)
If your revenue increases when you scale up, but your ads manager is not showing up any purchases, they most likely come from your ads (Unless you’re running a big email promotion, got featured on a big magazine, or something like that, of course)
Purchases tend to show up in bulk for me in the ads manager after a few days, so don’t freak out if you see a low ROAS on your side, as long as the revenue is there. Make fewer day-to-day changes and keep an eye on results for a longer time.
Insights From Doing $150K+ a Day in Revenue on Facebook Ads
March 2022 Update on this: For those just seeing this now, Facebook has become significantly harder, but the general strategy here still works. And that’s testing LOTS of creatives, not fancy hacks. We’ve since started spending over $10K+ per day on Tik Tok as well and it’s doing WAY better than facebook for us.
What’s up everyone! Just wanted to drop in and share some insights into what it takes to manage $20K-60K+ a day in spend on facebook in DTC ecom. (I’ve done $150K-250K revenue days on facebook, personal best in terms of ROAS was a bit over $200K in revenue at about $60K in spend on a single one of our brands, not including black friday which was insane)
Just a caveat here, how I run ads might not work for you, especially if you’re super low in spend. Different brands require different strategies, and most importantly, my own strategies are constantly developing. How I test and scale on facebook now is completely different than how it was 6 months ago for example. Also another caveat, some of the tactics we use are really only necessary at a super high level as you’ll see here, if you’re a mom and pop shop they won’t be necessary (for example running multiple facebook pages which I’ll get into).
When I first got started in online advertising, I was always searching for the ‘perfect’ way to run ads through shitty gurus, and honestly there is NO perfect way. I recommend learning the basics and devising your own strategy, which is what I ended up doing. Another thing, at lowish spend (less than $5K-10K+ a day I would say, you’re usually going to get decent fluctuations in performance day to day on facebook. Consistency on facebook comes from high spend and feeding the algo as many data points as possible.
I’m fortunate enough to be in a network of the most elite DTC brand owners so I’ve accumulated a ton of knowledge about what works at this level of scale, but this game still requires constant learning! This isn’t set in stone but its just what I’ve found works for me, so here it goes.
Consistent naming conventions are super important for analyzing data in ad reporting at a glance. You can figure out your own but here are mine if you’re looking for a quick idea:
TOF: Prospecting (Top of Funnel)
BOF: Retargeting
T: Testing
S: Scaling
SS: Super Scaling (these campaigns are typically $2K-10K daily budget)
X.XX numbers at the end of campaign names or ad sets names: date of launch, i.e. 5.15 is May 15
Campaign name example: SS – TOF – CBO – Beast – 6.05
Targeting – Countries – Age – Placement – Attribution – Date of launch
E.g. Broad – US + CA – 18+ – Auto – 7dc1dv – 3.15
e.g. INT – Theme parks – US – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 3.24
E.g. LLA – Lookalike (US, 10%) – 2+ Purchase 180 Days – US – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 2.16
Brand – FB Page – video/image number – ad copy number – lander/advertorial number – post ID – date of launch
E.g.
PP – vv100 – adc49 – lp3 – 123434341834813 – 8.08
PP – p3 – vv100 – adc72 – lp53 – 123434341834813 – 8.08
Testing random interests found in facebook audience insights, similar interests to winning interests, etc using best 2-4 post ID’s to “feed” the pixel data
Audience insights is phasing out so this might not be useful in the future
Small budget ad sets of $30-50
Can dupe winners out 2x in same campaign at slightly higher budget of $50-60
I do this with lookalikes too but I do not run interests or lookalikes with any real budget whatsoever nowadays. I literally run all creative testing and scaling with completely wide open targeting
Phase 1 testing campaign
All new videos/images get launched here
I like to do them in batches of 3-4 new videos/images at a time in a single broad ad set with the budget set to 1.5-2x AOV
Broad targeting (US + CA, 18+ so we determine how effective the creatives truly are without being skewed by very good lookalikes/interests etc. In the case of more niche products, can try broad interest targeting, like interest ‘fitness’ if selling fitness apparel or ‘coffee’ if selling coffee product, with detailed targeting expansion checked ON)
Using best copy variation, best offer, best lander/advertorial
Winners graduate to testing phase 2
Phase 2 testing campaign
Take each winning winning creative from phase 1 and put it into its own broad ad set in this second campaign, testing 4-5 different ad copy angles (separate ad), still using best lander
E.g. ad set naming convention:
img192 – Broad – US + CA – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 3.02
Means img192 is the constant image across the 4 ads, with 4 different copy
Winning ad copy variants graduates to step 3
Phase 3 testing campaign
Here’s what differentiates us from most ecom brands. We test a TON of advertorials, like 3-5 new advertorials a month focused on different angles. Seriously at scale this is what separates winners from losers. In this campaign I’ll also test running direct to our top sales lander as well as one of the ads. We NEVER run direct to a shopify store, we have a subdomain with dedicated landing pages/advertorials that we run to with custom checkout that converts MUCH higher and has a much higher AOV with it’s upsells.
Take winning video/images + copy combo and test 3-5 different landers/advertorials as mentioned
E.g. ad set naming convention:
vv65 – adc220 – Broad – US + CA – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 3.21
Denotes that vv5 and adc220 were the winning variables from previous test, now testing 3-4 different landers/adverts with these two winning combos
By now the creative has run through 3 different testing campaigns/phases. If still performing, it can be moved to bigger budget testing to see its scaling potential
Can also be moved to optional step 4 for generating more winning post ID’s
Also optional: Winner of this test can be moved back to step 2, testing more ad copy focused around the advertorial if a specific advertorial won during this test
Optional step 4
This is another tactic that I don’t see many bigger brands using. In this campaign I’ll take the winning ads from the previous steps, and re-create them on 3-4 different facebook pages that aren’t our main brand page. These are ‘blog’ style pages. For example the name of one of the pages if you own a furniture store might be “Home Decor Insider”. What you don’t want to do is create fake influencer pages like “Katie’s Home’s” or something like that as that’s not allowed.
Take the winning video/image + copy + lander/advert combo and test it on 3-4 different facebook pages to generate more winning post ID’s as mentioned.
The point of this is multi-fold:
Generate as many winning post id’s as possible because at scale you’ll need them
Distributes negative feedback score away from your main brand page (negative feedback can become an issue at scale, especially last year with covid shipping delays)
Different pages perform differently in the auction, some page names may resonate with people more and get cheaper cpc’s and cpm’s.
As you can see here the point in all this testing is generating as many winning post ID’s as possible.
BPA meaning best performing ads
This campaign is for testing all the winning post ID’s from steps 1-4 at higher budgets.
Like to do them in ad sets with batches of 2-4 ads
Also broad ad sets, but can also try with different LLA’s or broad interests
Budget 1.5-3x AOV, and scale it but dupe. I.e. start the ad set at $300, if doing well over the course of 3 days or so, dupe out at double $600. From here you’ll get a sense of how it does at higher budgets. Sometimes it can do very well in the smaller 1-4 step testing, but falls flat here. If it was getting decent metrics in testing, but falls flat here, you can try duplicating the ad set and trying it again, or testing with a couple different audiences.
DCT seems to work better with lower CPA products, or requires a very high budget for higher CPA products
I haven’t had much success with dynamic creatives for testing, and especially now with the ios update facebook doesn’t show in breakdowns which creative variables are getting the purchases so they seem essentially worthless.
If i were to do creative testing for DCT I would do something like:
One broad ad set for each new video/image
$100-300 budget
1x new video/image, 2 best copy + 1 new copy, 1 best headline + 1 new headline
Pull winning post ID’s out, follow testing steps 3-4 above to test different landers/adverts/offers/fb pages
What i DO like dynamic creative for lately is time sensitive sales, like black friday where I don’t have a ton of time to test stuff. What I usually do is toss in a ton of my existing winning videos/images/copy/headlines (I might just add a black friday sale specific line to the top of the ad copy) running to my best advertorial/lander and let it rip at about $1000 a day budget. If it does good after 1 day I’ll duplicate it out into a cost cap/bid cap at $5K-10K a day or whatever
This is a CBO with 5-7 ad sets, each ad set is a separate angle containing winning ads from the above campaigns, that get added to their respective angle ad set. Budget is about $1K per day for me. All ad sets wide open broad targeting
Here’s the fun part. My methods of scaling nowadays have evolved with what works on facebook. The good thing is with this level of spend I learn quickly what is or what does not work on facebook anymore so it keeps me current. I have a few different scaling campaign structures that I’m currently running simultaneously. This is what I’m finding works right now:
Lowest cost CBO -> 1 ad set (completely Broad) -> Best 6-10 post ID’s from testing campaigns. I’ll add new post ID’s/turn off ads if performance is on a decline over a week period. I will increase the budget by 20-30% a day if performance has been consistently good over a 2-3 day period.
Same as above, except this campaign is made up entirely of non-brand page post ID’s from the page testing campaigns
^ These campaigns are both often running at $2-5K+ a day
I duplicate the best ad sets 3x from the CBO angle testing campaign into a separate ABO campaign, each running at a different bid. Ad set one’s bid cap is set to target CPA + 25%. So if my target cpa for example is $50, the bid cap would be set to $62.5. Ad set two is set to +50% ($75) and ad set 3 is set to +100% ($99.99, I round down in this case as my theory is if i set the bid to $100, I’ll be put into a higher tiered auction pool and may get outbid, dont quote me on this lol)
I set budgets at about $1K-5K per ad set here. And because you can have one of these campaigns for each angle, you can see how quickly scale can build up here.
Same as above, but the cost caps for this campaign will be +15%, +25% and +50%
4 completely broad ad sets duplicate of each other, all with the same cost cap. This campaign contains the best 6-12 post ID’s overall from all testing campaigns. You’ll have to play with the cost cap here to get it to spend properly. This campaign is generally a big one for me usually with a $10K daily budget. I’ll also have a minimum ad set spend of about 3-5x the CPA set for each ad set
The point in having so many scaling campaigns is multi-fold:
Prevents reliance on a single scaling campaign on poor days. For example one or two of these campaigns might do mediocre one day, but the rest are crushing and make up for it
Optimizes differently and hits different points in the auction by utilizing both CBO and ABO
If you want to go crazy you can also take these exact scaling campaigns and scale them across multiple accounts as well. For that $200K day I had $10K+ cost cap campaigns scaled across like 4 different accounts.
And that’s it! Like I said this is not end all be all of running ads, just what I’ve evolved to do after spending high budget day in and day out for single brands
The most important thing about scaling with this level of spend and what separates the brands who do great online and those who don’t is content. We’re testing about 10-15 NEW video ads per WEEK + variations of winning videos on top of that (different hooks for example)
Audience “hacking” is no longer really a thing and hasn’t been for a while. I don’t run any interests at scale for the most part and lookalikes I barely use nowadays either (they worked great last year up until Q3-Q4). literally just wide open 18+ targeting. broad targeting might not work as well if you have a super niche brand
It’s true that nowadays facebook has certainly become a lot more difficult. We aren’t spending as much on it compared to last year (though still a lot and it’s our primary DTC revenue driver still), we’re trying to crack other traffic sources to diversify for cold traffic, especially with Tik Tok, Youtube, GDN and Snapchat. Snap is spending about $3K-5K a day at so-so ROAS.
How to structure your entire Facebook ad campaign (From prospecting to retargeting)
Having a defined structure and strategy is essential to a successful Facebook ad campaign.
I run an ads agency and one of the biggest mistakes I see with Facebook ads is a complete lack of structure. Many business owners and advertisers treat Facebook ads like darts, throwing hail Mary’s at the board and hoping for a favorable outcome. This is especially apparent when it comes to scaling, I think this is what people struggle with most.
In this post I will give a complete overview of how to structure your Facebook ads, from TOF prospecting to BOF retargeting.
Quick disclaimer, this is just a general overview of strategy and structure. Every ad account should be approached differently and it’s important to tailor your strategy to your brand.
This is what it should look like from a birds-eye view:
TOF – 1 Testing Campaign & 1 Scaling Campaign
MOF- Retargeting Campaign for Soft Interest (Landing page view, video views etc)
BOF – Retargeting Campaign for Heavy Interest (ATC, IC etc)
BOF Post Purchase (Optional) – This is brand dependent and isn’t applicable for all. This is post-purchase retargeting.
TOF – Testing and Scaling
This stage of the funnel should ideally be split into two campaigns, it may require more with bigger accounts.
This entire stage of the funnel only involves cold audiences, a majority of your budget should be allocated to TOF.
Testing
The first campaign is the testing campaign. It’s important to test EVERYTHING. This campaign should be ABO and every ad set should be allocated an equal daily spend. Test audiences and creatives for 1 week, kill ad sets that aren’t performing, winning ad sets and and creatives will be moved to the scaling campaign.
It’s also possible to scale ad sets vertically in the testing campaign. However, be careful to not get overzealous as you risk sending the ad set back into learning. To scale vertically, slowly increase the ad set budget by 10%-20% every couple of days.
Scaling
All your winning ad sets from the testing campaign must be duplicated into the scaling campaign. Sometimes ad sets will perform vastly different when duplicated so this is why we also scale vertically in the testing campaign. Sometimes it may just be a matter of duplicating the ad set twice before it performs. This is a result of Facebook’s learning phase always being different.
Now, this campaign should ideally be CBO as your goal is to maximise results. You should still be introducing new ad sets from your testing campaign, some people even introduce new ad sets directly to the scaling campaign. At this stage of the funnel, keep an eye on frequency as you don’t want to risk audience fatigue. It’s important to keep introducing new creatives to combat audience fatigue.
The TOF campaign should include both cold interest audiences and cold LLA audiences. As I said, test everything. It’s also important to start with logical audiences. Once you start getting traction you can begin introducing some more obscure interests.
