7 Questions to Ask Before You Run an Advertising Campaign
Most wasted ad spend is decided before a single ad goes live. Not by a bad headline or the wrong bid — by launching without an answer to one of these. Work through them honestly and you will either have a campaign worth running or a clear reason not to yet.
1. What Exactly Counts as a Result?
Not "awareness." Not "traffic." A specific action: a form, a call, a booking, a purchase. Write it down before you spend, because the definition decides how the campaign is optimised and whether anyone can tell afterward if it worked.
If you cannot name the action, you are not ready to advertise. You are ready to fix the site.
2. What Is That Result Worth to You?
Take your average sale, multiply by the share of leads that become customers. That is what one lead is worth, and it is the number that tells you whether a $40 cost per lead is a bargain or a disaster.
Most businesses have never done this calculation, which is why most businesses cannot say whether their advertising is profitable.
3. Where Does the Click Land?
If the answer is "the homepage," stop. A homepage serves everyone and therefore converts nobody in particular. The page has to continue the sentence the ad started — see landing page design.
4. Is the Tracking Correct — Verified, Not Assumed?
If conversion tracking is wrong, every decision after it is wrong, and the platform will confidently optimise toward the wrong thing. Fire a test conversion and confirm it arrives, at the right value, exactly once.
We have inherited more broken tracking setups than working ones. It is the single most common reason an account underperforms for months without anyone noticing.
5. Who Answers, and How Fast?
A lead that waits until tomorrow is usually a lead that bought from someone else. Response time predicts conversion more reliably than almost anything you can change in the ad itself. Decide who is responsible before the leads start arriving.
6. Can You Actually Service the Demand?
This is the question nobody asks. If you are booked for six weeks, more leads do not help — they generate disappointed people who will not come back and may leave a review saying so. Sometimes the right answer is to raise prices rather than raise spend.
7. How Long Will You Give It Before You Judge It?
Decide the window before you start, while you are calm. Campaigns get switched off in week two by owners who never agreed with themselves what week two should look like, and get left running for a year by owners who never set a point to review.
A fair first window for most search campaigns is enough spend to buy a few hundred clicks. Below that you are reading noise.
If You Cannot Answer All Seven
That is useful information, not a failure. The questions you cannot answer are the work to do first, and doing it is almost always cheaper than discovering the gap with your ad budget. We would rather tell you that now than bill you to find out.
One More Thing
If you want a straight read on whether a campaign is ready — including when the answer is not yet — that is a conversation worth having before the spend starts.