How to build an advertising strategy, step by step
An ad strategy decides which channel gets the budget, in what order, and what gets measured. Here are the steps to set one up.
What is an ad strategy?
An ad strategy is the set of decisions made before any single campaign: who you want to reach, where that person will meet you and how you will know whether an ad brought a sale. A campaign carries those decisions out. Without a strategy, a new campaign gets tried every month and nobody ever learns which one worked.
A good strategy fits in a few lines on paper. Each of those lines, though, rests on a measurement.
Step one: set up measurement
Before putting money into ads you need to see where sales come from. Conversion tracking in Google Ads and the pixel plus Conversions API on Meta exist for exactly this. Form submissions, phone calls and WhatsApp messages should be counted separately and, where possible, matched to real sales.
Without measurement the ad platform learns to multiply clicks, not sales. The gap grows as the budget grows.
Existing demand or new demand?
Channels do two different jobs. Search ads and SEO put you in front of someone already looking for what you sell; that is capturing existing demand. In feeds like Instagram and Facebook the person is not searching; the ad reminds them of a need, so it creates demand, and the creative does the heavy lifting.
For most businesses the order is: capture existing demand with Google Ads first, then open up to people who are not searching with Meta ads once measurement is in place. What you sell can change the order; a new product category with little search volume has to start in the feed.
Spreading and cutting the budget
Most of the budget ends up in a handful of search terms and a handful of creatives that bring sales. The real work of a strategy is excluding search terms that never convert, testing creatives one variable at a time and scaling the winner.
Ads are a rented channel: when the payments stop, the traffic stops. That is why an owned channel should be built alongside them. Lasting visibility in search results and in AI answers (GEO) keeps bringing demand even when the ad budget drops.
The step after the ad
The ad brings the visitor to the door; the experience at the door makes the sale. A page that clearly shows the price and the next step, and a quick reply to incoming messages, affect results as much as the ad itself. Letting an AI assistant handle after-hours requests is one way to do that. We cover how to look at revenue as a whole in how to increase sales and revenue.