Your copy at this stage should also be problem/solution focused, you are selling your product at this stage.
MOF – Retargeting Soft Interest
This stage of the funnel will only be effective if your cold campaigns were optimised for purchases, otherwise, you will be wasting money retargeting low-quality audiences.
The targeting for this stage is simple. It’s important that you exclude audiences that you will be targeting later down the funnel, such as ATCs, ICs, and Purchases.
The copy is really important at this stage of the funnel. You have already somewhat sold them on the product, hence why they clicked. I’ve found that trust-building copy and creatives are effective. Customer reviews/testimonials can be leveraged to build trust with your audience and convince them that your product delivers on what it promises, or at least, has a real customer base. People like to follow the herd, convince them that the herd buys your product.
Some advertisers skip this stage of the funnel completely, or combine it with the bottom of funnel retargeting. This is ok, but I like structure and separating the campaigns is much more orderly. It also allows you to ensure copy and creative is consistent with the funnel stage.
BOF – Retargeting Heavy Interest
This is the campaign that should provide you with the best results in terms of ROAS and CPA. However, as the audience will be much smaller, the daily ad spend will be relatively low.
It’s important that you exclude the MOF audiences, as well as purchasers.
Creative and copy should involve a strong CTA. This audience has already been involved in the purchase process and thus, have shown strong interest in your product. We often use discount codes at this stage as a CTA.
You can also get creative with your copy. Remember, this audience already knows your brand and product.
BOF Post Purchase – Optional
This is only applicable for brands with multiple products for sale. Only a very small budget should be allocated to this campaign.
Again, this audience is already very familiar with your brand so use this to your advantage.
As mentioned in the beginning, this is just a basic structure and there are many variations. It’s important that you take your own situation into account when setting up your Facebook ads.
I hope this post has been helpful, it’s not as granular as my previous posts but I think it’s important that people understand how to structure an entire Facebook ad strategy.
Top 10 CPM’s most expensive/cheapest Facebook
Here are the top 10 most expensive CPM’s for February-March 2022:
Australia – $19.57
Denmark – $18.98
Norway – $18.19
United States – $17.26
Singapore – $15.43
Israel – $14.68
New Zealand – $14.23
United Kingdom – $12.40
Canada – $11.86
Sweden – $11.71
Here are the top 10 cheapest CPM’s for February-March 2022:
Uzbekistan – $0.06
Belarus – $0.09
Kyrgyzstan – $0.16
Tajikistan – $0.16
Turkmenistan – $0.21
Kazakhstan – $0.22
Guinea-Bissau – $0.41
India – $0.41
Azerbaijan – $0.42
Wallis and Futuna – $0.43
Your poor performing Facebook Ads is not as simple to fix as you probably think it is…
If you are experiencing poor results with your Facebook Ads and have a “quick fix” in mind, please read this post before you attempt to fix it.
When you create Facebook ad campaigns, you know that there are just so many different ways that it can be set up.
Like a dozen different campaign objectives… Many conversion optimization options… Hundreds (maybe thousands, idk) of interest you can target… Lookalike audiences… The different platforms you can place your ad on… Video vs. image… Square vs. rectangle… Long copy vs. short copy…
And the list goes on and on.
So whenever you launch a campaign on Facebook and it isn’t working after 5-7 days, you can see how many different things can be adjusted in an attempt to fix it.
I’ve worked on hundreds of ad campaigns on Facebook and have had thousands of conversations about Facebook ads with either my clients or with people who are needing help running their ads and they come to me for consulting or to have me personally launch and scale their ads properly. Sometimes they will tell me what they think is causing their issues and what they say ALWAYS falls into two categories. They either say “I have no idea” or they say that they think the fix is just one thing like “I just need better targeting” or “my ads don’t get enough likes” or “I’m just not sure how much my daily budget is, that’s my main problem”
And I’ve made the mistake of taking their word for it so when I dive into their ad account, I go in with the expectation of just making that easy fix and everything else in the ad account being setup properly. Just fix their targeting or budgeting and it’ll all be smooth sailing from here. Nope. There are always many more problems I see as I go in their ad strategy and setup.
I’m going to go a bit deep here… people often emulate this type of thinking with a lot of things in life that are big problems but think the solution is super simple. When people need to lose weight, they’ll say “If I could afford healthy food and a gym membership, I would be in great shape” but there are so many other problems like their consistency or workout routine… their opinion of what “healthy food” is could be inaccurate. Get them free unlimited healthy food and free gym membership and they’ll still be out of shape. And people think “if I had a million dollars, I would be happy with my life” but then they win the lottery and are still miserable.
Maybe there is some sort of psychological pattern that people do to themselves to feel less overwhelmed with their problems? I’m not an expert in that area!
Here’s the point I’m trying to make: the fix for your low performing ads is MUCH more than just one single small little fix. It’s either a lot more little fixes or one big fix.
If I dive into your Facebook ad account and I see horrible campaign structure, improper budgeting, confusing ads, and terrible targeting… turning on “target people connected to Wi-Fi” is NOT going to fix your campaign. Find the “perfect interest” to target won’t fix it either. But this is the type of thinking that people have that I talk to with broken ads.
When it comes to fixing broken Facebook campaigns, all of the solutions fall into two main categories, each having their own criteria that MUST be met.
The categories
Campaign structure
Product (or offer)
The criteria that both must be met for a winning ad campaign
The campaign structure must cater to what Facebook prefers
The product must cater to what your target demographic prefers
Some things do overlap a little bit into both categories. For example, the ad design needs to be social media friendly so that Facebook doesn’t throttle your reach with high CPM and your ad must cater to your target demographic by being easy for them to understand what you are selling. So that’s a little bit of both Facebook and target demographic in that situation. And then in the scenario where your product can’t go against Facebook’s ad policy is clearly something that must cater to Facebook’s preferences.
I could write a book going over all of the things that fall into these categories that will fix a failing ad campaign, but here are a few real examples I’ve seen inside of ad campaigns over the last few weeks.
1. Budget spread too thin among ad sets and/or ads
An ad account I started working on last week was using dynamic ads with as many ad variations as possible. Maxed out number of creatives, maxed out number of ad copy, and headlines. The amount that they were spending on this dynamic ad was about $100 per day, however because they had so many dynamic options, they basically had like 200+ ads in one ad set. Put $100/day into that and you’ve got 50 cents per day per ad. That’s not nearly enough budget to give Facebook with any ad. If you are going to use dynamic ads or multiple ads in one ad set, try to give each ad a range of $5-15 per day.
2. Ad talks more about the business or brand instead of the product
This one broke the rule of having the ad and product cater to the target demographic. Especially for newly established brands, your best target demographic are impulse buyers. They don’t typically care about how long you’ve been in business or how your product is made. Now I’m not saying you should never put that into an ad, but I would recommend talking about the product or special offer at the top of the text in the ad and in the headline which is the first thing that a viewer will read.
3. Targeting is far too restricted and narrowed down
A rule of thumb when it comes to Facebook’s targeting is you want to make it easy for Facebook to find who it is you are looking for. When you add too many constraints on your targeting, it requires Facebook to work extra hard on figuring out who to put your ad in front of and Facebook makes you pay for that extra work it has to do by raising your CPM substantially. The ad account I worked on had 5 interests in the first level that were entertainment based, then narrowed down to 3 more interests that were hobby based that must match, and then finally was narrowed down again towards engaged shoppers. So when Facebook finds someone in that first level of audience, it needs to check if they match the second level, and then the third as well. For best results, just test out one or two interests in each ad set starting out.
4. Creative is not social media friendly
Your ad doesn’t need to be “good” as much as it needs to be designed in a way that Facebook prefers so that it shows the ad to a lot of people. This is the first warning sign that I encounter when I look at an ad in the ads library for a Facebook page. I was on the phone with someone consulting them on their Facebook strategy and they said “My biggest problem is the targeting. I have no idea what interest is the right one,” but then I look at their ads in the ad library and it doesn’t matter who they target with that ad, Facebook doesn’t like the ad. Too much text on the ad and low quality image is the common one I see for this one. The 20% text rule is no longer in effect, however if you put too much text on an ad it will throttle the reach and increase the CPMs (usually by a TON to where it is nearly impossible to counter) If you have some big bold text you want to put on the creative, just put that in the headline of the ad instead.
And there are many more errors that I have witnessed but I’m sure that a lot of people who read this post are making similar errors to just the few examples I’ve mentioned and I hope this can help them fix their ad account at least a little bit.
How to leave less money on the table with your FB ads
I’ve audited hundreds of ad campaigns, from huge organization like Greenpeace to startup drop shippers.
There are 9 areas I pay attention to when doing these audits:
Structure
Objectives
Targeting
Placements
Customer Avatar / Personas
Copywriting
Visuals
Landing Pages
Funnel / Strategy
Here are the most common mistakes I see businesses make with each of those Pillars, that hold them back from the ROI they need if they are to grow.
Biggest Mistake: Not using clear naming protocols.
Explanation: This is possibly the least sexy area of FB ads, but if you don’t name your campaigns, ad sets and ads consistently, you end up with unclear names for things and everything takes longer when trying to find your way around your account, look back at results, or compare performance of two campaigns/ad sets. Look at this example…How to avoid making the same mistake: The naming convention I recommend is as follows:Campaign:Objective | description | date i.e. “Guide download | Overwhelm | Jun 2019” Ad Set:Description | date | testing variable i.e.ad set 1: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | email lookalike” ad set 2: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | Interest: Moz” Ads:Description | date | testing variable | creative variable i.e.ad 1: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | email LLA | H1C1V1“ ad 1: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | email LLA | H1C1V2“ (H= headline, C= ad copy, V= visual)
Biggest Mistake: Not using the conversion objective
Explanation: I think this comes down to people not quite understanding how Facebook’s targeting and objectives work.
Here’s an (over-simplified for the sake of clarity) overview:
There are two main factors that affect who sees your ads, your targeting and your objective. By choosing targeting options, you narrow down your potential audience from ‘Everyone who uses Facebook’ down to (for example) ‘people who like pages related to surfing’ or ‘women over 40 within 10 miles of my business’.
Then Facebook takes that group of people, and ranks them in order of ‘most likely to complete the objective you’ve chosen’ based on the huge amount of historical data they have on everyone. This means that if you’ve selected an audience of 100’000 people, and chosen the ‘traffic’ objective, then Facebook will decide who of those 100’000 people are most likely to click your ad (based on things like how relevant they think this ad is to them, and how often they’ve historically clicked on things like this), and show it to them in rough order, from person 1 to person 100’000.If you chose the ‘video views’ objective, then Facebook will decide who of those 100’000 people are most likely to watch your video (based on things like how often they watch videos like yours), and show it to them in rough order, from person 1 to person 100’000.So…
By choosing different objectives – your ads will show to different groups of people within your audience. This isn’t a big deal if you have an audience of 30’000 because your ad will likely show to all of them in a short timeframe, but if you’ve got an audience of 2 million people, then you want to show it to the people most likely to do the thing you want. And typically, when you’re sending someone to your website, it’s because you want them to do something when they’re there – i.e. download a guide, or buy a product, or book an appointment. So by not choosing the ‘conversion’ you are likely getting worse results than you could be.
How to avoid making the same mistake:
Read through the following paragraphs to learn when to use the most common objectives:
Traffic – Use this when you’re sending people to your website but don’t have an action for them to do when they get there, or can’t track what they do when they get there – I.e. a blog post/ press release/ new thing you’re doing, or when promoting third party content (where you don’t have access to a tracking pixel on the end site).
Conversions – Use this when you want to send someone to your website AND have them do an action – i.e. getting them to buy something, sign up for an event, or download your awesome guide.
Within conversions – you can set up different objectives. Best practice is to start with the end goal you want, i.e. purchases, and then move back along the customer journey (purchase > initiate checkout > add to basket > view content > view landing page) if you don’t get results.
Page Post Engagement (PPE) (This is the same as boosting a post) – Use this when you want to get comments/likes/shares on a post – i.e. content that doesn’t require an action/ for a competition/ getting people to tag their friends. These are also great when you have a messenger bot setup, triggered by a comment.
Video views – If you’re building an audience of people to retarget, then video is likely to be the cheapest route, because you can track anyone who watches 3 seconds or more of your video. Also if you want to get cheap awareness of something that doesn’t include a direct action you want someone to take.
Lead Generation (Lead Forms) – These seem undervalued by many advertisers, probably because getting the leads from the form into anywhere useful like your CRM, isn’t as easy as it should be* – but if you want to get people to sign up for something, or give you their details, and you they are already qualified, then Lead forms can work great. For local businesses who want leads (i.e. gyms or cleaners), lead forms consistently get me the best results. * Use Zapier to easily get the info people fill in sent to your email/phone instantly.
Reach – Using the reach objective is telling Facebook to not worry about any end objective, but rather to just show your ads to everyone in your chosen audience. This is useful when you’re targeting a small number of people (e.g. retargeting the 2000 people who’ve watched a specific video of yours), or if targeting a small geographical area (e.g the 5km radius around your business)
Brand Awareness – An underused objective – presumably because it doesn’t produce a very measurable end ‘result’ but brand awareness ads are actually very powerful. Facebook will choose who to show your ads to based on who is likely to remember your brand in a couple of days time. This means it can be very useful for ads going out to a broad cold audience, with a view to retargeting them. HOWEVER – I’ve also found it to be one of the most profitable objectives to use for retargeting in multi-tiered campaigns (i.e people who’ve visited your website but not signed up for your course yet)
Biggest Mistake (Non-Local): Ignoring custom audiences. Explanation: The following order of targeting options are (broadly speaking) the preferred, because they go from warmest to coldest:
Custom audiences
Lookalike Audiences (LLA’s)
Interest targeting
Location
Age & Gender
And obviously, the warmer the audience, the more likely they are to buy from you.
