Alex Thilen

There’s this myth that certain paid ad networks aren’t meant for certain audiences. A common example we see: “TikTok Ads aren’t meant for B2B.” But I’d argue otherwise. Every ad network works for everyone. It’s not that TikTok isn’t good for B2B, it’s that other ad networks are simply better from a cost perspective. Could you generate a return on your money with a B2B SaaS offer from TikTok ads? I bet you could. But why would you want to? Your money is better spent elsewhere. It’s not whether or not it makes sense from a returns perspective, it’s whether or not it makes sense from a network priority perspective. If the grass is greener somewhere else, go there instead.

Every new dollar you spend reaches someone slightly less ready to buy. Here’s what I mean… The first dollar you spend and the millionth dollar you spend behave differently. To the point where the first $0 to $100,000 per month in ad spend could result in selling an individual low-ticket product within hours. Whereas going from $900,000 to $1,000,000 per month in ad spend could result in selling the same product, but it might take 2 weeks to convert. Why? A few reasons… When you’re starting out, the ad network searches for the most likely people to buy your product. But when you start seriously cranking up your ad spend, the algorithm runs out of immediate buyers and instead pushes your ads in front of people who will likely buy later down the road. This leads to diminishing returns, forcing you to branch out to other ad networks before embracing the same-platform diminishing returns again. Maybe you started with Google Ads because that’s the most logical medium for your audience. But now it’s time to try Facebook ads. Facebook ads might be worse than Google ads from an ROAS perspective for your audience, but the diminishing returns you’re now experiencing on Google make Facebook worthwhile. And finally, there’s creative fatigue. The more money you spend, the more frequently the same prospects see your same old creative, and the novelty dies. That forces you to come up with new creatives more often…which costs you more. I’m not sharing any of this to bum you out. Instead, it’s more of a reminder that diminishing returns are inevitable, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as you’re seeing a return, keeping your ads active and scaling them further is worthwhile.

The more you spend, the further away your next customer is from buying. But that doesn’t mean spending more isn’t worth it. Irrespective of diminishing returns, as long as you’re seeing a return on each dollar, increasing your budget is worth it. But when you spend more, the rules change. Creatives will need to be updated more often. The worthiness of other ad networks starts to rise. You’ll need to wait longer before jumping to conclusions. So long as you’re not treating the first dollar and the millionth dollar invested as the same thing, you’ll be fine.

Unpopular opinion: Increasing friction in your ad funnel can (sometimes) be a good thing. Let’s say you’re running ads for a sophisticated high-ticket service offer. Let’s say it’s difficult to express the entire value proposition through ad copy and creative alone. If that’s the case, take a different approach entirely. Shift the purpose of your ad away from attention → explanation → landing page → book a call. Instead try: attention → excitement → VSL landing page → book a call. A VSL adds a layer of friction that may reduce conversions, but the leads will be better. Only serious prospects will watch a full VSL, filtering out bad leads that would waste your time on a call. Plus, they’ll fully understand the value of the offer, and the video warms prospects up for a sales call. Basically, you’ll have fewer booked calls, but more calls will convert. This is why adding friction is (sometimes) a good thing. By adding friction somewhere in your funnel, you’re lowering friction elsewhere.

Your ads can suffer directly due to a weak post-click experience. I’m not just talking about lower conversions and therefore fewer purchases at the bottom of your funnel. But ad networks like Facebook and Google will actually “punish” you for driving traffic to a weak post-click experience with rising CPMs on the ad platform itself. These networks know that if users click on your ads and hate the post-click experience, they’re less inclined to click on ads in the future. That’s the worst-case scenario for ad networks, so they make life harder for you as a result. This is why there’s no excuse to dial in the rest of your funnel. Everything is connected.

Paid media amplifies, but it doesn’t rescue. Ads earn you impressions and the “opportunity” for sales. But they can’t earn you sales on their own. Sales depend on the quality of your offer, product, and social proof. A competitive offer combined with a great product? Ads will do wonders for you. But zero social proof and an offer fabricated from nothing? You’ll burn a hole through your wallet. Ads can’t profitably earn you sales independently of these other factors, and they never will.

