How to Run Your First Ad Campaign in 2025 (Complete Beginner's Guide)

Congrats, you have successfully, with months, probably years of effort, set up your brand.

And now, you have decided to take the next step, i.e., to run ads to increase awareness of your services.

And after running 100s of ad campaigns for myself and my clients, i get it, running your first ad campaign can feel overwhelming,

You might feel like you don’t know where to start, you would feel confused, and you would even risk sacrificing all your money for nothing.

But there’s one thing I can tell you from experience, that once you break down the whole campaign into clear steps, the entire process will look more manageable.

And in this blog, I will walk you through everything you need to know to launch a successful ad campaign in 2025, starting from platform selection to optimization strategies.

The Digital Advertising Landscape:

Since AI has been made public, there have been a lot of changes in the digital advertising world.

Understanding these changes is extremely crucial if we want success for our campaign.

The modern advertising has relied heavily on first-party data and contextual targeting rather than third-party cookies,

And this shift has made digital marketing more about building direct relationships with your audience and creating compelling content that would more deeply resonate with them.

Being authentic and valuable to your target market is more important than ever.

So, once you know that, let’s make sure that you are choosing the correct platform for your ad campaigns.

Google Ads:

Google captures high-intent traffic through search campaigns, hence making it perfect for businesses that offer niche-specific solutions to immediate problems.

The strength of Google Ads is in keyword targeting, which would allow you to appear when potential customers search for your products or services.

It would work best if your business has a clear search demand.

Facebook and Instagram Ads:

Google captures high-intent traffic through search campaigns, making it perfect for businesses that offer niche-specific solutions to immediate problems.

The strength of Google Ads is in keyword targeting, which would allow you to appear when potential customers search for your products or services.

It would work best if your business has a clear search demand.

If you want to learn more on Facebook Ads, here's my free crash course;

TikTok Ads:

Since 2019, TikTok has had immense growth in the younger demographic audience, which has created new opportunities.

Since TikTok’s algorithm is well-suited for content discovery, it gives small businesses a chance to have viral reach without a massive budget.

The ads that are authentic and entertaining usually perform better than the overtly promotional ones.

LinkedIn Ads:

LinkedIn has a hold of a professional audience, so it becomes ideal for B2B companies. The targeting options of this platform are job titles, company sizes, industries, and professional interests.

Since LinkedIn offers a much higher quality of leads than any other platform available, they have a higher cost per click than everyone else.

and to have a better grasp on creating ads on Linkedln, here's my FREE crash course;

Set up your first campaign:

Step 1: Define the purpose of your campaign

Although this seems quite obvious, you have to clearly define what you want to achieve.

What is the purpose and target of your campaign? Who is your target audience, what emotions do you want them to feel, etc?

And the reason I want you to be so super-specific is because different objectives would require you to use different strategies, different planning.

And, even though it sounds simple, having years of firsthand experience with dealing with ad campaigns from wincible, I can tell you one thing, it is the most important decision you will ever make for your brand.

If you decide wrong campaign objective, not only would you fumble your money big time, but there’s a high chance that you would do extra negative damage to yourself.

Which, at any cost, you must avoid.

So, to make things easier for you;

Here are some of the common campaign objectives you can select from:

✔️ Brand awareness: This is for you to introduce your business to new audiences. 

✔️ Lead generation: When you want to collect contact information like emails and phone numbers from your potential customers.

✔️ Website traffic: This is to drive visitors from your website to your landing page.

✔️ Sales/ Conversions: This is to convert the warm leads into buyers.

✔️ App downloads: This is to increase the downloads of your mobile application.

✔️ Engagement: This has a basic purpose to increase your social media interactions and followers.

SMART Goal Framework:

This is the most basic yet most effective framework you can create for your objectives.

So, next time you are crafting your objective, make them,

“Specific + Measurable + Achievable + Relevant + Time Bound”

For example: “Generate 50 (Specific) qualified leads (Achievable) for our consulting service (Relevant) within 30 days (Time Bound) with a cost per lead under $25 (Measurable)”

P.S.: It’s not necessary to include all of them, but try to fit in as many as you possibly can.

Step 2: Budget Planning and Allocation

The second thing is to have proper ways to do budget planning and allocation.