Yet I see a lot of businesses just constantly pumping out ads to a cold audience, and ignoring the people who have already watched their videos / been to their website / added a product to their cart. In – businesses, a retargeting campaign, going out to people who have added something to cart but not bought is the highest ROI campaign 9 times out of 10, and it’s the same no matter what you sell.
How to avoid making the same mistake: Plan out a proper customer journey. What are all the different steps that someone goes through between first coming across your business and becoming a long-term customer?
Downloading a guide and getting on your email list?
Watch a video of you explaining how your process is ideal for them?
Browsing your website?
Scheduling a call with you personally?
And then create ads for each relevant stage to help guide them along that path. Remember, as they become more familiar with you, you will also speak to them differently.
Biggest mistake: Wasting money on the audience network.
Explanation: There are over a dozen different places where your ads can show. But not all of them tend to be equally effective, and Facebook will often push a high amount of traffic to the audience network because it is less saturated. The audience network is a huge number of websites and apps where Facebook also show ads. There are times and places when the audience network is great – I’ve seen it work well for link clicks to blog posts, and as part of a retargeting campaign, allowing you to ‘be everywhere’, but too often it’s not the right choice.
In recent times (since sometime in 2019) Facebook’s ability to choose the right placement has seemed to massively improve, to the point where I often leave placements on ‘automatic’ because I end up with a better end ROAS, but the audience network is the most common culprit for wasted spend, especially if you’re looking to get video views from a cold audience.
How to avoid making the same mistake:
Go to the ‘Performance and Clicks’ pulldown menu in ads manager, and then use ‘Placements’ in the ‘Breakdown’ pulldown menu to see if there are any Placements which are performing above or below the average.
If you see that you’re spending lots on the audience network and not getting results, then you might want to turn it off in future.
You do this at the ad set level, select the ‘Edit placements’ radio button instead of ‘Automatic’ and untick the placements you don’t want. Caveat – As mentioned, this is an area that I am encouraging people to play around with a bit less recently – it’s worth testing, but I’ve seen many examples of CPM’s increasing significantly when you remove too many placements.
When it comes to defining their customer clearly (if you don’t know who you’re selling to, it’s hard to speak to them in an appealing way) there are two related/intertwined mistakes I see made most often.
Biggest Mistake: They don’t define their target customer at all in the first place, and just use generic language that (sort of) appeals to everyone.
If they have defined an avatar, they’ve lumped everyone in together, to some amalgamation of all their customers.
Explanation: Generic language speaks to (and disqualifies) nobody. Buying is first and foremost an emotional decision, and if we don’t trust the person selling to us, we’re not going to buy, so you need to show that you UNDERSTAND THEM, and UNDERSTAND THEIR PROBLEMS.
How to avoid making the same mistake: First, define all the different groups of people that buy from you, there should be at least 3, but if you’ve got loads, then just identify the biggest few. Each of these personas will have different opinions/goals/pains etc, so once you’ve done that, ask yourself the following questions for each one:
For each one we want to know the basic demographics that define them:
age,
gender,
location,
income…
Then the psychographics that relate to what you’re selling:
What do they want?
What do they care about?
Who are their enemies?
What are their dreams?
What do they believe?
What are their suspicions?
How have they failed before?
What are they afraid of?
Then when you create an ad campaign, create it for just one persona at a time, and craft your message and your offer to match them.
Biggest Mistake: Copywriting is a huge topic, but you don’t have to be a world-class copywriter to get results from Facebook ads – the biggest mistake I see being made is talking about you, not about your clients.
Explanation: This follows on from the above customer persona section – because if you don’t have a clear picture of who your ad is for, then you can’t write for them. But you need to write for them, because talking about yourself is NOT going to appeal to them. “We are the biggest supplier of…”“I am a skilled teacher and can do…”This isn’t interesting to the reader, and will not get them to click.
How to avoid making the same mistake: WIIFM – Every time you write a sentence, read it back and ask yourself (from your reader’s POV) “What’s In It For Me?” If you have a clearly defined picture of who you’re writing for, then you can go through everything you write and make sure that it’s relevant to them, their hopes, dreams, goals, objections, fears…
Biggest Mistake: Not testing them.
Explanation: The PRIMARY job of the image/video that you use is to get enough attention to stop someone scrolling for a split second, so that they can scan the ad copy to see if it’s relevant/interesting.
If you just chuck up one photo and never try anything else, who knows how much money you’re leaving on the table.
How to avoid making the same mistake: Effective attention-getting-visuals tend to fit into one of 3 categories:
The target market Show an image/video of the type of person you’re speaking to – they will pay attention because it’s relevant to them. For example – if you run a food truck, then a photo of your customers eating an awesome looking burger in front of a recognizable place/landmark in your town.
The problem/solution/aspirations Demonstrate either the issue at hand, or your product/service solving that issue – again, people will pay attention because it’s relevant. For example – If you sell waterproof hiking shoes, you could show someone with wet socks looking miserable.
A pattern interrupt. Something that just seems out of place will get attention (read Purple Cow by Seth Godin), but beware using ‘wacky’ but irrelevant images/videos for the sake of it. these might get people to stop/click, but it’s likely doing nothing to qualify the right people. For example – I saw a FB ad a while back that was just a picture of a cute dog, with a headline along the line of “Instead of you seeing a boring advert, I’m paying to show you this pup” – it got my attention, but that was that.”
So find (or create) a bunch of images and video that fit those categories and see which gets the best Click-Through-Rates and the most conversions.
Caveat- you can of course, also use the video in your ads to teach/inspire/sell directly, but remember that without getting initial attention, your efforts will be passed over, and you still need to be testing different variations.
Biggest Mistake: S L O W loading times.
Explanation: Your landing page is the page that you send people to if they click on your ad. It could be a simple blog post, a product page on an e-commerce store, a booking page for a cafe, or an opt-in page where someone can give their info in exchange for a download/course/freebie.
Landing pages are consistently given less attention than they need especially compared to the ads sending people there, which is crazy because it can easily increase/decrease the ROI on your ads by 100-500% or more. and the biggest culprit is loading speed – how long it takes for your website to load for the viewer. According to Neil Patel “Nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.”
How to avoid making the same mistake: Google ‘pagespeed insights’ and click the top link, then enter your website/page. All those things that appear, they are all costing you money. ‘Eliminate render-blocking resources’ ‘Defer unused CSS’ ‘Properly size images’ – it’s all geeky stuff, and it all counts – so find a website developer and pay them to fix it. The great thing about speeding up your site is that it’s going to pay for itself over and over and over. If you’re paying money every month to run ads, then it’s worth paying a one-off fee to increase your conversion rate overnight.
Biggest Mistake: Randomness
Explanation: To put it bluntly – most businesses don’t have a plan when it comes to FB ads. They tried a couple of ads that worked, but now they aren’t working so well, and they just keep throwing things up without much of a clue.
How to avoid making the same mistake: It’s not complicated, not groundbreaking. but it is effective. You find an established business like yours, that’s already running ads, and you ‘model’ what they’re doing.
And the great thing that came from Facebook’s privacy stuff is that all this info is publicly available. Here’s how to you find it:
– Find known successful companies on FB – OR search keywords for your niche – Look for the ‘Page Transparency’ box on the right.
– And if they’re running ads, Facebook will tell you.
– You click on ‘Go to Ad Library’
– And there you go, all the ads that they’re currently running.
– You can click on them, follow their funnel, see what they’re doing.
– And model it for your business.
This isn’t perfect, and you can’t just copy/paste a funnel from another business, but it gives you a starting point, and if you model what a similar business is doing, adapt it to your own products & clients, then test from there, you’re likely going in the right direction, rather than driving around without a map.
There you go – avoid these 9 mistakes and you’re probably halfway there.
The hardest part of working on Facebook is working with Facebook.
Set your conversion objective for business goal, even if you can’t exit “Learning Limited”. Cheaper results.
You can get incredible results if you go “Broad” targeting. This means no targeting parameters. But first you have to groom your Pixel Metadata with Lookalikes, retargeting, etc.
Videos are gold.
Play it white hat. The “gurus” who teach you “scaling tactics” with duping and running small ad sets either haven’t advertised in 3 years or they are just saying what someone else told them.
These 5 rules will help any budding FB Advertiser.
What’s your favorite FB hack?
Before running an ad for my target country, I run the same ad for low-cost countries like African and Asian countries to gather insane amount of Likes, Shares, and Comments.
Then I use the same ad to run for my target country. The likes and shares serve as a social proof that the ad is worth watching.
This is a common strategy 🙂 But you don’t have to run the ad to third world countries – you can simply run it optimized for Engagement in the US (or wherever your target market is). Engagement-optimized campaign CPMs go as low as under $1.
It’s always better to accumulate social proof (especially comments) from your native country’s users.
How I Scaled An Ecom Brand From $45K To $120K In 30 Days
Your Landing Page/Purchase Flow and your offer.
I rarely see people testing landing pages, and even rarer, I see people talking about offers.
But changing these 2 things allowed me to scale an ecom brand from $45K/m to $120K/m within 30 days.
How?
Improving both Landing Page and Offer resulted in a conversion rate increase from 1.38% to 3.35%.
Let’s dive right into it, and hopefully, you can get something valuable out of this post:
Landing Page/Purchase Flow:
What is the purchase flow?
The purchase flow is each step that a customer has to take to buy the product.
A standard purchase flow usually looks like this:
Product Page – Add to Cart – Cart Page – Checkout – Purchase.
—-
In the brand I’m using in this example, the purchase flow looked like this:
Homepage – Offer $120 AOV Product Bundle (they have the option to add to cart here) – Product Page – Add to Cart – Cart Page – Checkout – Purchase
—–
Which in itself is a rather long flow with a high AOV. Generally speaking, you want to keep your purchase flow as short as possible to prevent drop-offs.
How a short purchase flow may look like:
Product Page – Add to Cart Button – Checkout (Skip cart page) – Purchase
Note: You might want to add upsells on the cart page, so this flow is not always ideal. It could also very well be that you need to explain your product to convince people to buy it, which is why e.g., sending people to a homepage or specific landing page can also be better than sending them straight to the product page. You need to test here.
So, the landing page from people who came from Facebook was the homepage combined with a relatively high AOV product bundle (2 products) for $120.
This did a decent job at selling the product, and the conversion rate was 1.38%, with an AOV of $120.
So our revenue from 100 visitors looked like this:
(100*0.0138)*120 = $165
So, our RPV (Revenue per visitor) was $1.65 ($165/100)
This offer was not profitable for the client. The overall ROAS was way below the ROAS Targets, and I knew I needed to change something. However, on the ads side of things, everything looked great.
So, here’s what I changed:
Landing Page
First of all, I started by redirecting the traffic to the product page to see if this affects the conversion rate.
This, however, wasn’t a success because the conversion rate didn’t increase significantly. In addition, the Facebook Ads were still unprofitable, and I knew a greater change needed to come. So, I built my specific landing page for that product bundle.
Since I’m not the greatest at building landing pages or writing landing page copy, here are two excellent guides where I learned a lot:
How My Landing Page Structure Looked Like In Order:
Hero Banner (With a button that automatically scrolls to buy section)
“Featured In” Part
Why “Product” Part
Reviews Part
Guarantee
Product Buy Section
Reviews
—
How The Purchase Flow Looked Like:
Landing Page – Scroll Down – Add to Cart – Cart Page /w new Upsell – Checkout
—
I follow the structure from the 2 guides above, so if you’re interested in building your own landing page, I highly suggest you check them out!
Note: I always use GemPages for landing pages, so if you’re a Shopify store owner, I’d suggest you use GemPages to build your Landing pages. ShoGun is also pretty good, but I prefer GemPages.
While the new landing page did a slightly better job selling (Conversion Rate increased from 1.38% to 1.7%) than either the product page or homepage, this still meant the Facebook Ads were just barely even profitable. So a more significant change needed to be made.
I changed the offer.
2. The Offer
Before, we were selling a product bundle upfront for a $120 AOV with now a 1.7% CV Rate, which meant we were getting a $2.04 RPV (Revenue per visitor)
Here’s what I changed:
I advertised a lower-priced AOV product with a discount on the landing page (core product) and instead created an in-cart upsell with the old 2nd bundle product. So if customers bought these 2 products, it was basically the same bundle as before.
How the numbers changed:
AOV: Decreased by 10% (which was to be expected) from $120 to $108.
CV Rate: Increased from 1.7% to 3.15%
RPV: Increased from $2.04 to $3.78, which is a huge change.
So from the start ($1.65 per visitor) to the end ($3.78 per visitor), I was able to increase the revenue per visitor by $2.13, which is an increase of 129% just by changing the landing page and offer.
TL;DR: By changing the Landing Page and offer from a brand I was able to increase their revenue per visitor by 129%.
I hope I could show you with this post that it’s not only your Facebook Ads you need to work on. In the end, your ads + homepage are connected, and even something as simple as the offer can have a significant impact on your conversion rate.
Facebook Ads: How iOS 14 will affect your campaigns
Campaigns will be affected in a variety of ways including:
Delayed Reporting: Real-time reporting for iOS devices will not be supported, and data may be delayed up to 3 days.
No support for breakdowns: For both app and web conversions, delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region, and placement will not be supported.
Attribution Changes: The attribution window for all new or active ad campaigns will be set at the ad set level, rather than at the account level. Additionally, going forward, 28-day click-through, 28-day view-through, and 7-day view-through attribution windows will not be supported for active campaigns.
