Common marketing questions

There's no magic percentage, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your business is guessing. The real question is whether your budget is enough to learn something. If you're only getting a handful of clicks a week, you can't tell the difference between a bad ad and bad luck.

A reasonable way in: pick a number you'd be genuinely okay losing, spend it steadily for a month without fiddling, and see what one customer ended up costing you. Now you have a real number to make decisions with instead of a benchmark from someone else's business.

Compare what you paid to get a customer against what that customer is worth to you. That's the whole test. If it costs $40 to get someone who spends $300 with you over a year, the ads are working, no matter what the click-through rate looks like.

Clicks, impressions, and engagement are diagnostics. They're useful for finding where something broke. Plenty of campaigns with beautiful engagement numbers have never made anyone a dollar.

No, and trying to be is the most common way small teams burn out. Pick the one you can keep up with on a bad week.

Pick based on where your customers already are and what you can actually sustain. If making video feels like pulling teeth, a TikTok strategy will die in six weeks no matter how good the advice was.

Give it a few weeks of steady spending before you judge anything. Ad platforms need a stretch of consistent data to figure out who to show your ads to, and every time you change the budget, the targeting, or the creative, some of that resets.

Most people change their settings every three days and never let anything run long enough to tell them something.

Boosting is the easiest way to spend money with the least control over what you get. The button is right there and it optimizes for likes and comments, which feel good and rarely turn into sales.

The full ads tool takes an afternoon to learn the basics and lets you tell the platform what you actually want, whether that's purchases, form fills, or calls. If you're going to spend money either way, spend it there.

Usually not a whole new one. What matters is the specific page people land on after they click. It needs to match the ad that brought them, make one thing obvious to do next, and load quickly on a phone.

Sending paid traffic to a slow homepage with six competing calls to action is how most ad budgets quietly disappear. Fix that page first and you may find the site is fine.

They do different jobs. Ads buy attention now and stop the moment you stop paying. SEO earns attention slowly and keeps working after you've done the work, but it can take six months to a year to show up.

If you need customers this quarter, that's ads. If you're building something you'll still be running in three years, do both, and start the SEO work early so it has time to mature.