Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
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):<p>1. Most important tip: is your product ready for ads?<p><pre><code>  - 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&#x27;ve just gifted money to Google&#x2F;X&#x2F;Meta whoever.

  - If you haven&#x27;t already, sometimes when you think you want ads, what you more likely and more urgently need is better SEO optimization
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2. The quality of your ad is important, but your on-boarding flows are way more important still.<p><pre><code>  - Most of the time, when we debugged why an ad wasn&#x27;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&#x27;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 &#x27;fold&#x27; or view that a user saw. That tiny scroll we took for granted killed performance.
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3. As a founder, learn the basics<p><pre><code>  - This is not rocket science, no matter how complex an agency&#x2F;ad expert may make it look.

  - There are some basic jargon that will be thrown around (&#x27;Target CPA&#x27;, &#x27;CPC&#x27;, &#x27;CTR&#x27;, &#x27;Impression share&#x27;); don&#x27;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&#x27;t assume that your &#x27;Ad expert&#x27; or &#x27;Ad agency&#x27; has &#x27;got this&#x27;.

    - 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.
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4. Targeting Awareness&#x2F;Consideration&#x2F;Conversion<p><pre><code>  - 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 &#x27;awareness&#x27; keywords

  - Most importantly, unless your competition is play dirty and advertising on your branded keywords, don&#x27;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!
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5. Plug the leaks, set tight spend limits<p><pre><code>  - You&#x27;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&#x27;re trying to make a living and they don&#x27;t work for you.)

    - (Also mentioned in the article) Do not accept any &#x27;auto optimization&#x27; options from the ads platform. They mostly don&#x27;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&#x27;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 &#x27;placement&#x27; also helps a lot
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6. Read up `r&#x2F;PPC` on Reddit<p><pre><code>  - Especially the old, well rated posts here. 

  - They&#x27;re a gold mine of war stories from other people who got burnt doing PPC, whose mistakes you can avoid.</code></pre>