Targeting Limitations: As more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, the size of your app connections, app activity Custom Audiences, and website Custom Audiences may decrease.
Dynamic Ads Limitations: As more devices update to iOS 14, the size of your retargeting audiences may decrease.
Limited to 8 conversion events per domain: You’ll be restricted to configuring up to 8 unique conversion events per website domain, and ad sets optimizing for a conversion event that’s no longer available will be paused when Facebook implements Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework. Businesses that use more than 8 conversion events per domain for optimization or reporting should create an action plan for how to operate with 8 events maximum. (Note: Facebook will automatically configure the events most relevant based on our activity)
(There’s more, especially for mobile campaigns, but you can read about it at the link at the bottom of my post)
Action Items:
We’ll want to preemptively verify our domain ownership in Business Manager. This will allow us to have authority over which conversion events are eligible for our domain should we choose to do so: Apple dev verification
We’ll have to be vigilant in terms of keeping these changes in mind when assessing campaign performance. For example, our FB ROAS will likely appear to be lower in the coming days and we may not be able to simply look at yesterday’s data when assessing performance. Instead, we may need a 3-day window.
This will likely affect Google Ads as well, but I have not seen Google release a document outlining the specific impacts this will have. For now, we can assume that what’s happening to Facebook will be the same for Google.
How to Make a Good Landing Page: The PPC Advertiser’s Guide
Knowing how to make a good landing page makes a massive difference to your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. When you design a landing page that offers a better user experience, you’ll see marked improvements in key metrics, including your Ad Rank (Quality Score & CPC), bounce rate, and conversion rate. As these factors improve, your costs will fall, ultimately helping you earn a higher return on investment (ROI).
In this guide, we’ll show you how to make a good landing page, covering each vital step to make it easy for you to deliver an experience people won’t forget.
When you’re learning how to make a good landing page, you should focus on the following:
Relevancy of landing page
Define your unique selling point (USP)
Show your product/service in action
Tell people what they need to know
Make your landing page mobile-friendly
Simplicity
Make your call to action clear
Remove distractions
Provide transparent policies
Leverage social proof
Minimize loading times
Build engagement
Optimize for voice search
Social Sharing & Feeds.
Test and update
Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Here’s a common mistake in PPC advertising:
You promise one thing in your ad, but when people click it, your landing page fails to deliver that promise. For example, your ad may offer a 10% discount on brake pads, but when people arrive on the landing page, it offers a 5% discount on brake discs.
This inconsistency will deter users, and your business will lose out on possible leads and conversions. You must create relevant landing pages that align with your ads — and with user intent.
Is your ad and landing page closely aligned now?
Good. Now, it’s time to define your unique selling proposition, which is how you differentiate your offer from your competition.
Your ad may address a problem that your target audience needs to solve. With a strong USP, you can show prospects that your product or service is the best solution available.
For example, if you are a quality pizza delivering company and you are best at coping with your delivery time you must emphasize your quality and your delivery time on the landing page.
Humans are visual creatures. If they see products or services in action, their appreciation and desire to have it will increase.
You can experiment with these ideas to improve engagement on your landing page:
Still photos
Animated explainer video
User tutorial video
Carousel shots that highlight specific features
Infographic
Also, it gives you a chance to explain the product or service in more detail, answering any common queries, and dispelling doubts before they arise. For example: if your landing page is having steps to complete by the user, escort them in a way that keeps the interest active for the user. Like:
Step 1: Fill the form
Step 2: Get the offer
Step 3: Get Paid
Nowadays, there is zero room for fluffy content, especially in paid advertising. Your ads and landing pages must get to the point – fast!
Use your landing page to explain only vital information that prospects need to know, such as:
Benefits of your product or service
Pricing and purchasing options
Business contact details including physical location and phone number
Social media channels and email address
Focus on the essential information to maintain interest and build credibility with your landing pages.
In the mobile age, nobody wants to deal with confusing websites. Therefore, you must create landing pages that offer smooth and straightforward navigation, right to the point of sign-up.
Make your landing pages mobile-responsive, so users on smartphones and tablets can quickly scan through the page, and complete any action that’s required.
Here are a few pointers:
Compact images – Make your images small (in dimensions and file size). This will speed up your loading times and make pages easier to view.
Reduce typing demands – Keep things simple for users.
Avoid auto-downloads – This annoys users by taking up space in their device.
Avoid auto-play videos – Intrusive audio can embarrass or annoy users, especially if they are watching videos in a public place.
Minimize animations – Use color effects and GIFs sparingly to speed up loading times. Provide animation if it is really required to show some demo otherwise don’t use it.
Learning how to make a good landing page may seem scary, but here’s the best tip of them all:
Keep it simple.
Here’s how:
Simple and direct copy
Clear, direct headlines
Minimalist design with plenty of white space to enhance the information rather than hiding it.
A clear call-to-action (CTA) that tells users what you want.
Fewer colors
High-readability
Here is the example of clutter vs. simple and clean landing pages.
Keeping it simple will lead to better results in terms of engagement, clicks, and conversions.
No landing page is complete without a strong CTA.
Whatever your product or service is, and however you make your offer, you need CTAs at decision points on the page to drive action.
Consider these strategies for better CTAs:
It’s a good idea to avoid having too many CTAs. It may be best to use just one at the very bottom of the page. That being said, having another CTA above-the-fold is a popular choice.
If you decide on that, make sure you also include vital information above-the-fold, so users have those details to guide their decision.
Have you ever seen an action button with the word “submit” on it?
This is a common choice, but not a great one because it lacks strength and inspiration. Instead, you want to incite action.
Create a stronger CTA that gets people to react. For example, “Don’t miss out on your FREE download” is better than “download now.”
Outline how easy your visitors will find your product or service to use. With clear, easy-to-follow directions, the value of your offer becomes undeniable — and often, irresistible.
Here’s something you should keep in mind when you want to know how to make a good landing page:
You must focus on a single conversion goal. Just one.
Therefore, anything else that distracts from your goal is surplus. Get rid of all distractions, external links, and unnecessary CTAs, images, or information that dilutes your message or invites users away from your landing page.
Ideally, you want to streamline the journey on your landing page to funnel leads to your final CTA.
As we move into 2020, consumer privacy matters are at an all-time high. The data breach scandals of Facebook, Yahoo, and Quora caused panic, and the General Data Protection (GDPR) regulations have taken effect across the globe.
Now, you must be transparent with the processes and practices you use for collecting, storing, and sharing consumer data. If people can’t trust your brand, you’ll never make a sale.
Follow these tips to nurture trust with people:
Use cookies toolbar to notify people that you track on-site behavioral data.
Use terms and conditions page to outline what your business is responsible for, and what it’s not.
Share your privacy policy, so people understand how you use consumer data.
Publish an FAQ page that answers common questions people may have about your brand, and your products and services.
Imagine your company provides analytics services to major corporations. Once you have one or two big clients in your portfolio, you can leverage those relationships to convince others to convert.
By getting positive reviews, you’ll have strong social proof from happy customers — that pay well. That can be enough to sway other top-tier clients.
To maximize this strategy, try to get video testimonials. Video content is much more engaging, and it will be a high-impact addition to your landing page.
Speed is crucial in the customer journey. Nobody wants to wait around for a slow website to load, especially on mobile.
Here are some tips to slash your loading times:
Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as this is an important ranking factor of Google’s Mobile and Desktop Indexes.
Use compact-sized images and files.
Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Opt for client-side scripting rather than server-side.
Use CDNs (content delivery networks)
Reduce redirects
Enable compressions
Shoppers have a lot to choose from online. You need to work hard to convert prospective new customers, tailoring your marketing tools and techniques to engage your site visitors in ways that they appreciate.
For instance, you can harness data insights with a live chatbot feature, or utilize pop-up discounts that cater to each visitor’s interests.
These techniques keep people on your page and make them consider your offer or brand as an option.
In 2019, voice search enjoyed significant growth, primarily driven by the improvements in voice-enabled technology. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant are battling it out to be king in voice-enabled devices, and with it, they are changing search engine optimization.
How?
Well, people who use voice search tend to do things a little differently than those who do a regular text-based search.
So, when you’re thinking of how to make a good landing page in 2020 and beyond, you should think about the following:
When people use voice search, they usually have a particular need, such as:
The address or opening hours of a store.
The price of a specific product.
Whether a business offers a specific type of service etc.
Keep user intent in mind to create content that answers specific questions, providing answers to things people want to know.
Google may be a smart search engine, but it needs all the help it can get. The better you optimize your content, the easier it will be for Google to analyze it — and promote it.
Schema markup makes it easier for search engines to comprehend the content of a webpage. Consider your website, your audience, and the CRM editing capabilities to use the right schema markup that will help you get noticed by voice searchers.
Voice search queries are typically conversational in style, often framed as questions or full, grammatically-correct sentences.
You can incorporate these long-tail, conversational keyword phrases into your landing page content to attract targeted traffic. As a bonus, this defined traffic is often cheaper.
Show your social feeds and tweets on your landing page to show your presence on social media. Once visitor purchase or do some conversion, make it easy for them to brag about their purchase and share their experiences by adding links to all types of social media. It will increase your credibility and presence on social platforms.
Like everything else in PPC advertising, your landing pages are not a set-and-forget task. Once you publish your landing pages, you must keep an eye on the analytics to gauge their performance.
Try A/B testing several ideas to determine the most effective version of your landing page. For example, you could test out two versions with different:
Headlines
Benefits
Images
CTAs
CTA positions
Run variants for a while, gather the data, and then analyze it to identify which version generates more clicks, leads, and conversions.
This process of testing and monitoring should be ongoing, helping you continually update and improve your landing pages, eliminating flaws, and optimizing strong points to create the best possible user experience.
Remember only to change and test one aspect at a time. This makes it easier to determine the impact of the change. For example, test images one week, then pick the best image. Next week, test headlines, then select the best headline. The following week, test CTAs, etc.
So, now you know how to make a good landing page. By analyzing these areas and putting in the time and effort to optimize each one, you’re sure to see dramatic improvements.
PPC advertising requires patience and strategy, more so than a big budget. Learning how to optimize your landing pages is crucial to maximizing your ROI.
Is Organic Search Traffic from Blog Posts superior to Google Ads?
From my experience Google ads cost me $0.80 per click. Of course it depends on the niche. So it might vary.
Now for $10 I can find someone on Upwork who writes me a 1000 word blog post. Again it depends on the niche. But that’s been my experience.
So $10 spent on Google ads will give me 12 clicks. Wouldn’t a $10 blog post give me much more traffic than 12 clicks over the years? Assuming it has a good headline and maybe some tags.
If I had to bet, I would bet that the blog post over time would far outperform the Google ads. But I don’t yet have the data. So I’m curious what you think about that?
Answer:
The blog probably would get more unique visitors, yeah. But are they qualified, are you selling them in the blog post, does your $10/article writer understand their needs and have experience on writing copy that converts?
With ads you can filter your keywords to find customers who are warm and are actively looking for a solution, it’s a little harder for articles on that front. E.g. a search for ‘welders in hackney’ would be a solid term to target with ads, but an article written on that topic probably wouldn’t rank well enough without a lot of research on the companies, finding out their pricing, services offered and enough unique and smart content to rank above those services own websites.
If your plan is to replace every advert keyword you’re targeting with a $10 blog post, you’ll end up with hundreds of really low quality articles that Google will recognize as low-effort and out of sync with the searcher’s intent and you won’t rank for anything.
Blog post with SEO included that ranks for specific keywords will have a good roi. But just make sure it is quality content as $10 content is likely to be worth exactly that.
What advice would you give someone wanting to learn google ads in 2022?
Working on an actual account will teach you more thing s than a course
Take a course only to cover the basics for developing strategies work on an actual account
Always look out for new features in ads manager, as Google is often biased towards new features and provides results at cheaper costs
Courses are a great start but nothing beats just running ads. Personally I think there is more than enough free info on YouTube to last a lifetime…..and good info too.
Learn the basics. Understand each feature in the dashboard. You’re general marketing experience with FB will help you.
I would recommend taking a client up on the offer or running ads for yourself to learn.
- The best way to learn google ads is by doing so. Do not buy a course! Google has some beginner courses (skillshop) take some of these and than ask an ngo if you can work for them. For ngo‘s google ads is free so it is a nice why to get to know the interface and everything around. And after than maybe you are able to go to an agency, there you could learn a lot.