And also, not as much as the last one, but this step also holds a special place in the list of important things,

Because you just have to spend a lot on your advertising so as not to mess up your budget and can’t focus on other essential things,

But at the same time, you have to allocate a budget that would ensure that you spend enough for your ad to flourish on the competitive algorithm of Meta.

You just can’t afford the mistake of spending too little just to gather data or risking too much on unproven campaigns.

So, here is a roadmap that I follow frequently for my ad campaigns.

Budget Considerations:

✔️ Start with a test budget of $10-50 per day, depending on your platform choice.

✔️ Plan for at least 2-4 weeks of consistent spending so you can gather reliable data.

✔️ Reserve an extra sum as an additional budget for scaling your successful campaigns.

✔️  Use the learning period to further optimize your campaigns.

Platform Specific Budget Guidelines:

Just to further simplify your decision, here is the minimum budget you must allocate to different platforms.

✔️ Facebook/Instagram: Minimum $5-10 per day per ad set.

✔️ Google Ads: Minimum $10-20 per day for search campaigns.

✔️ TikTok: Minimum $20 per day for most campaign objectives.

✔️ LinkedIn: Minimum $10 per day, but $25+ recommended for better results.

Step 3: Audience Research and Targeting

Understanding your target audience's dream state, pain points, fear state, and desires is extremely crucial for how well your campaign will perform.

You can even say,

“Your campaign success is directly proportional to how well you understand your audience.”

So, knowing your audience better would ensure that they would have an even better engagement with your business.

Here are some of the methods you can follow for your research.

Audience Research Methods:

✔️ Use platform audience insight tools to have a better understanding of potential customers.

✔️ Research your competitor audience’s and engagement patterns.

✔️ Create detailed buyer personas based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.

Targeting Options by Platform:

Now here are some platform-specific targeting options you can re-check before publishing your ad on any platform.

Facebook/Instagram Targeting:

Demographics: Age, gender, location, language.

Interests: Pages liked, activities, interests declared.

Behaviors: Purchase behavior, device usage, travel patterns

Custom Audiences: Website visitors, email subscribers, app users

Lookalike Audiences: People similar to your best customers

Keywords: Terms people search for related to your business

Demographics: Age, gender, household income, parental status

Audiences: In-market audiences, affinity audiences, custom audiences

Remarketing: Previous website visitors or YouTube viewers

Demographics: Age, gender, location, language

Interests: Categories based on user behavior and engagement

Behaviors: App activity, device usage, and purchase behavior.

Custom Audiences: Website visitors, app users, customer lists

Job Title: Specific roles or seniority levels.

Company: Size, industry, name, growth rate.

Education: Degree, field of study, school.

Skills: Professional skills and endorsements.

P.S: To further master Targeting, check out this video.

Step 4: Creative Development and Ad Formats

Your ad creative plays the deciding factor on whether people stop scrolling and engage with your content, or they just walk past your brand.

And also to mention, Different platforms and objectives would require different creative approaches.

Visual Content Best Practices:

Here are some of the best practices you can try out when creating your ad creative.

✔️ Use high-quality images or videos that can represent your brand on a professional level.

✔️ Ensure that the visuals are optimized for mobile viewing (vertical or square formats).

✔️ Include clear branding without overstuffing the creative part.

✔️ Regularly test different visual styles to identify what resonates with your audience.

Copywriting Guidelines:

✔️ Try to have an eye-catching hook that focuses on your audience’s pain points.

✔️ Communicate your offer within the first few words.

✔️ Include a strong CTA that tells people exactly what to do next.

✔️ Keep the text concise while providing enough information to drive action.

With all these guidelines and keeping your campaign structure and with launching your campaign, here is a campaign launch checklist you must check before publishing your ad.

Pro Tip: Once you launch your campaign, your first two days are crucial for gathering initial data and issues.

After approximately a week of data collection, you have the appropriate information to make decisions on the optimization of your ad.

These are your key optimization areas:

✔️ Audience Performance: Identify which audience segments are performing best.

✔️ Creative Performance: Determine which visuals and copy variations are most effective.

✔️ Placement Performance: See which ad placements deliver the best results.

✔️ Time-of-day Analysis: Understand when your audience is most active and responsive.

And while those are optimization areas, here are some of the actions you can take to fix them;

✔️ Increase your budget for high-performing ad sets.

