The Difference Between Running Ads and Building a Paid Traffic Strategy
I think it’s safe to say that most business owners would put ads in the same category as a root canal or walking around all day in wet socks. For a lot of reasons, I don’t blame them. Ads and marketing their business is not the first thing that comes to mind when they consider all of the more fun business tasks they need to do. When they first get started with ads, it feels like learning another language. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who said they thought it would be easy or pleasant.
Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram have been my world for years now and even I often still find it challenging at times. What I have noticed though is that there is a big mistake a lot of business owners make and it’s not always at that just getting started stage. Sometimes business owners make this mistake for years.
And that mistake is that they just run a few ads instead of putting a little time and effort into building out a paid traffic strategy.
This is incredibly important to know because this distinction is what separates the businesses that get consistent compounding results from the businesses that get occasional wins followed by frustrating plateaus.
The difference between those two things may not seem immediately clear so that’s what I’m going to talk you through here.
What Most People Do When They Just Want to “Run a Few Ads”
Imagine you’re an online business coach who teaches your expertise through courses, digital products, a membership, or high-ticket coaching (or a combination of all of those). At some point, you will reach a revenue plateau and you’ll need to turn to ads so you can scale.
The pattern I’ve seen is that when you reach this stage, you'll usually concentrate only on launch ads. So you’ll only run ads to your conversion event (typically a webinar), get people registered, then sell to them during the open / close cart period.
Once the launch ends or the budget runs out, you turn ads off, take a look at your immediate ROI, and decide if it makes sense next time you launch to do the same thing. If you didn’t hit your goal, maybe you do something different next time.
This is not an unusual cadence and it feels logical on the surface. It mirrors how most people think about marketing spend. You spend money, you expect a return, and then you stop spending when the return is no longer there.
Although you could absolutely hit your launch revenue goals by following this pattern, this approach brings inconsistent results. When you do this, you're starting cold every single time, you never build audience momentum, your ad account never accumulates enough consistent data to optimize properly, and you're always in reactive mode rather than proactive mode.
What It Looks Like When Ads Are Part of a Larger Strategy
The difference between the scenario I outlined above and what I’m about to tell you is huge.
When you have a real paid traffic strategy, you have ads running continuously at some level even between launches. You have audience-building happening in the background all the time, creating rich retargeting opportunities by keeping you, your business, your brand, and your offers top of mind. This keeps you popping up constantly in your audience’s feed, showing you as the expert in your field and gives them the opportunity to engage with you (and as a bonus, you don’t have to rely on the oh-so-fickle organic algorithm to serve up your content to the right people).
A real strategy means that your ad account is always learning, always accumulating data, and always getting smarter so Meta can find more of the right people because it’s used to doing it all the time. When you start and stop ads constantly, that learning resets and you pay more because you’re buying mostly cold traffic every single time.
Also consider that a paid traffic strategy doesn't live in isolation. It builds a system that connects your email list, your content, your funnels, and every launch of your offers so they can all work beautifully together. Ads become the machine that feeds the system so the system converts better. But that system only works if your offer, messaging, and funnel are already solid. If you're not sure where you stand on that, start here first.
My own ad approach centers around ads as just one layer in a larger growth ecosystem and not just a standalone tool.
Why Treating Ads as a Tactic Costs More Than You Think
The learning phase. While it’s true that your ads will go into a learning phase with each campaign you publish, the overall learning that Meta does for your ad account gets affected by each start and stop. If you run ads consistently, even between launches (and yes, even at just a few dollars a day), Meta just keeps learning who your best audiences are.
Your warm audience builds slower. When you run a business that is dependent on launches, you’ll soon realize that your business is also dependent on having a very large audience. Only a small percentage of that audience will be in the buying phase and ready to purchase one of your offers when you’re offering it, so the larger your warm audience is, the better. Let’s say that only 2% of your entire audience buys during your launch. Well, 2% of 100,000 is way more than 2% of 1000, right? Do that math and you’ll want to make that warm audience as large as it can be.
Cold audiences cost more to convert. Without a large warm audience, you’re targeting a cold audience every time. Now, even in launches where my clients had a large warm audience, we also targeted a cold audience. That’s completely normal and unless you have a following the size of someone like Mr. Beast, you’re probably always going to allocate some of your budget to a cold audience (and to be clear, even Mr. Beast should target cold because hey, you can always reach someone new who hasn’t heard of you). But nine times out of ten, your cold audience will always cost more to convert than your warm. So again, this is why growing your warm audience is important.
Want to see what the impact could be of consistently growing your warm audience? Then check out this case study.
Which One Are You Actually Building?
Here are a few questions to ponder to see if you’re in need of a paid traffic strategy:
Am I only running ads for launches and not in between (either for email list building or just brand awareness and audience growth - or both)?
Does my audience only hear from me when I have something to sell to them?
Does my ad account sit dormant for weeks or months at a time?
If the answer to these questions is all or mostly yes, then you’ve been running ads tactically and that's why your results feel inconsistent. That's fixable. But it requires a different approach than what you’ve been doing.
That different approach starts with having the right foundation in place before anything else. If you haven't already built your pre-ad foundation, start there first. I covered exactly what that looks like in this post.
When I work with my clients, we work together to design a full-funnel ad strategy following what I call The Momentum Framework. That involves running consistent ads between launches, using content my clients are already creating - just making it work smarter and harder for them with ads. Then we also layer in email list building ads. And finally, when they are launching, we run the usual conversion/sales ads.
It truly is the layered approach of my paid traffic strategy that creates the foundation for them to maintain momentum so they can grow larger and faster than they would with the start and stop tactical approach. And keep in mind that this does not necessarily mean spending more. It’s more about spending smart to get the maximum benefit out of the budget.
From Tactics to Strategy - What That Shift Actually Requires
The shift from just running ads to building a paid traffic strategy isn't about spending more money or creating tons of ad content. It's about intention and consistency so you can build something that compounds over time rather than starting over each and every time.
I’m sure if you think of your bigger goal, you’ll realize that you’re not just trying to sell more things in the moment. You want to build a sustainable, scalable business. A paid traffic strategy is what makes that possible. Random ad tactics are what make it feel impossible.
If you're ready to stop running ads tactically and start building a paid traffic strategy that actually fits your business, The Ads & Funnel Clarity Session is where we start. Click here to find out what's included and how to book yours.
Not sure where you stand yet? My free Ads Readiness Checklist will help you figure that out.