- Increasing Search budgets by varying percentages: stage it or go all in?by /u/QuantumQuasar2745 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 14, 2026 at 11:13 am
Looking for some input on budget increases across three Non-Brand Search campaigns, all running Smart Bidding. Proposed one-time increases: Campaign A (£450/day): +30% Campaign B (£150/day): +34% Campaign C (£110/day): +42% Would you apply these in one go or stage them? And if staging, what interval would you go with? submitted by /u/QuantumQuasar2745 [link] [comments]
- Anyone adjusting paid spend based on AI organic traffic growth?by /u/Inevitable_Sun8741 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 14, 2026 at 10:37 am
Not a traditional PPC question but relevant: if AI referral traffic is growing as an organic channel, does it change how you're allocating paid budget? I've been tracking AI referral traffic using Zen Reports (GA4 integration) and some of my branded keywords that I was bidding on are now getting meaningful coverage from AI citations. It feels like this is becoming more of an issue as AI usage grows across different verticals. Happy to share more about my setup if it's helpful ; always curious how others are approaching the same problem. Trying to figure out if that changes the bidding math. Would love to hear how performance marketers are thinking about AI traffic in the context of overall channel mix. submitted by /u/Inevitable_Sun8741 [link] [comments]
- Looking for Growth Operator to Own Customer Acquisition for Local Services Businessby /u/welptheregoesreddit (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 14, 2026 at 6:18 am
Looking for a Growth Partner / Agency Operator for Local Services Business I’m building a local home services business and looking for someone who wants to own the customer acquisition side end-to-end. This is NOT a “run some ads” role. I’m looking for someone who can build and operate the entire acquisition engine: - Landing pages - Offer testing - A/B testing - Google Ads - LSA setup + optimization - Call tracking - Retargeting - Lead funnels - Customer acquisition playbooks - Ongoing optimization and scaling My side: - Day-to-day operations - Converting leads into customers - Hiring / managing cleaners - Service quality - Dispatching - SOPs - Retention - Building the operational machine The goal is to create a scalable acquisition engine for a local services company and potentially replicate it into multiple markets. Ideal person: - Has actually generated leads for local service businesses before - Understands CAC/LTV - Knows Google Ads + LSA deeply - Can move fast and test aggressively - Thinks like an owner, not a freelancer - Interested in long-term upside vs just billing hours Compensation: - Open to a monthly retainer structure depending on experience, execution ability, and results. Open to discussing performance incentives or longer-term upside for the right person. I’m less interested in credentials and more interested in: - What you’ve actually built - Results you’ve gotten - How you think about scaling local acquisition If this sounds interesting, DM me: - What businesses you’ve worked with - What channels you’re strongest in - Examples/results - What type of partnership structure you’d ideally want submitted by /u/welptheregoesreddit [link] [comments]
- HIPAA and Google Ads Conversion trackingby /u/tjeastman (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 14, 2026 at 5:11 am
Is it possible to capture a gclid from an ad click pass it through to the crm and then do a offline conversion upload? submitted by /u/tjeastman [link] [comments]
- Normal for Google shopping ads?by /u/curiiiious (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 14, 2026 at 4:00 am
Day 1 (Tuesday) manual CPC, after 60 clicks, I’m at a 8% conversion rate. 5 sales. Day 2 (Wednesday) manual CPC, after 60 clicks, 0% conversion. No sale. Is that normal? Does Google purposely give you high intent on day 1 and then give you crap afterward? Yes, the keywords are relevant. This client is in the supplement space. Does this happen to you? submitted by /u/curiiiious [link] [comments]
- Small budget interior company campaign not performingby /u/singapore_indian (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 14, 2026 at 12:05 am
3 weeks into a Search-only campaign for a high-consideration interior company (average project value $15,000–60,000). Exact match keywords only. Location targeted to a specific metro city. $4/day budget to start off. Here is where I stand: Performance: 98 clicks, 8.51% CTR, $0.16 avg CPC, 0 conversions recorded. Setup: CMS-based website with two separate GTM containers. Container A is installed on the landing pages where the ads send traffic. Container B is installed on the main site including the /thank-you confirmation page. Form on landing page submits and manually confirmed redirects to /thank-you correctly. Conversion action: Set up as page load event on /thank-you URL. Google Ads base tag confirmed firing on all pages via Tag Assistant. Conversion action shows Inactive in Google Ads after 3 weeks. What I have tried: — Verified form submits and lands on correct /thank-you URL — Updated conversion label in GTM — Updated trigger URL in GTM thank-you page trigger — Confirmed base Google tag firing on all pages — Zero conversions still recording Questions: 1. With two GTM containers where the form is on Container A pages and /thank-you is on Container B pages, does the conversion tag need to be exclusively in Container B? And does having it in Container A cause any conflict? The Google Ads base tag was originally installed via a Manager/MCC account. Conversion actions are created inside the client sub-account. Could this cause conversions to fire into the MCC rather than the sub-account? Is cross-account conversion tracking needed in this scenario? Campaign itself appears healthy, CTR above benchmark, CPC very low, keywords relevant. Concerned the 3 weeks of learning phase data is corrupted by zero conversion signal. Looking for tracking fix and any strategic recommendations given the zero conversion signal period Getting back to Google Ads after a long time, I am still figuring out things. submitted by /u/singapore_indian [link] [comments]
- Ecomm Google Ads Structure Helpby /u/Commercial-Gift-3001 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 11:06 pm
Hi, my job asked me to assess and provide feedback on the current google ads campaign structure (i have not touched google ads in a few years), which is out of my scope but I would like to keep this job so was hoping for some feedback! Some background: ecomm health company with a ton of skus. the current campaign structure is: Pmax shopping (all products): purchasers i'm not seeing any targeting here to warrant this campaign to be geared towards purchasers spending $37/day Pmax shopping (all products): visitors targeting 100 search terms spending $32/day Branded (tROAS) spending $50/day The budget is around $1.1k/month. Campaigns don't seem to have an issue of getting 30 conversions a week looking at MoM data and overall ROAS is healthy based on their benchmarks. I was thinking of breaking out the Pmax so I'm targeting Best Sellers only, and adding in in-market audiences, etc, and removing the Purchasers Pmax campaign since I'm not sure what is happening there. I was also thinking of creating a DSA campaign with best sellers or a Benefits campaign with ad groups targeting kws by benefits (immunity, brain, digestion, etc) but only starting with a few. I want to add a remarketing campaign, should I create a pmax shopping, standard shopping or non-shopping campaign for this? (how do i add web visitors or past customers to the targeting)? Any feedback would be so appreciated! submitted by /u/Commercial-Gift-3001 [link] [comments]
- YouTube Ads Refuse To Spend For 2 Weeksby /u/MeetTheReal007 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 10:23 pm
I’m hoping someone here with YouTube Ads experience can help because I’m now 14 days into trying to launch a conversion-focused in-stream campaign and the behavior I’m seeing feels extremely abnormal. Important context: I am ONLY trying to run skippable in-stream YouTube ads I am not interested in search/display/etc. My Google Ads account was created in 2011 I successfully ran YouTube campaigns in the past Same video creatives previously worked on this account No policy violations or suspensions Ads all show as “Eligible” What happened: I first launched a Maximize Conversions campaign. It received zero impressions/spend. I then tested: Maximize Clicks Video Views / Target CPV campaign All of them initially received literally zero impressions for days. During troubleshooting I tested: higher budgets higher CPV bids broader targeting removal of audience targeting linking YouTube channel to Google Ads multiple campaign structures Google support repeatedly told me: bid too low budget too low learning phase etc. The weird part: The Video Views campaign FINALLY started spending after about 7 days of being fully eligible with zero impressions. It ended up spending: ~$97 on day 7 then a little more the next day So clearly the account CAN serve in-stream inventory. At that point I paused the Video Views campaign because it was only meant as a diagnostic test. My actual goal is Maximize Conversions. I then launched a fresh Maximize Conversions campaign with: $80/day budget same general setup in-stream only This campaign spent about $0.08 within the first hour… and then completely stopped again. It has now been over 24 hours since that tiny spend and nothing else has happened. At this point I’m confused about what’s actually going on: Is YouTube just taking absurdly long to initialize campaigns lately? Is Maximize Conversions extremely conservative on fresh YouTube campaigns? Has anyone seen campaigns sit for days and then suddenly start spending? Does the initial tiny spend followed by silence indicate normal learning behavior or something broken? Would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experienced similar behavior specifically with YouTube in-stream campaigns. submitted by /u/MeetTheReal007 [link] [comments]
- Experienced media buyers: what mistakes should beginners avoid?by /u/Vardam (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 8:46 pm
For experienced PPC/media buyers: What are the biggest mistakes beginners make that almost guarantee a campaign will fail? I’ve been studying digital marketing, landing pages, copywriting, and PPC, and I’m trying to understand what experienced marketers avoid when launching campaigns. For example: Bad audience targeting? Weak creatives? Testing too many variables at once? Killing campaigns too early? Bad landing pages? Ignoring psychology/customer intent? What mistakes wasted the most money for you when you started? I’d rather learn from real experience than repeat expensive mistakes myself. submitted by /u/Vardam [link] [comments]
- Is it normal to have spent $7,000 and not have a single real lead? Home service company.by /u/Thin-Coat-5483 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 8:22 pm
ok so we've been running google ads and have spent like $7k (closer to $6,900 but rounding). doesn't even include the $750/mo we've been paying our manager for the past 3 months. Fencing company google says we got 50 leads which like cool i guess?? but most of them either don't pick up, aren't even in our area, whatever. i know i know learning phase blah blah but this feels insane. i call back in 10 minutes or less often faster what do i even ask my manager at this point to fix this submitted by /u/Thin-Coat-5483 [link] [comments]
- How to find high quality OEM manufacturers?by /u/ZeraPain (Entrepreneur) on May 13, 2026 at 6:12 pm
So after months of research, I’ve finally identified a niche with strong growth potential for the future. Where I eventually would like to design, and manufacture my own product. However, as the title suggests, I’m now facing a new challenge: how do I actually find high-quality manufacturers, preferably based in Europe? I’ve come across quite a few horror stories about manufacturers in China who end up copying designs or concepts. From what I’ve read, even having them sign an NDA often doesn’t provide much protection in practice. Recently, I contacted my first manufacturer in my own country. While this initially seemed promising, the quoted bulk price was extremely high. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit within my financial model at all, as it leaves little to no room for a sustainable net profit or to grow the company. At this point, I’m trying to better understand how to balance quality, cost, and reliability when selecting a manufacturer. Are there specific platforms, sourcing strategies, or vetting processes that can help identify trustworthy European partners. submitted by /u/ZeraPain [link] [comments]
- Beware of "Stray Customers"by /u/baghdadcafe (Entrepreneur) on May 13, 2026 at 4:59 pm
Here is a thing I come across a lot. Some entrepreneurs get, what I like to call, a "stray customer" So, they get a customer, from lets say the oil industry. A lucrative, cash rich customer - who buys your service and money is absolutely no object. They are a dream customer. Guess what, the entrepreneur was so delighted with the whole process (and bigger bank balance) they starts chasing other customers in the oil industry hoping to replicate the success. But, unfortunately, it does not work like this. All businesses get these "stray" customers from time to time to time in the same way that your local coffee shop gets a visit from some A list celebrity for their americano. A lot of times these customers do not represent your ideal target market. For whatever reason, your firm just happened to be at right place at the right time. But sustainable sales pipelines are not built this way. They are in fact built in a way that is a lot more boring. submitted by /u/baghdadcafe [link] [comments]
- I literally tried Expensify, Ramp & Brex for my travel expense management - My thoughts.by /u/BoiledEggs (Entrepreneur) on May 13, 2026 at 4:24 pm
One thing I’ve noticed after using three different expense platforms back to back is that every company claims to “simplify travel expenses,” but most of them only feel simple during the demo. Real travel is messy. Flights get delayed. Hotel receipts disappear into the void. Someone on the team forgets to upload expenses for three weeks and suddenly accounting is sending passive aggressive Slack messages at 4:58 PM on a Friday. Ugh. Over the past year, I used Expensify, Ramp, and Brex while traveling for conferences, client meetings, and internal team events. None of them were terrible. In fact, all three had moments where I thought, “Alright, this is actually pretty solid.” But they each approached travel expense management very differently. Ramp felt like it was built for finance teams first. That is not necessarily a criticism. If you are someone who loves visibility into spending, automated controls, and airtight policies, Ramp is impressive. Transactions sync fast, categorization is clean, and the automation can save a ridiculous amount of admin work. At one point I barely touched expense coding because ramp had already handled most of it before I even opened the dashboard... The downside is that it occasionally felt a little too structured when I was traveling heavily. If everything is neat and predictable, Ramp is cool. But travel rarely stays that neat. Brex had almost the opposite. Using Brex feels polished in the way luxury apartment lobbies feel polished. Everything is smooth, modern, and intentionally designed. The virtual cards were easy to manage, travel perks were genuinely useful, and international spending worked better than I expected. For startups especially, I can see why people gravitate toward it. The platform has momentum to it. It feels fast. But after a while, I noticed Brex worked best when your company already operates in the kind of ecosystem Brex expects. Once travel got chaotic or reimbursement situations became less straightforward, the experience lost a little of its shine. Then finally, I tried out Expensify. It did not immediately hit me with flashy dashboards or startup aesthetic. Instead, it handled the annoying parts of travel without demanding much attention from me. That became more important the more I traveled. The smartscan feature sounds gimmicky until you are standing in an airport trying to expense a wrinkled receipt with 3% phone battery left. After a while, I stopped thinking about receipts altogether because Expensify handled most of the work in the background. And honestly, that was the biggest difference between the three. Ramp made me feel like I was using a smart finance platform. Brex made me feel like I was using a modern startup platform. Expensify made me forget I was dealing with expense management software at all. That matters more than feature comparison charts will ever admit. The biggest surprise was how forgiving Expensify felt during travel. If something was messy, duplicated, delayed, or uploaded late, the platform usually handled it without turning the process into another task on my list. That reduced friction in a way I did not fully appreciate until I switched back and forth between all three. If I were running a finance department focused heavily on controls and operational efficiency, I would absolutely look hard at Ramp. If I were scaling a venture backed startup with a younger team and wanted strong perks plus sleek infrastructure, Brex would make a lot of sense. But for actual day to day travel expense management, especially for people constantly moving between airports, hotels, client dinners, and conference centers, Expensify ended up being the one I preferred using most consistently. I tried formatting this as best I could! Hope it helps and my fingers are exhausted from typing. Toodles! submitted by /u/BoiledEggs [link] [comments]