Attribution isn’t about finding exactly what marketing source gets credit. It’s about building enough confidence to make better decisions. Knowing exactly where each customer came from isn’t possible because reverse-engineering the exact paper trail of each customer’s unique buying journey can’t be done. That’s why attribution isn’t about exactly how well something’s working, but instead whether it’s working or not to begin with. Approximate yet correct decision-making still makes it worthwhile.

Targeting problems used to stem from poor targeting. But today, it stems from poor creatives. Nowadays, ad networks have excellent algorithms, and they’ll do the targeting for you. However, that relies on your creative, which signals to the network who should be seeing your ads. If your creative gets seen by an audience sample that’s “supposed” to interact positively with said creative, but doesn’t, the algorithm will share your ads with another audience until it finds prospects who resonate. But if your own understanding of the audience is off, and you therefore can’t create captivating creatives, the algorithm can’t help you.

Weekly reminder that if you’re a B2B brand running ads on LinkedIn… You can also run ads on Facebook at 1/20th the price. Yes…the targeting will be worse…much worse. But not 20x worse. Meaning there’s a value arbitrage opportunity worth capitalizing on. The only reason this is the case is because, for whatever reason, many B2B companies don’t think they can profit from Facebook ads. But I can assure you, even the most buttoned-up B2B exec still watches cat videos on Facebook every now and then. Give it a try. This could be your next big growth unlock.

Love this quote: “Whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.” If company A can spend $50 to acquire a customer, while company B can spend $200 to acquire that same customer, company B will dominate with ads because they can outbid everyone. But in order to outbid everyone, you need a greater customer LTV. That’s doable thanks to upsells and cross-sells you’ve made possible throughout your funnel. Which is exactly why the success of your ads is directly correlated to the rest of your funnel. Don’t neglect what makes your top-of-funnel functional in the first place.

If you can’t compete with ads, you probably have a CAC problem. How do you solve this problem? You need to either increase conversions, lower costs, or raise customer LTV. This can be accomplished through… A better offer. CRO across your funnel. Middle-of-funnel retention marketing (Skool, email, SMS, etc) More cross-selling, upselling, bundling, etc. At the end of the day, the business that can afford to pay the most for a customer wins.

If I’m hiring for Google Ads, I want someone who’s been doing it for a decade. That might sound dramatic, but it’s not for the reason you may think. 10 years ago, Google shared a lot more data with its users. You had all the search terms, insights on the page your ad was on, the position the ad ranked in, and so much more. Nowadays, Google leaves us in the dark, but the platform hasn’t really changed. So people who’ve been improving ads for 10 years know how everything works because they were able to gain insights that existed a decade ago, but don’t anymore. Do I have the exact data to prove this? No. But it’s the same system. The fundamentals of how Google ranks your ads haven’t changed. People who’ve been working on Google ads for a decade+ have this unfair advantage. I’ll always prioritize hiring these veterans over anyone else. Brands should do the same.

Doing ads the right way always ends up being counterintuitive to some degree. The reason for this is two-fold: 1 - You can only see some of the data you’d otherwise want to see 2 - The ad network providing this data is incentivized to make you spend more This is yet another reason why ads, regardless of the platform, are difficult to execute well. The network quite literally wants you to spend more than you should. And if you’re already selling something low-margin, that isn’t helping.

