It’s deceptively easy to start a digital ad campaign. Enter your credit card info, pick a few targeting options, and let the leads roll in, yeah? But netting a return is the hard part.
I learned this lesson by torching $12,000 when a dead, untargeted test campaign was somehow activated. There wasn’t any evidence of it being reactivated in the platform’s change log, and after months of support calls and being hot-potatoed, I never got a clear answer on what went wrong. Watching money evaporate due to a technical glitch makes you feel like a small, helpless creature.
What went right was my boss. Tail between my legs, I told her about my mistake. She replied, “Shit happens. Thanks for telling me. We trust you. Get back to it.” That $12,000 mistake (and my boss’s grace) bought me invaluable lessons about digital advertising. I’ve gone on to spend millions across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Spotify, and other platforms.
Here’s what actually matters when you’re getting started:
Focus on Three Numbers (And Only Three)
You need just three numbers: leads acquired, leads converted, and cost. From these, you can calculate cost per acquisition and cost per conversion. Then you can associate the numbers with targeting parameters, creative assets, etc. to start optimizing. Add lead value (what a conversion is worth to you) to inform your budget, and you’re set. Everything else is noise.
For most small and mid-sized businesses, views, impressions, clicks, followers, reactions, visits, and shares are vanity metrics. Forget awareness and brand equity for the moment. Just let performance drive your early ad decisions.
Avoid Reports That Look Like Cockpits
Really, you don’t need many dials, charts, or knobs… maybe not even a dashboard. It’s okay if the meat of your report only occupies a few cells in a spreadsheet. Most metrics only matter when tied to cost. If a number isn’t helping you make decisions about where to spend your next dollar, it doesn’t belong in your core reporting.
Don’t Trust Auto-Generated Campaigns
Many platforms will offer to build or generate campaigns for you with a few clicks. This makes it exquisitely easy to get started. Don’t do this.
Auto-generated ads likely won’t reflect your offerings. And if you only to target an audience based on age and location (the basics many automated campaigns ask you for), you’ll pay for a lot of impotent placements.
Skip Display Networks (For Now)
Stick to native placements when starting out. Display and audience networks promise massive reach across third-party sites, apps, and more. But native traffic (ads shown directly on the platform) consistently delivers better value. Start there.
Keep Your Marketing Automation Dead Simple
If you can handle ad platforms, you can probably automate lead capture and reporting yourself. With basic spreadsheet skills and no-code tools like Zapier or Power Automate, you can build effective workflows with minimal cruft.
I’ve been a fly on the wall at many companies that adopt SaaS platforms, struggle with integration, and finally abandon them. The true cost of the one-size-fits-all systems always exceeds the sticker price, particularly if it means integrating the system into your existing website, email system, CRM, etc.
This is subjective, but a simple, scalable system you build yourself will serve you better than a complex SaaS solution you have to bend your business around.
Weigh the Privacy-Performance Tradeoff
User tracking is powerful but problematic. While you can measure ROI without trackers, tracking pixels and tags can drive precise ad targeting, retargeting, and conversion tracking.
But tracking pixels aren’t always necessary. You can often measure ROI through simpler means, especially if you’re only using one or two ad platforms, or if you have another way to monitor inbound traffic sources (e.g., How’d you hear about us?).
That said, since the late 2010’s, I’ve seen remarkable success with Meta’s Pixel. For pretty much everyone, adding a tracking pixel for the ad platform you’re using will yield better performance. But remember, once you install a site-wide tracker, you’ve commoditized your visitors.
Use Lookalike Audiences
You can feed your customer lists to platforms to target similar users. For example, if you have a list of buyers, you can feed that list to a platform to help target others that resemble that list. Expand that targeting gradually until returns diminish.
Combined with basic targeting and retargeting, lookalike audiences are incredibly powerful. There is huge utility here. You have to be clever about the lists you feed the platform. And this is a kind of blind-trust tool — you’re both trusting a platform with valuable information and you’re relying on their algorithms to make good decisions. And once again, in my experience, Meta excels at this.
Remember: Your Ads (and Your Account) Can Vanish
Algorithms can freeze your campaigns — or entire account — indefinitely. I’ve had campaigns flagged, store locations erased from maps, and accounts locked because an algorithm made a wrong call. While human support eventually fixed these issues, getting human attention is difficult.
I cannot stress this point enough.
Most platforms offer bubbly, one-to-one onboarding support. Thereafter, it’s way less human. When you need help (and you will need help when an algorithm turns its thumb down) it’s excruciatingly difficult to get meat-based support. Especially post-COVID, I could only reach humans because I was spending serious money. I only got a support phone number after exceeding $1M in annual spend.
Set Rules, But Expect Cold Night Sweats
My $12,000 lesson taught me to create failsafes. Major platforms now have granular rules you can set to deactivate campaigns when they hit certain limits or goals. Always set these caps.
But even with monitoring, reports, and the right chickens sacrificed to the right gods, things can still go wrong.
Parting Thoughts on the State of Ad Tech
For years, many have said the ad tech bubble is quivering with horrid tension. But I’m still blowing air into that bubble, and I only see it growing. At least not for the largest players — Google and Meta. And if Apple were to launch a search engine and somehow serve privacy-conscious ads (oxymoronic), I’d be an early adopter.
Some claim digital advertising is a scam incapable of delivering ROI. I don’t understand that. While it’s not for every business, ROI is surprisingly easy to calculate, especially with small budgets. Even after my $12,000 mistake, I kept spending because it kept working. It still does.
But I understand the aversion to ad tech. The space overflows grifters and markup-scalping agencies. Bot traffic and click farms abound. And after all, it’s advertising. Most ads — digital or not — are irrelevant and suck.
In an ideal world, ads would be as rare and welcome as spotting a colorful bird in your neighborhood. The perfect ad would interest you, prompt action, and leave you satisfied.
We’re not there yet.
For now, dweebs like me wield blunderbusses to fleck the target of you.
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Written in 2021; gently updated in 2025.