- Retargeting Campaignby /u/Scooby_Doooby (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 4:21 pm
Platform - Meta Campaign - WhatsApp Retargeting Daily Budget - INR 200 Audience - Who Submitted Forms in the Last 90 days Results Last 7 Days = 6 @ 258 Last 14 Days = 9 @ 315 Total Number of Ads = 4 Performing Ads = 1 My observation: Tight budget, hence leads are coming less Only one performing ad, would like to close the non performers Make a new Adset, publish new ads keeping the winner. Any suggestions? Also a question I was researching on Claude about the campaign and Claude asked if there is any TOFU (warm audience being built) I am new to performance marketing hence I would want to know isn’t Retargeting for the warm audience already? submitted by /u/Scooby_Doooby [link] [comments]
- YOU GUYS ARE GOATS 🐐by /u/Late-Cranberry-4826 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 4:11 pm
I apologize for the long post, but I want to say thank you all genuinely for your replies on my post last week. 🙏 They’ve helped me out SO much more than you know and I’m beyond grateful. My first campaign finally generated $1k!!! And the last 3 days have been in the green!!!! I just turned up the budget 20% today and got another sale ($130 AOV) I feel so ecstatic ik the revenue ain’t much YET but for the first time since 💀MF DECEMBER💀 im actually seeing consistency with my brand which I’ll take over anything else atp. The last 8 months was a legit HELL LOOP: getting seemingly good ROAS 1 week, and realizing I can’t afford life the next because of meta outages and rising costs of living, going through a breakup, losing my dog, losing my mf HOUSE 😭✌️ but that’s a post for another day. I just had to keep grinding w my head down till I got to this point Again HUGE thank you to everyone that responded to my last post and responds to this very long post (ik). I know the sales ain’t much but with what I’ve been through since last year, this feels like I finally found some ground of peace and consistency. I just have a few questions since there’s not really Demand Gen scaling guru on YouTube ik of, which can be a good and a bad thing. YouTube search hasn’t been my friend so if you guys can link videos that would also be very appreciated. Even if it’s some random dude with 60 views on a 3 hour video I’ll watch it. My questions - my main frame of reference is Meta PTSD so apologies if the questions are very simplistic 1st) Is Google really that consistent? Do I have to worry about my ads dying tomorrow? Next week? The next month? I know constant creatives are a must but META has given me mad PTSD I feel like these campaigns could nosedive any moment no matter how good branding is 😅 2nd) If I want to test more similar creatives to the winner, should I replace the losing creatives in the winning ad group? Or create a new campaigns for those since now im scaling? 3rd) if I want to test a new angle, should I do create a new ad group in the winning campaign, or a new campaign altogether? 4th) If these were to be unprofitable, how long should i wait until judging? Ive heard this platform works much slower but more consistent Thank you guys again!! As crazy as it sounds your Reddit replies have pulled me out of a very dark hole that in the moment, felt like I’d never get out of. The human mind can go to some insane places in survival mode. I’m so grateful for all of you. TDLR: I’m was down bad now we on the come up Have a wonderful day and KEEP GRINDING!! Everyone gets their turn submitted by /u/Late-Cranberry-4826 [link] [comments]
- Anyone having good luck with LSA for mobile detailing?by /u/FearlessAnalyst7039 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 4:07 pm
We've been running these since about Dec 2025. When we first started we were generating about $4 of revenue for every $1 spent on LSA. These past two months, we're running at about $1:$1 We answer 100% of the calls and texts, and its answered immediately. We also go back and supply feedback on every lead. Previously we were only getting about $5-$10 of credit each month, but this month so far we already have $35 of credit going into the next month (on about $300 of spend so far). We have also got more aggressive in managing it by pausing the ads if our week gets fully booked in advance, or if there is bad weather. I just look at this and shake my head cause it was so promising at the start, but now I think it's a waste of time and energy. We had similar issues with regular google ads last year as well. Every time we'd start a campaign, it would start off strong and give great results, then within weeks it was garbage performance and just draining our bank account. I don't know if I'm just venting, but looking for any solutions... submitted by /u/FearlessAnalyst7039 [link] [comments]
- Tried Amazon’s built-in Video Builderby /u/hnayr (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 4:02 pm
I tested Amazon’s built-in Video Builder tool recently for Sponsored Brands video ads and it was a lot easier to use than I expected. I’ve mostly avoided video ads in the past because producing them felt like too much work relative to the size of the campaigns. But this workflow is basically: choose the ASIN generate a few variations remove the bad assets it pulls in adjust the text overlays export Took maybe a few minutes to get something usable. One thing I noticed immediately though: the output quality is heavily dependent on your listing images. If the listing has weak mockups or cluttered graphics, the video ends up looking pretty rough too. The AI also doesn’t always choose the right assets. It was pulling in things like sizing graphics and secondary images that I wouldn’t want in an ad, so I still had to manually clean things up. I don’t think this replaces proper creative testing or fixes a weak product page, but for testing video ads quickly it seems useful, especially for smaller sellers that aren’t going to hire editors or make custom UGC videos. I could also see it being useful for products that already get decent CTRs from search and just need something that stands out more visually in placements. For anyone already running Sponsored Brands video ads regularly: Are you seeing noticeably better CTRs compared to static Sponsored Brands campaigns? I definitely am on my print on demand video ads. submitted by /u/hnayr [link] [comments]
- Google Ads Store Visits: PMAX v. Search Adsby /u/NeilAnnwn (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 3:50 pm
I've inherited a Google Ads campaign from a digital marketing agency. The account is for a gas station brand with 1,000+ locations. The account is synched with a GMB account and tracks Store Visits as a conversion. The account currently has a Search Network campaign and a PMAX campaign, each of which split spend approximately 50/50. FWIW, PMAX ads predominantly show on Google Maps when you drill into "Where Did My Ads Show" Currently, the Search Network campaign (think keywords like "gas station near me") has an approximately 5X larger cost per store visit conversion than PMAX. Whenever I see a discrepancy in cost-per-conversion to that degree, my skepticism antenna goes up. Is PMAX truly 5X more effective at driving store traffic? Or is there a difference in counting and modeling methodology that's resulting in this difference? I'm afraid I'm going to have to run some geo-based test/control experiments for incrementality to truly answer this question. That notwithstanding, does anybody here have any hands on experience with this specific scenario? Is my skepticism antenna warranted, or should I discontinue my search campaign and fall lovingly into the arms of PMAX? I know what answer my Google reps will give me, but I am curious what others might have found. submitted by /u/NeilAnnwn [link] [comments]
- How to un-burn out?by /u/HiddenCity (Entrepreneur) on May 13, 2026 at 3:11 pm
I've been burnt out for over half a year and I honestly don't know how to get out of it. I am a single-person architectural firm with occasional help. Some background: I really started doing business development for the first time last year since things were slow. Mainly going to events and networking, but also working on my website and overall marketing strategy. I created a lot of promotional material like folders a literature I give to new clients, which I think has had a positive effect. I lost a ton of money with a Facebook ad strategy that went nowhere. Hired professionals to photograph some of my work, since that's one of the most important things I can do from a marketing perspective, and my firm doesn't really have any. Burned through my cash cushion so that's added some stress, especially since I've got two kids in pre-school draining my savings account. Anywhere, somewhere in the fall I got a bad client who created a construction problem and then wouldn't pay for it. I witheld my work until it was paid and he threatened to sue me, citing a bunch of nonsense like "compensation for taking time off work to deal with XYZ..." He's wealthy so the threat worked, and I had to go through all the insurance and all that. In the end he was bluffing and went away and everything's fine now, but for 3 months I was a wreck. Work is finally starting to pick up this spring after what was basically an entire year of nearly dead stream of inquiries coming in. But I'm just so TIRED. I could not motivate myself do anything in January or February-- from actual work to just doing the dishes at night. Literally just sitting down stressed out of my mind, even though the stress is over. No self-control eating, on the internet all day wasting time instead of doing work. I was told the stressful winter probably depleted all my vitamins, and after taking some B6 and B12 supplements I felt way better and kind of got out of the slump. But I feel like after the initial perk up I just get easily tired now, like a battery that charges to 25% and stops. I'm pretty much living off coffee despite getting 8+ hours of sleep. Pretty sure living with young kids doesn't help, but I just don't understand how I can wake up with zero energy or motivation to do anything every day. I'm not sure how to get out of this slump, but assume this has to be common in the entrepreneur community. Has anyone here had experience with this? submitted by /u/HiddenCity [link] [comments]
- Services founders: what process do you wish you'd documented from day one?by /u/Late-Development-543 (Entrepreneur) on May 13, 2026 at 2:55 pm
We're 20 people now and still finding places where the lack of early documentation is costing us. Hindsight: we should've documented our quoting process before we hired our second salesperson. Each rep developed their own quoting style, and now the price/scope mismatch on the same service is genuinely bad. Took us 18 months to undo it. The first SOP we DID document was client onboarding because it was bleeding revenue. That paid off fast. Wish I'd doubled down on documentation earlier and on more processes. Curious what others would have documented first if they could go back. The patterns I keep hearing: sales/quoting (mine), client onboarding, hiring and new-employee onboarding, quality control or delivery review, cash flow and invoicing. What's yours, and what did the lack of it cost you specifically? submitted by /u/Late-Development-543 [link] [comments]
- Has Google started to pull back on Broad Match?by /u/ConeDingus (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 2:28 pm
Am I missing something in the settings or has Google pulled back on the whole broad match hype they used to do? A few campaigns I’ve added broad match variations of the top converting keywords, the broad match keywords aren’t spending? Edit: for added context the account has 299 conversions in last 7 days overall. 136 conversions on the campaign I’m wanting to scale up, and max conversions with target cpa is the bidding. Target cpa set is double what the cpa has been in last 7 days submitted by /u/ConeDingus [link] [comments]
- Should I manage Google Ads for a real estate client?by /u/Sure_Note1009 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 2:15 pm
Hey! I recently built a fairly complex website for a client who buys buildings, renovates the apartments, and then sells them. He currently has an agency managing his ads, but he’s not happy. He’s spending around 750€/month on Meta Ads, not running Google Ads, and says he’s not getting leads. He also pays around 175€–225€/month for management and feels like they just set up the campaign and barely touch it afterwards. Since he trusts me, he asked if I could manage Google Ads for him. I’m a developer, I understand the basics of Ads, I’m used to analyzing data, and I’m willing to learn it properly, but I don’t have real experience managing campaigns. The goal would be to find buyers for properties on one specific island, targeting people with higher purchasing power. He was told that doctors or similar profiles might be a good audience. My question is: does it make sense for me to take this on? How many hours per month would an account like this usually require if done properly? And what would be a reasonable monthly fee to manage Google Ads with a budget of around 750€-1,500€/month? Thanks submitted by /u/Sure_Note1009 [link] [comments]
- Omneky vs Creatify, what's the actual difference?by /u/Jazzlike_Cap9605 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 12:54 pm
Been testing Omneky and Creatify side by side for ecom stuff since everyone's talking about them. Creatify does exactly what it says - drop a link, get short video ads with AI avatars. Super fast output. Good for quick tests, but they definitely have a 'look' you start recognizing. Omneky felt pretty different. It's less of a straight video generator and more of a workflow thing. It plugs into the ad accounts and uses performance data to guide the next batch. The biggest difference hit around week two. With Creatify, I was still manually generating and testing new batches. With Omneky, the new creatives were already adapting based on what worked in week one, plus they looked a bit more premium/on-brand. Both have their uses, but are you mostly just needing bulk creation or actually trying to automate the optimization part? submitted by /u/Jazzlike_Cap9605 [link] [comments]
- GTM tags still needed with Shopify native tracking?by /u/Ok-Bumblebee143 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 12:36 pm
Running a Shopify store with the Google & YouTube channel handling GA4 and Google Ads conversion tracking natively. GTM is also installed but not yet live. A few questions for anyone who's worked with this kind of hybrid setup: Is a Conversion Linker tag needed in GTM if Google Ads conversion tracking is already being handled natively through Shopify? Is a Google Ads Remarketing tag needed in GTM if remarketing audiences are already being built through the native channel? Are there any tags genuinely worth running through GTM that Shopify's native setup can't cover Thanks submitted by /u/Ok-Bumblebee143 [link] [comments]
- Lead Gen: Should I set "Final Sale" as a Primary Conversion at the campaign level despite low volume?by /u/Valley_of_Death (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 10:58 am
Hi everyone, I need a recommendation on best practices for a specific campaign. I'm running a Google Ads Lead Gen campaign where the primary conversions are currently Phone Calls and Form Submissions. I also track Final Sales (offline conversions), but I currently have them set as "Secondary." I'm using a Maximize Conversions strategy because Max Conversion Value hasn't been successful for me yet. Here’s my dilemma: at the campaign level, none of these actions (calls, forms, or sales) have enough individual volume to be used as the sole conversion goal. My question: Would you recommend adding the "Final Sale" as a Primary conversion alongside calls and forms for this specific campaign? A few important details: Sales volume is low and the conversion lag is about 12+ days. I don’t have an automated lead qualification system in place, and I don't have the time to qualify or score leads manually. This is why I'm looking for a purely "data-driven" way to improve lead quality through the existing conversion signals. I’m worried that adding a low-volume, delayed conversion might either help the algorithm find better quality leads or, conversely, mess up the bidding since the data is so sparse at the campaign level. What’s your take? Thanks! submitted by /u/Valley_of_Death [link] [comments]
- How to get real time feedback on your ads and avoid waiting weeks for resultsby /u/Vast_Musician_6150 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 10:43 am
Ok, can we talk about how frustrating it is to wait forever to find out if your ads are actually working? Some ad platforms make us wait weeks to see performance data. By the time you get it, your campaigns already out of sync, and youre just kind of hoping it works. Ive been stuck in this cycle for a while, and its starting to feel like a waste of time. I know theres gotta be a better way to get faster feedback and make adjustments in real time. Does anyone have a system or tool they use to get immediate feedback on their ads? submitted by /u/Vast_Musician_6150 [link] [comments]
