Best Resource to Learn About Paid Ads?

[smithy]

With the way Google and SEO is going, it might be time to transition into paid ads.

The Crash Course looks great, but even @eliquid himself says that a lot has changed since he wrote the guide.

While nothing beats jumping in and getting experience, can anyone recommend free or paid resources you have found useful that will save time and money?

 

[Kakeshi]

When it comes to Paid ads, the person who helped start this Paid Ads industry - Perry Marshall is the guy. Start by reading any of his books on Google or FB ads and you will know why this guy is such a legend. Even his freely available book on Pareto Principle : 80/20 Sales & Maarketing is a masterpiece.

Paid ads is all about testing the ads on all parameters, removing the performer from the duds and then refining the performers further. On this front, my recommendation is to learn anything by Perry Marshall.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Someone once linked this PPC blog here on BuSo and it seemed really high quality to me so I popped it in my RSS feed reader, though I never read it. So don't take this as a seal of approval, but I do hope it's useful for you: https://sol8.com/blog/

 

[TheWeeb]

Someone once linked this PPC blog here on BuSo and it seemed really high quality to me so I popped it in my RSS feed reader, though I never read it. So don't take this as a seal of approval, but I do hope it's useful for you: https://sol8.com/blog/

Sol8 guys are legit for PPC. I also recommend checking out PerformanceMax on Twitter.

The best way to learn paid ads is by doing them (aka burning cash) and understand the metrics.

Profitability is the #1 metrics. High CPM, High CPCs etc doesn't matter much only ROAS. They can tell a few things tho so don't ignore them completely. (Ex: High CPM usually means FB showing the ad to high value audience, and because it is high value audience -> more sales. But it is also possible the CPM is high because your ad is bad etc and thus low CTR.)

Another thing, creative is king. You can have bad ad setup but still print money because of your creative and sales page.

 

[Biggy]

With the way Google and SEO is going, it might be time to transition into paid ads.

The Crash Course looks great, but even @eliquid himself says that a lot has changed since he wrote the guide.

While nothing beats jumping in and getting experience, can anyone recommend free or paid resources you have found useful that will save time and money?

The best is by just doing it.

You don't need a course at all.

 

[Potatoe]

When it comes to learning the basics, setting up campaigns, tracking, making mistakes... I'd personally recommend doing that on low-stakes accounts that you don't really care about losing/getting banned from.

I lost an account/all my earnings recently at an ad network when I got banned for click fraud by sending taco loco traffic to it (The ad network said most of the clicks were coming from the same few IP addresses). Interestingly enough, this ad network said they aren't refunding their advertisers for all the alleged fraud clicks - they're just keeping the money. Also, they let my traffic run until the day before the payment cutoff lol. Anyways...

If I would have been sending that same traffic to Adsense or Monumetric or something, it could have been a pretty devastating loss.

 

[thisishatred]

When it comes to learning the basics, setting up campaigns, tracking, making mistakes... I'd personally recommend doing that on low-stakes accounts that you don't really care about losing/getting banned from.

I lost an account/all my earnings recently at an ad network when I got banned for click fraud by sending taco loco traffic to it (The ad network said most of the clicks were coming from the same few IP addresses). Interestingly enough, this ad network said they aren't refunding their advertisers for all the alleged fraud clicks - they're just keeping the money. Also, they let my traffic run until the day before the payment cutoff lol. Anyways...

If I would have been sending that same traffic to Adsense or Monumetric or something, it could have been a pretty devastating loss.

These folks?
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/tacoloco-push-traffic-that-converts.5970/

 

[Potatoe]

@thisishatred Yep, that's the only traffic source I was using when I was banned from the ad network for fraud clicks.

Prior to that, there was also a massive discrepancy in the amount of traffic I was paying for (like Taco charging me for 2000+ visitors in a day, and only a few hundred were counted by the ad network).

Before they stopped responding to me, Taco explained that some countries such as Saudi Arabia have strict internet policies meaning that on Taco's side they'll sell me the traffic but the landing page never loads for those users. Funny enough, the vast majority of my traffic was USA.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, try, succeed" seems like sound advice. I think the missing piece of advice so far, however, is to do your trial and error on networks that won't matter if you get banned from them. Traffic sources will lie, "quality traffic" means about as much as "quality content".