Advertising, explained and put to work
Guides and analysis for agencies and advertisers: advertising accounts, Meta, Google Ads and TikTok campaigns, conversion tracking and advertising operations.
You open a client report and find three spellings of the same source and several names for one campaign. The meeting starts with spreadsheet cleanup instead of results. Another dashboard will not fix inconsistent names being sent into it.
The report says every advertising dollar generated four dollars in sales. Good news? Perhaps—but what remains after product costs, delivery, payment processing and returns? ROAS compares revenue with ad spend, not profit with all costs. It cannot answer that question on its own.
Several offers look alike: an ad account, support and billing. One costs less, but does it cover the same things? The difference may only become obvious when you need a report, a campaign stops, or you want to end the service. Operational questions deserve attention before signing and handing over a budget.
The client has invited you into their ad account and the team is already preparing the campaign. Everything seems ready—until nobody can confirm who pays the bills, or the Pixel turns out to be connected to an old store. A quick start can become a delayed launch.
Your shop sells desk lamps. A photo showing one in a workspace might explain its use better than an isolated product shot. That's an idea for a teaching exercise in visual advertising, not a promise that Pinterest will generate sales for the shop.
You sell software to businesses, but “businesses” doesn't tell you who will read the ad. Who uses the software, who evaluates it, and who approves the purchase? Ask those questions before exploring LinkedIn Ads: professional context and attributes may help define who you need to reach.
You have a great product photo, but what does it tell the person looking at it? A clear ad starts by answering that question. This guide walks through a teaching draft for Snapchat ads, from message and objective to destination and results, without launching a campaign or prescribing a spending amount.
You've opened TikTok Ads Manager, but you're not sure what to film. Before choosing an effect or a soundtrack, ask what the viewer needs to understand to care about the product. We'll turn that question into a video outline and initial settings, using a fictional desk-lamp shop.
Someone types “adjustable desk lamp”. That's different from casually browsing images: they have a question they're expressing through search. Search campaigns in Google Ads let you show ads connected to searches. They're one campaign type, not the whole of Google advertising.
You may know how to post a photo on Instagram, but creating an ad adds new questions. What do you want someone to do? Where will they go? How will you track the result? Learning Facebook and Instagram advertising starts with those decisions, then uses Meta Ads Manager to organise them. Meta Blueprint offers an introduction to the tool and its reports.
