What I learned from spending $50k on ads

For the last 8 months I've been running a newsletter for freelance software developers, and my main way of attracting subs was through paid ads. In those last 8 months I've spent ~$50k on hundreds of ad campaigns on twitter and meta

At the start I was a complete beginner, didn't know a thing about paid ads. But it seemed easy enough. Pay for exposure, get subs, make money. Yaa not that simple. Over the last 8 months here are my $50k worth of learnings:

1. Ad creative quality matters big time

At first I thought I could just create ads about my project, and because it's so great people would like it and signup. Nope.

There are so many ads out there, yours has to stand out. But it can't be over the top where it's annoying. There's like an art to finding that middle ground that I'm still working on

2. Ads get ... "stale"? wtf?

This didn't make any sense to me. You run an ad, it's doing really great. Then after like a month performance starts dropping and dropping. Why? My other ads promoting the same product are still doing the same. It's almost like the ad engine gets bored of it.

And then sometimes if you just do an ad refresh (new campaign with exact same stuff), it does well again. Explain that!

3. You have to constantly be testing new ads

This is the name of the game imo. There are too many variables to account for. Copy, design, platform, targeting, season, and a level of randomness. That the only way to run a successful campaign, is to run a bunch of campaigns and then double down on the ones that work.

I found the 80-20 rule to apply here.

4. Different platforms need a different ad "vibe"

Twitter ads - a lot of value is in the actual ad copy, the "tweet" section of it. Probably worth like 50% of the ad performance.

Meta ads - it's like 90% ad creative. Idk if people even read the ad copy.

Google ads - 100% copy. I found the search ads to be the only ones that worked / less spammy, so there's no creative there

5. Ads cannibalize each other, wtf?

Another wtf you have to consider. If you over-advertise the same product, people will get tired of seeing them, and the extra ads will take away from all your campaign performances. So once again there's a middle ground

6. Twitter great for traffic volume, Meta great for CTR, Google great for ... spam?

For like $50 a day on twitter, I can get like 5k-10k page views. But only like 1-3% of them will convert.

For like $50 a day on meta, I can get like 200-400 page views, but 20% will convert.

So net-net it about equals in the amount of subs I get, but a ton more page views from Twitter (i'm suspecting bots)

For Google, I got a great conversion rate similar to Meta's, but the subscriber quality was so bad so I stopped.

These numbers are probably industry and product dependent, but thought it worth giving.

Summary:

Running ad campaigns is definitely an art. And hopefully my lessons will save you money from making the same mistakes I did :)

A last shameless plug :)

I built a website that hand picks the best ad creatives across all platforms, and indexes them so you can search and save the best ones. Much better than going through the traditional ad libraries, having to know what to search, sifting through shit ads, only to have the ads disappear when the campaigns stop.

Take a look if interested: swipejuice.com. And I like to tweet more about my paid ad learnings at: x.com/acharbohno