I had an unlimited budget. I could spend as much money as I wanted on whatever ads I wanted. But I had to be profitable. I was working in-house for a technology company. We had aggressive revenue targets and I wanted to play a major part in making that happen. I managed to grow ad spend from $3 million to $6 million per year because I found creative ways to profitably scale my campaigns.

I crushed our revenue targets. Here’s what I learned.

The creative is everything

This is true across every major paid media channel, be it Google, Facebook, Youtube, whatever. A good creative trumps everything else. No amount of planning, research, targeting, or audiences will have as big of an impact as your creative. A good creative will get you tons of clicks. There’s so much machine learning and AI built into digital ads now and they’re trained to look for early engagement signals.