✔️ Pause or modify your underperforming elements.

✔️ Create new ads based on the successful patterns of your ad performance.

✔️ Refine your targeting based on your audience awareness.

With all these tips and tricks, once you are able to identify your winning campaigns, scaling would require careful strategy to maintain your ad performance.

Scaling your ad:

Here are some scaling methods you can follow:

✔️ Vertical Scaling: Increase your budget gradually (20-50% increases every 3-5 days).

✔️ Horizontal Scaling: Duplicate your successful ad sets for new audiences.

✔️ Creative Scaling: If an ad creative is successful, have multiple creative variations of it.

✔️ Platform Expansion: Launch similar campaigns on various other platforms.

P.S.: For a thorough understanding of this topic, check out this video.

And even though watching an ad creative perform successfully, you might think that you are ready to scale, beware of taking major precautions before you scale:

✔️ Never increase your budgets too aggressively (avoid doubling overnight)

✔️ Monitor the performance of your ads very closely during scaling periods.

✔️ Maintain creative variety to prevent audience fatigue.

✔️ Keep successful, original ad campaigns running while you test the scaled versions.

Common Mistakes You Must Avoid:

Now, in ad campaigns, no matter how much experience you gain, there is a high chance that you can make a mistake that would cost you a fortune. 

So, before publishing, consider this a checklist to verify and make sure your ad campaign is foolproof.

Budget Related Mistakes:

✔️ Insufficient budget for learning phase: No matter what platform you choose for your ad campaign, there is adequate data that you need to further optimize your ad campaign.

If you start with a low budget, you wouldn’t be able to optimize your ad properly, and it would lead to poor performance.

✔️ Impatient Budget Changes: Making frequent budget changes would confuse the algorithm, and it won’t stabilize, which can lead to inconsistent performance and higher costs.

Targeting Mistakes:

✔️ Over targeting: Making audiences too narrow, or niching down too much, would limit your brand reach and also would increase costs.

So, instead, start by focusing on a broader audience.

✔️ Ignoring Audience Overlap: While running your ad campaign, make sure you are not targeting a similar audience, because that would create unnecessary competition and would drive up your costs.

Creative Mistakes:

✔️ Poor Mobile Optimization: Most traffic comes from mobile devices, and most of the time, landing pages and ads are not optimized for mobile viewers, hence they cause significant underperformance.

✔️ Weak Call-to-action: Unclear or weak call-to-action would leave users unsure of what to do next, and would reduce conversion rates.

Measurement Mistakes:

✔️ Focusing only on metrics: Likes, shares, and clicks don’t necessarily mean good business results. Have your focus shifted to the metrics that are tied to your actual objectives.

✔️ Not setting up proper attribution: Without proper tracking of your metrics and results, you can’t measure what your true campaign performance is and hence, won’t be able to make informed optimization decisions.

Advanced Tips for Better results:

Here are some additional tips that would ensure that you have no chance of losing when going for an ad campaign.

Seasonal and Trend Optimization:

Adjust your ad campaigns so that you can stay away from seasonal trends, holidays, and current events that can potentially affect your audience’s behaviour.

Competitive intelligence:

Customer Journey Integration:

Align your ad campaigns with your overall customer journey to ensure that there is consistent messaging from awareness through conversion and retention.

Cross-Platform Synergy:

Use the insights that you obtain from one platform and use that strategy on the other platforms where your ad has been published.
Successful audiences and creative approaches often are the same across many platforms with proper adaptation.

READ MORE: 5 Meta Ads Mistakes That Most Marketers Do

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a mix of art and science. 

So, while data should guide your decisions, you must also remember the importance of creativity, authenticity, and genuine value creation for your audience.

The key is to just BEGIN.

Do so by choosing your favourite platform, setting your budget correctly, creating your first ad, and then learning from your real market feedback.

The experience that you gain from your first ad campaigns would be invaluable in all future advertising efforts combined.

Success in digital advertising comes to those who are able to combine strategic thinking with persistent execution.

The bottom line is this:

Running your first ad campaign in 2025 doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By following a structured approach, you can easily launch campaigns and consequently optimize them, and you are guaranteed to succeed.

I hope this helped! 

Until then, Happy Digital Learning 😍