The article has some helpful points. But as a programmer-SAAS-founder-who-took-over-ads operation, I have some tips on some insights we gleaned doing paid ads (and getting it to be profitable for us):
1. Most important tip: is your product ready for ads?
- Do not do paid ads too early.
- Do it once you know that your product is compelling to your target audience.
- Ads are likely an expensive way of putting your product in front of an audience.
- No matter how good the ad operation, unless your product can convince a user to stay and explore it further, you've just gifted money to Google/X/Meta whoever.
- If you haven't already, sometimes when you think you want ads, what you more likely and more urgently need is better SEO optimization
2. The quality of your ad is important, but your on-boarding flows are way more important still.
- Most of the time, when we debugged why an ad wasn't showing conversions, rather than anything inherent to the ad, we found that it was the flows the user encountered _AFTER_ landing on the platform that made the performance suffer.
- In some cases, it's quite trivial: eg. one of our ads were performing poorly because the conversion criterion was a user login. And the login button ended up _slightly_ below the first 'fold' or view that a user saw. That tiny scroll we took for granted killed performance.
3. As a founder, learn the basics
- This is not rocket science, no matter how complex an agency/ad expert may make it look.
- There are some basic jargon that will be thrown around ('Target CPA', 'CPC', 'CTR', 'Impression share'); don't be intimidated
- Take the time to dig into the details
- They are not complicated and are worth your time especially as an early stage startup
- Don't assume that your 'Ad expert' or 'Ad agency' has 'got this'.
- At least early on, monitor the vital stats closely on weekly reviews
- Ad agencies especially struggle with understanding nuances of your business. So make sure to help them in early days.
4. Targeting Awareness/Consideration/Conversion
- Here I have to politely disagree with the article
- Focus on conversion keywords exclusively to begin with!
- These will give you low volume traffic, but the quality will likely be much higher
- Conversion keywords are also a great way to lock down the basics of your ad operation before blowing money on broad match 'awareness' keywords
- Most importantly, unless your competition is play dirty and advertising on your branded keywords, don't do it.
- Do NOT advertise on your own branded keywords, at least to begin with.
- Most of the audience that used your brand keywords to get to your site are essentially just repeat users using your ad as the quickest navigation link. Yikes!
5. Plug the leaks, set tight spend limits
- You'll find that while your running ads, you are in a somewhat adversarial dance with the ads platform
- Some caveats (also mentioned in the article)
- Ad reps (mostly) give poor advice, sometimes on borderline bad faith. We quickly learnt to disregard most of what they say. (But be polite, they're trying to make a living and they don't work for you.)
- (Also mentioned in the article) Do not accept any 'auto optimization' options from the ads platform. They mostly don't work.
- Set tight limits on spends for EVERYTHING in the beginning. I cannot emphasize this enough. Start small and slowly and incrementally crank up numbers, whether it be spend limits per ad group, target CPA values, CPC values - whatever. Patience is a big virtue here
- If you're running display ads, there are many more leaks to be plugged: disallow apps if you can (article mentions why), and disallow scammy sites that place ads strategically to get stray clicks.
- For display ads, controlling 'placement' also helps a lot
6. Read up `r/PPC` on Reddit
- Especially the old, well rated posts here.
- They're a gold mine of war stories from other people who got burnt doing PPC, whose mistakes you can avoid.