Denzil Duke

Don't Let Money Stop You From Learning To Run Paid Ads

Denzil Duke -

The last time I ran paid ads was on Facebook and TikTok for a drop shipping store back in 2023. I had probably spent over $500 on those ads providing me a return of $120 worth of sales.

Amounting to -$360 profit.

After reading that, you might be saying to yourself,

"That's exactly why I'm not running ads."

And if you don't know me, my name is Denzil Duke. I'm currently an aspiring marketer learning to run paid ads for my golf coach client. Also, taking on work experience at a marketing agency running paid ads for small businesses. I hope my lessons about running ads can help dip your toes in paid advertising.

So, learning from $500 mistake... I want to give you 3 lessons I'd give you and my younger self to stop being scared of running ads.

From:

  • Choosing What Platform To Advertise
  • Giving Yourself A Learning Budget
  • My Number 1 I Made Running Paid Ads

#1: Choosing The Platform You Want To Advertise

I'm going to recommend you learn Google Ads first. This is because you'll learn important marketing micro skills to run your campaign.

In fact, these are 3 notable skills learning Google Ads:

  1. Creating a Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager account.
  2. Creating a Google Ads account
  3. Putting coding snippets so tags can fire and track conversions on your site

The easiest type of ad to run as a beginner is Search Ads. Remember the last time you searched something up on Google? And the first sites that popped up with 'sponsored'.

That's a Search Ad.

When people do a query in the search engine, it will try to match the most relevant result to the keywords.

The only hard aspect of Search Ads is researching and choosing keywords for your ad campaign.

In saying that, it's easier for beginners to learn keywords compared to Facebook ads. Requiring knowledge about video editing and writing captivating content.

People using Google are already searching for a solution to their problem. It's a matter of presenting it as the first option, and providing a great user experience on the website.

So, that Google Ads Search Campaigns is my recommendation for learning paid ads.

#2: Give Yourself A Learning Budget

The highest ROI as a developing marketer or entrepreneur is education. Perhaps not the traditional form like university, but through self-study and skills acquisition.

End of the day, return-on-investment (ROI) is either:

  • Monetary
  • Experience

You might lose money running ad campaigns. But, you become a better, more experienced marketer because of it.

In the long run, you make more in return by learning from your losses in your career.

So, what budget should I give myself to learn about running paid ads?

If you want to follow what I'm doing, I put a daily ad budget of $2.50/day for Google Ads.

That's about $17.50/week. Which is about less than one hour's work here in Australia.

Again, don't think of this as a cost. See it as a simple investment to do two things.

  • Get familiar with running paid ads
  • Seeing real results with the money you put in

Of course you can say,

"I'm paying money for something that might not make money."

That's the point. You haven't done this before. You're paying Google the company to learn how to run ads.

Hey! If your ads are good enough and you have a product to sell, you might actually make a Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

#3: My Number 1 Mistake Running Paid Ads

You might think it's a hack or tactic I'm about to teach you.

The fact of the matter is my number 1 mistake was:

Not starting sooner.

I kept procrastinating. I didn't want to sit my ass down for a few hours to learn how to run ads properly.

Personally, once you can get over the hurdle of,

"I don't want to lose money."

Is when you actually start making money...

Especially with this one client I have. He's the only golf coach in town that golfers can book a lesson through a website.

I decided to run a Search Ads campaign with my own money for his site two weeks ago. After a week of running paid ads, I had generated $420 worth of sales. Costing me $21.48 with a cost per click (CPC) of $1.19.

ROAS of 1955.30% for my client.

The deal I have with my client is I get 12.5% of revenue, amounting to $52.5.

52.5-21.48 = $31.02

So, for every dollar I'm putting into my machine, I'm getting back 2.4 dollars in commission. A 1:2.4 ratio. Not bad at all.

For my golf coach, he's getting $367.5 from $21.48. A 1:18 ratio.

That's where running paid ads becomes fun. It also gets crazier when the cost per acquisition is cheap compared to the life time value (LTV) of a customer.

I hope these kind of numbers and ratios excite you as much as they do for me.

To Conclude...

What we've learnt:

  • If learning to run ads for the first time, use Google Search Ads
  • Give yourself a learning budget to run paid ads
  • Two outcomes come from running paid ads: monetary or experience
  • Start learning paid ads sooner