- What’s the most unhinged AI automation you've seen that somehow works?by /u/Sure_Marsupial_4309 (Entrepreneur) on May 13, 2026 at 9:33 am
I saw a Shopify founder describe an absolutely unhinged setup recently. They connected Midjourney to a print-on-demand pipeline so trending memes from Twitter/X automatically became t-shirt mockups within minutes. The system scraped viral posts, generated parody shirt concepts, created mockups, and pushed products directly to the store before most brands even noticed the meme existed. The crazy part is they said most of the sales came from being early, not from having amazing designs. Basically weaponized internet speed. So curious from the entrepreneurs here, what’s the most unhinged AI automation you've seen that somehow works? submitted by /u/Sure_Marsupial_4309 [link] [comments]
- Google ads for restaurantsby /u/TeslaOwn (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 8:48 am
I’m running a Google search campaign for my restaurant. Budget is around $300/week and I’m only targeting people within a 5 mile radius. I’m also offering a discount on one of our most popular items. I used Keyword Planner and targeted keywords like restaurants near me and similar searches. Google estimated around 40 orders, but after a week I’ve only gotten about 10. Not sure if this is normal or if I’m approaching this the wrong way. Someone told me I should run separate campaigns, one for brand awareness and another focused on orders. Is that actually necessary for restaurants, or should a direct conversion campaign be enough? submitted by /u/TeslaOwn [link] [comments]
- Best practices for Meta Ads attribution in the Hotel/Retreat industry (7+ day booking windows?)by /u/Emzed07 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 8:03 am
Hi everyone, I’m (desperately) looking for some advice on handling conversion attribution for a client in the hotel/retreat niche. As you can imagine, the decision-making process for these stays often takes longer than a week, but I'm constantly hitting a wall with Meta’s default attribution settings. I am now optimizing the campaigns for add to cart conversions as this is the lowest one in the funnel that I was getting enough data for, but my client also would like to have some more information on actual bookings. So a significant portion of bookings happens after the 7-day click window. I've uploaded CSVs of confirmed bookings, but the Campaign Manager still reports 0 conversions, even though the data is definitely there. I recently set up a CAPI (Conversions API) link via Zapier from the booking engine (Cloudbeds). However, my understanding is that this is still subject to the 7-day click / 1-day view attribution window in the reporting dashboard. I've tried getting help from AI, but it keeps sending me in circles with conflicting info about 28-day windows that don't seem to exist in the dashboard anymore. submitted by /u/Emzed07 [link] [comments]
- Need help with Google Ads suddenly getting 0 impressions/clicks after running fine for 3 monthsby /u/PineappleFormer1982 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on May 13, 2026 at 7:35 am
Hey everyone, I’ve a Google Search campaign that has been running normally for around 4 months and was generating leads consistently. Day before yesterday 10 Clicks and 90 impressions Yesterday 0 clicks and 60 impressions But suddenly from today: impressions dropped to 0 clicks dropped to 0 campaign status shows “Eligible (Limited)” Campaign diagnostics says: “Enhanced conversions has setup issues impacting performance” “Target CPA is set too low to get conversions” Current setup: Search campaign Maximize conversions with Target CPA Budget around $14/day Conversion tracking for WhatsApp clicks + phone calls No ads are disapproved and campaign is still enabled. Google is recommending increasing the Target CPA. Do you guys think this is mainly because Target CPA became too restrictive, or could broken conversion tracking also completely stop impressions? Would appreciate suggestions on: whether I should remove Target CPA temporarily switch to Maximize Clicks increase budget or check something else first Thanks! submitted by /u/PineappleFormer1982 [link] [comments]
- Case Study: Three Website Changes That Improved Our Conversion Rate by 42%by /u/ManyInformation8009 (Entrepreneur) on May 12, 2026 at 7:02 pm
Over the last 30 days, we tested a few changes on our wholesale e-commerce website. We were getting traffic, but not enough visitors were turning into leads or customers. Here are the three changes that had the biggest impact: Simplified our homepage message Instead of listing every product category, we used one clear sentence that explained exactly what we offer. Improved our call-to-action buttons We replaced vague buttons like “Learn More” with more direct options such as: Shop Wholesale Apply for a Wholesale Account View Best Sellers We added more social proof We featured the brands we carry, customer testimonials, and photos from trade shows we’ve attended. This helped build trust right away. Results after 30 days Conversion rate increased by 42% Bounce rate dropped by 18% Average time on site increased by 27% The main takeaway for me was pretty simple: Clear messaging almost always beats trying to say too much. Sometimes small tweaks can make a much bigger impact than a full redesign. What’s one website change that had a surprisingly big effect on your business? submitted by /u/ManyInformation8009 [link] [comments]
- Would you use a dark pschyology, stoicism app?by /u/Zorantscales (Entrepreneur) on May 12, 2026 at 5:05 pm
I was planning and thinking about building a philosophy, stoicism app that users can be brutally honest with, everything stays local, even the developer can't see that. We would integrate 4-5 philosophists, pschyologists that doesn't sound like a generic chatbot, but an actual mentor. Also with several other features. What are your thoughts on this and what suggestions do you have on features? submitted by /u/Zorantscales [link] [comments]
- Found a real niche niche. Any advice?by /u/Starlyns (Entrepreneur) on May 12, 2026 at 3:40 pm
We always hear the same advice: find a niche to open a biz in it so u have less competition etc then we go thru life and we really don't see this niches because everything feels oversaturated. I have worked with over 200 companies in all sectors, I learn about their biz in order to do proper marketing for them but never felt that I found a real "there's hardly anyone working on this niche" do you know what I mean? 4 months ago I saw a job post asking for a marketing manager, I applied, research the company. Never heard of this type of biz before, research competition just 2 more. even in their website there is an article from 2007 saying how niche their business is and it was making 4.5 mill back then. it had 25 employees in 2007 and still has 25 in 2026. their whole marketing is literally stuck in time. Still the owner he does everything and decided after almost 3 months interviewing me not to hire anyone "we talked every 2 weeks and he always forgot what we talked previously" every other staff approved me for the job. Anyway, I still intrigued. because not only they lack competition in USA, is mostly global. This company Won't grow. the owner wants to do everything himself and dont want to change anything. I talked with staff and based on our meetings he is all the time flying around in sales meetings etc but nothing can get approved if he doesn't edit it himself. They sell a very unique type of products they manufacture in USA. their competitor makes a similar one but more expensive and harder to use. What would you do in this case? knowing that in a few years they reached 4.5 mill and 19 years later have hardly any competition and they are doing nothing to grow. and theres a need for their product globally. submitted by /u/Starlyns [link] [comments]
- Is it easier to build a business right now or is that just what twitter wants us to believeby /u/Healty_potsmoker (Entrepreneur) on May 12, 2026 at 3:16 pm
I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and genuinely can't decide if we're living in the greatest era to start a company or the most deceptive one there's a 14 year old in my twitter feed who built and shipped a saas product using cursor and claude, this kid has paying customers and a stripe dashboard and hasn't started high school yet. and when you look at what one person can actually do right now it's hard not to be optimistic, you can build a full product with cursor and claude without being a real engineer. run your entire outbound through consolidated platforms like salesforge, fuse ai or clay where data and sequencer all live under one login, manage meta ads through ai connectors by talking to chatgpt, produce 50 video variations in an afternoon using magic hour or kling . claude can write your copy, debug your code, plan your strategy, and orchestrate your workflow. Dario amodei said we will see the first solo unicorn by 2026 and sam altman is betting on it too but here's the part nobody on twitter talks about because it doesn't get likes if everyone has access to the same tools then everyone has access to the SAME tools. The tools democratized creation but they also democratized competition and those are not the same thing. and then there's the distraction problem, we have more leverage than ever and also more noise than ever. The same phone that gives you access to every ai tool in existence also gives you infinite dopamine hits that steal your attention before you ship anything. I watch founders spend more time tweeting about building than actually building, the tools got better but our attention got worse. the honest answer to is it easier to build a business right now is yes building is dramatically easier and building a successful business is roughly the same difficulty it's always been. because the hard parts were never technical execution. The hard parts are choosing the right problem, reaching the right peoplw and maintaining focus in an environment specifically designed to destroy it. will we see a billion dollar one person company? probably but it won't be the person with the best tools. It'll be the person with the best judgment about which problem to solve and the discipline to keep solving it while everyone else is distracted by the next product hunt launch are we in the easiest era to build or just the easiest era to start and the hardest era to focus? submitted by /u/Healty_potsmoker [link] [comments]
- Is it better to for a company (with low overheads) to position itself in having more customers, or in having a better class of customer?by /u/prankster999 (Entrepreneur) on May 12, 2026 at 11:45 am
As above... I understand that people don't want to say no to money, but at the same time, having lower quality customers will just result in having more headaches. The reason as to why I ask is because I am looking to create an ecommerce website with a membership component. For general onboarding, I am unsure as to whether to just use Stripe or use Stripe KYC (Know Your Customer). For the membership, I definitely do want to use Stripe KYC (Know Your Customer). So basically... Use Stripe KYC sparingly, or throughout the website? What would you suggest? EDIT: I am thinking about implementing the following: New Account + Simple Purchases (ie User Onboarding Process): Simple Stripe (but where trusted bank cards and not "pre-paid cards" are used) + basic fraud prevention. Membership: Stripe KYC (ensures high trust and anti-bot user legitimacy, including minimum age rating). submitted by /u/prankster999 [link] [comments]
- Talent Tuesday: Services and Collabs | May 12, 2026by /u/AutoModerator (Entrepreneur) on May 12, 2026 at 8:00 am
Looking to hire, get hired, or find a collaborator? Post what you're offering or what you need. Keep it brief: who you are, what you do, and how to reach you. No spamming. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]
- How to Build a Pitch Deck That Actually Gets Investor Attention: What 590 Reddit Comments Reveal About What Worksby /u/Melvinak (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 10:20 pm
I analysed 590 comments across 15 Reddit threads where real investors and venture capitalists were giving founders detailed feedback on their pitch decks. I wanted to understand what investors actually care about, what needs to go on each slide and why. The summary of it all is that you have to clearly communicate that you understand your business and your market. The Cover Slide: Your First Three Seconds Matter An investor will spend approximately three seconds looking at your cover slide. This is your window to establish clarity and professionalism before they've read anything else. You need to give a summary of your company: What you do, Who it is for, and What result it gives them. This might seem limiting, but it forces you to distill your entire value proposition into something memorable. One often overlooked detail is the format in which you send your deck. Investors consistently emphasize sending your pitch as a PDF rather than a .pptx or .key file. The reason is because fonts break, layouts shift across different systems, and you risk looking unprepared before the substance of your pitch has even been evaluated. The "Why Now" Problem: Going Beyond AI Before you present your product, you must address a fundamental question: Why does this business have to exist right now? Too many founders begin with their product feature set. Instead, you should start by identifying something that has changed in the world, a behaviour shift, a market move, or a regulatory change that makes the problem you are solving more urgent. This creates the context that makes your solution timely rather than simply clever. However, there is a critical caveat here. Every pitch deck in 2025 seems to claim "Why Now? Because AI." Investors have stopped being impressed by this answer. You need something more substantive, a regulation that changed, a generation that behaves differently, or a major competitor whose business model collapsed. The "why now" has to be real and observable in the market. The Problem Slide: Your Most Important Moment This is the slide where an investor decides whether the rest of your pitch is worth their time. Do not present a statement. Present a story. Give your customer a name. Walk through a specific moment where the problem hit them hard. "Every Monday, Sarah spends four hours on reconciliation, and once it nearly cost her a client" is better than "Companies struggle with X". If you or a co-founder have personally lived this problem, this is your strongest advantage, and most founders do not play this card loudly enough. Lead with it. Show how you understand this problem not from research, but from experience. Bring your own evidence to this slide. Rather than citing market research PDFs or industry reports, share what you have directly gathered: customer interviews, results from a landing page test, the size of your waitlist. There is a meaningful difference between "We think people have this problem" and "We talked to 50 people and 42 of them listed it as a top-three pain point." The latter signals that you have done the work to validate your assumptions. Keep this slide to one slide only. Do not cram your solution or market size into this frame. It will look cluttered, and it will dilute the emotional impact of the problem itself. The Solution Slide: Show What It Does, Not How It Works Your solution slide has one job: explain what your product does. That is literally the entire purpose. Many founders confuse features with benefits. Your investors do not care about your "AI-powered multi-tenant architecture." They care that it "cuts the Monday morning reconciliation from four hours to twenty minutes." One experienced reviewer noted that they have removed this slide from at least ten decks because founders keep explaining how the technology works instead of what it accomplishes for the customer. There is a useful test here: if your grandma cannot understand what problem you solve in thirty seconds, your explanation is still too technical. Strip away the implementation details and focus on the outcome that matters to your customer. Show the Product Early: Screenshots Beat Explanations Show your product early. Really early. Screenshots are so important, they allow investors to understand instantly what they are looking at. Do not ask them to imagine what your product looks like while you are explaining it. Simply include a screenshot. As one commenter put it plainly: "demo beats explanation every time." If you do not yet have a product, a clean mockup works just as well. Add one line underneath the screenshot explaining what the viewer is seeing. The Traction Slide: Retention Tells the True Story The most important chart you can display is a retention chart. This shows how many of your users are still using the product at week one, week two, week four, week eight, and week twelve. A curve that flattens indicates product-market fit. A curve that drops to zero indicates that users tried the product once and did not return. When it comes to presenting numbers, context is everything. Saying "10K users" means almost nothing to an investor. But saying "10K