Stop A/B testing. It will hurt your ad performance. Many brands exclusively A/B test their ads while ignoring the rest of their funnel. Yes… creating different hooks for a new creative script and testing what resonates is a great idea. But that can’t be the fullest extent of your funnel’s testing. You can’t forget about your website, PDPs, landing pages, email marketing, add-to-cart page, and much more. If you addressed the rest of your funnel with the same care as you do your ads, you could indirectly double the output your ads generate. You’re paying for ALL the traffic that lands in your funnel. Watching some of it slip through the cracks of an unoptimized website is such a shame. The problem is that decision-makers have this idea that they’ll “perfect” their ads before bringing attention to the rest of their funnel. That’s an expensive mistake. Think of your funnel, including your ads, as a living, breathing organism that constantly needs improvements. Bring that mentality to your entire funnel, and it’ll pay dividends faster than you think.

Sometimes the best way to scale ads is to stop touching them… We had a client a few months ago, whose ad account was growing quickly. They struck gold with a killer creative, cranked up ad spend, and wanted guidance on what to do next. My solution? To initially do nothing. Thankfully, they hadn’t touched their Google account for about a week, because I could tell the algorithm was getting a bit too confused. That’s a common outcome when you make too many changes too quickly. I saw no purpose in confusing the algorithm any further, so we simply waited. A week or so later, we started optimizing, and that client had their best revenue day, 8 days in a row, and their highest profit day overall. If I had fallen for the temptation of making changes too early, none of that would’ve happened. Sometimes the best decision is not to make any decision at all.

Most ad plateaus are self-inflicted. Sometimes companies approach us with a problem, their ads are performing well, all things considered, but they’ve plateaued in results. Sometimes they blame creative fatigue, algorithm changes, and a slew of other things. But more often than you’d think, the “problem” they’re experiencing is something they’ve completely manufactured themselves. What’s actually happening is their budget is all over the place. They spend more one month, spend less the next month, and keep see-sawing back and forth. Which means they haven’t necessarily plateaued; they just need to be more disciplined about their ad spend and expectations. I think there’s a touch of human psychology involved here. People love solving problems… and once they’ve effectively solved all the problems in their ad account, they start creating new problems that don’t actually exist. So they throttle their budget from one month to the next. I see this far too often for it to be an accident. So, unless you’re ramping up spend for a specific event, holiday, or other lucrative opportunities, keep your budget steady. Chances are, you’re not plateauing at all.

Most “ad problems” aren’t ad problems… they’re funnel problems. Teams spend too much time analyzing dashboards instead of funnels. From your first ad to the post-checkout thank you page, everything is connected. So purely focusing on your top-of-funnel ads while ignoring everything else is a mistake. Think about it this way… Upsells on your add-to-cart page → more LTV → allows for a better offer (such as free shipping) → better converting ads. It’s all connected. Great service providers don’t just focus on ads.

The brands that win with ads always have the same thing going for them. They have some sort of upsell or LTV play that comes post-sale. This happens because, if everyone in your market is competing with something that has 50 bucks of profit, but your LTV play provides you with 200 bucks of profit, you’ll blow everyone out of the water. Or put differently, you’ll outbid people and dominate your space, and there’s nothing they can do. Better math always wins. At least, until they improve their LTV to match yours. Because between reducing expenses and raising LTV, raising LTV has a higher upside. So focus your energy there.

The longer the sales cycle, the more patience you need. short cycle → ~7 days normal → ~28 days long / enterprise → 60+ days Once you’ve determined if your sales cycle is short, normal, or long, you realize that any performance that “looks bad” inside that lag window is not failure, but impatience. Judging before letting changes demonstrate results is one of the most common reasons ads with otherwise great offers fail. The phrase: “good things take time” has never been more relevant.

Companies focus on perfect attribution that doesn’t exist. Long sales cycles, multiple ad networks, and dozens of points in your funnel can trigger a sale. But this doesn’t mean attribution is useless. There’s a perfect blend of data + intuition that helps you make the right ad decisions. However, this level of nuance is only possible when you’ve been doing this as long as we have. That’s why most people over-rely on attribution, because they haven’t honed their creative, media buying, and adjacent ad funnel skills long enough to make smart decisions with imperfect or incomplete data. They feel like they need to cling to data at all costs. That’s a sign it’s time to outsource to a team of professionals if I’ve ever seen one.