users, with 23% month-on-month growth over six months, and 68% still active after three months" tells a coherent story about sustainable growth and user satisfaction. Do not simply show a graph going upward and expect investors to be impressed. Explain why the spike happened. Tell them what the numbers actually mean for your business. Market Size: Do Your Own Math Do not pull market size numbers from Statista or similar databases and paste them into your deck. Investors know you did this, and it does not impress anyone. Instead, do your own math. Calculate how many specific people or companies have this exact problem. Estimate what they would realistically pay you per year. Multiply those two numbers. That is your target market. That is what investors want to see. If your total addressable market is too broad, It signals to investors that you do not yet know who your customer is. Market size estimates require you to niche down, to be specific, and to ground your estimates in logic rather than wishful thinking. How You Acquire Customers: Where Most Decks Fall Apart This is the slide where most pitch decks fail completely. Founders will spend ten slides detailing their product and its features, then present one vague slide that says "we will do SEO and partnerships." A venture capitalist in one of the Reddit threads mentioned that they have stopped asking "how big is your market" and started asking "how do you get your first one hundred customers", because the answer reveals everything about whether a founder understands their business. Pick one channel. Not a list of channels. Do not say "we will do social media, partnerships, and paid ads." Instead, describe what acquiring a customer through one specific channel actually looks like in real, concrete terms. For example: "We send thirty cold emails a week. Three reply. One becomes a customer." This is a plan. Show any evidence that this approach is already working, even if only at a small scale. And demonstrate that it costs you less to acquire a customer than they will ever pay you. The Competition Slide: Honest Positioning Matters This slide has one job: show where you sit in the market relative to your competitors. Use an X-Y map. Choose your two axes carefully, they need to be things your customers actually care about, not dimensions that conveniently make you look good by default. Investors who know the space will see through a misleading positioning immediately. Name your competitors. All of them, including the large ones. One reviewer shared an example of a founder who built a product with a UI similar to Tinder but never mentioned Tinder as a competitor, it looked like the founder did not understand the market they were entering. This is a mistake. Be honest, don’t give investors a reason to believe you are hiding something. The Team Slide: Lead With Your Unfair Advantage Investors often skip directly to the team slide to decide whether the rest of your deck is worth their time. Investors want to know: Why is this team uniquely suited for this problem right now? What lived experience, unfair insight, or hard-earned access does your team possess that most other founders in your space simply do not have? If someone on your founding team has personally lived the problem you are solving, this is your answer. Say it clearly and confidently. One experienced investor put it this way: "A team slide treated as an afterthought, just names and logos with no hint of why this team is suited to win, is one of the most common mistakes I see." Do not make this mistake. Your team's credibility on this particular problem is one of your strongest assets. The Ask: Connect the Dollar Amount to an Outcome Your ask should be one sentence. How much are you raising? What milestone will it get you to? How long is your runway? "We need $2M for hiring and marketing" is not a plan. "$2M gets us to $100K monthly recurring revenue with eighteen months of runway" is a plan. If you cannot connect the dollar amount to a specific, measurable outcome, investors will conclude that you do not fully understand your own business yet. Overall The Reddit threads revealed that the founders whose decks impressed investors were the ones who could tell a clear, grounded story about a real problem, a team suited to solve it, and a path to get there with the capital they were seeking. I hope this helps someone. Happy pitching! submitted by /u/Melvinak [link] [comments]
- School of Hard Knocksby /u/Vouchy-MOD (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 6:50 pm
1000 interviews and the advice is always the same five lines. Wake up early. Work hard. Read. Believe. Take the leap. Thats the whole playbook. Nobody verifies anything. Guy says 80k a month at 21, host nods, cut. Could be real, could be daddys credit line. You cant tell and the host doesnt ask. The funnel does the rest. Free clip, bio, paid community. The interview is the ad, not the product. submitted by /u/Vouchy-MOD [link] [comments]
- Does anyone track what happens to paid clicks that land on a Google Business Profile?by /u/Due-Bet115 (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 6:31 pm
Hi, Something I've been sitting with lately that I haven't seen discussed much here. A lot of local Google Ads campaigns route clicks to the Google Business Profile panel, not a website. Maps placements especially. The prospect clicks the ad, the advertiser gets charged, and the person lands directly on the listing. Which means the listing is functioning as a paid landing page. But it's not being treated like one. Standard ads analysis tracks CTR, CPC, conversion if the setup is right. What happens inside the listing once someone arrives isn't tracked anywhere. No session time. No exit signal. Just a click that counted and a prospect who left quietly. The evaluation happens fast. Photos, description, how recent the reviews are, whether the business looks active. If something doesn't hold up, the tab gets closed and the money is already gone. That gap is structurally invisible. There's no metric that says "twelve people landed on your listing from paid traffic and left without contacting you." It just doesn't exist. I'm not sure how many people running local campaigns are treating GBP quality as a paid conversion problem. It mostly seems to get handled as an organic visibility problem, which is a different frame entirely. Anyone here think about this, or do you mostly let the listing sit and focus on the campaign side? submitted by /u/Due-Bet115 [link] [comments]
- One lesson I learned too late: not every paying client is a good clientby /u/Traditional_Key8982 (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 4:53 pm
Early on, I used to think every closed deal was a win. Over time, I realized some of the most exhausting clients were the ones I fought hardest to close. More revisions, slower decisions, unclear expectations, endless “small additions.” Meanwhile, the clients who understood the value and moved decisively were often easier to work with. Revenue matters, but client fit matters more than I realized. submitted by /u/Traditional_Key8982 [link] [comments]
- Turns out the kid who couldn't sit still in class was just 20 years early for the AI era.by /u/Popular-Cap-9013 (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 3:26 pm
AI is giving non-ADHD people their first taste of what my brain has been doing for 36 years. welcome to the chaos. people who've always been focused and structured are starting to use AI seriously and suddenly they can't stay on one thing. idea at 9am, Claude builds a prototype by 11am, by lunch they've moved on to something else. 8 projects a month, zero finished. and they're stressed about it because this has never happened to them before. you know what thats called? thats ADHD. thats been my entire life lol. I've had ADHD since I was a kid. the jumping between 14 ideas before breakfast, the "I'm going to build THIS now" energy that dies after 4 hours, the losing money on projects I abandoned at 80%. I've been managing that chaos for decades. I know when my brain is lying to me about what's important. and now I'm watching neurotypical people discover that feeling for the first time because AI removed the friction that used to protect them. before AI a random idea would die naturally because it would take 3 weeks to build. now theres no friction. every impulse becomes a prototype in 2 hours. and if you've never dealt with that before its genuinely terrifying. but for people like me? this is the best era ever. we already have the coping mechanisms. we already know that feeling productive and being profitable are not the same thing. the chaos that AI creates is just tuesday for us. I'm building a solo business right now, $103K ARR, AI as my entire team, and my ADHD brain is genuinely an advantage for the first time. fast context switching, holding 5 half-finished ideas in my head and knowing exactly where I left off, going wide and fast while AI handles the depth. thats not a bug thats how I've always operated. I talked to a friend last week whos super sharp with AI. like genuinely good with Claude, builds stuff fast, sees opportunities everywhere. and thats exactly his problem. he's overheating. sees so many possibilities that he's going in every direction at once and burning out. and I was like bro welcome to my world except I've been managing this exact feeling since I was a kid and you're discovering it now. now I'm not romanticizing ADHD. it still sucks in a lot of ways. but specifically for working with AI? pure advantage. to anyone feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities. you're not broken. your brain just got capabilities it wasn't trained for. commit to one boring important thing per day before you touch anything else. I've been doing that my whole life because I had to. and to my fellow ADHD people. our time has come. the ones who spent their whole lives being told their brain was a problem are now the best equipped for whats happening. thats not irony thats justice lol. submitted by /u/Popular-Cap-9013 [link] [comments]
- Monday mentorship: ask anything | May 11, 2026by /u/AutoModerator (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 8:00 am
New to entrepreneurship or just starting out? This is your space. Ask the questions you're afraid to ask elsewhere. Experienced folks, jump in and share what you wish someone had told you early on. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]
- What’s the biggest "before vs after AI" difference in your company?by /u/dewharmony03 (Entrepreneur) on May 11, 2026 at 8:00 am
Feels like AI changed the default speed of business overnight. A founder said recently AI completely changed how they handle churn. Instead of manually reading angry cancellation emails, they dump thousands of support tickets and refund requests into AI and ask it to surface hidden patterns humans missed. Apparently they discovered a huge percentage of churn came from one tiny onboarding confusion nobody internally noticed because support staff normalized it over time. That was pretty cool. So entrepreneurs, what’s the biggest "before vs after AI" difference in your company? submitted by /u/dewharmony03 [link] [comments]
- Midcareer professional (40s) wondering if I'm crazy for considering a service businessby /u/justimprint (Entrepreneur) on May 10, 2026 at 10:25 pm
Sorry people, I am back to ask another question for feedback. I make $140K WFH, comfortable life, but I keep thinking: "What if I built something?" I have the capital, a box truck, and operational discipline. Idea: Hauling services (turnovers, junk removal, maintenance, cleaning) B2b, residential. Location: Northern VIrginia and target is the DMV. Real question: Am I overthinking this or is this actually a solid path? Honest feedback appreciated. Not looking for hype, just real talk. submitted by /u/justimprint [link] [comments]
- Struggling startupsby /u/Puzzleheaded_Fuel544 (Entrepreneur) on May 10, 2026 at 9:11 pm
Question for founders: If continuing became unsustainable, would you rather shut down quietly or transfer the project to someone else if possible, retaining a portion of equity in the process. If so, Why? submitted by /u/Puzzleheaded_Fuel544 [link] [comments]
- What founders actually need before hiring developersby /u/Naive-Wallaby9534 (Entrepreneur) on May 10, 2026 at 6:52 pm
A surprising number of founders start looking for developers before they have clarity on: the actual problem the target user the core workflow what makes the product different A lot of people think they need: a huge spec 40 features polished UI complex architecture But honestly, the best MVP projects usually start with something much simpler: one painful problem one clear user type one/two core features a fast feedback loop Everything else can evolve later. Curious if anyone here is stuck before building or trying to figure out what their first version should actually include submitted by /u/Naive-Wallaby9534 [link] [comments]
- How to offload sales? I hate it!by /u/03captain23 (Entrepreneur) on May 10, 2026 at 2:27 pm
I run a handful of tech companies. Some local some cloud and they're all better than competitors, cheaper and everything else. Once we retain customers they stay for life. Also once I get my foot in the door i close basically everyone. Almost all my business has been just word of mouth and its worked well for 15 years. The problem is I need to scale and haven't been able to sell. I have everything completely built and ready to scale 10x, whole infrastructure and everything just sitting idle. I really need someone to work on commission and help ramp up sales, handle leads and just keep grinding. Commission only is the best way as I need them to be hungry and work on their own, I really need a sales entrepreneur. They can easily make 6 figures and easily work remote. I'm just unsure how to find someone or how to properly explain that its a legit opportunity. Also its a wide array of types of products, some a few bucks a month and others are tens of thousands a month. My goal is for them to sell 500k+ a year in new sales and they'd net 150k+/year. Where's the best spot to find people like this? I haven't really tried but it seems a bit hard to list submitted by /u/03captain23 [link] [comments]
- The most stressful part of building my first product wasn't the delaysby /u/Unable_Fishing_1679 (Entrepreneur) on May 10, 2026 at 2:11 pm
I'm building my first watch brand and recently went through prototype production with a supplier. Going into it, i thought delays would be the biggest risk. Well after days of thinking and learning, i know they weren't. The hardest part was realizing how little visibility you sometimes have into what's actually happening. My prototype was delayed twice. But what bothered me more was getting very vague updates for weeks, then eventually discovering some design details had been changed without discussion because they were difficult to manufacture consistently. The weird thing is the prototype still looked pretty good overall. Which made me realize how dangerous that can be as a founder. A project can look fine while important compromises are quietly happening in the background. Since then i've talked with a few other suppliers, and the biggest difference wasn't pricing or capability. It was transparency. The conversations that built the most trust were actually the ones where suppliers openly pointed out risks early. submitted by /u/Unable_Fishing_1679 [link] [comments]
- 🎙️ Episode 004: AMA Gabe Galvez (Private Equity) ) | /r/Entrepreneur Podcastby /u/FITGuard (Entrepreneur) on April 24, 2026 at 10:29 pm
Episode 4 submitted by /u/FITGuard [link] [comments]
- PPC Salary Survey 2026 Final Report - 11th Year Editionby /u/fathom53 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on March 17, 2026 at 1:14 pm
Howdy Y'All Our 11th year in the books. This year we got 445, which is about a 40% drop in responses due to me switching email platforms. Sadly a lot of emails seem to have hit people's spam folder. A bit of bad luck. Countries/regions are listed in alphabetical as we got 110+ slides. For reporting, the bar is 20 for the USA and 10 for the rest of world to show a country, region, province/state or a city. The Netherlands is still in the top 3 countries this year. They knocked out Canada for the top 3rd spot for number of responses. USA and UK are top 1 and 2 and Canada was number 4. Congrats to each country. Some Notes It feels like salaries are not growing and getting compressed if you work a salaried job. Does not feel like we are bringing in enough junior level people which could spell trouble for our industry down the line Some people have 1-3 years experience in paid but having been working for 8-10 years, thus they can skew salaries higher. Some people include their bonus in their salaries I imagine. This can make their salary higher than someone who might not have. Hence why we try to use the median salary across all reports Results Served Two Ways Google Slides 2026 Salary Survey or PDF 2026 Salary Survey Thanks you for helping make this happen. I spend a couple weeks on this project each year and it's truly interesting to see the data doing this labour of love project. If you see a mistake or you think something is off, let me know in the comments and I'll look into it when I get a chance this week. This folder has past salary survey results. submitted by /u/fathom53 [link] [comments]

























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