Struggling With Ad Performance?

Hey there,

Quick question for you:

When one of your ads stops performing, where’s the first place you look?

The creative? The targeting? The landing page?

If you’re like most marketers, the honest answer is: everywhere at once.

You refresh dashboards, scroll through metrics, tweak budgets, and second-guess copy, all in a panic spiral.

But performance rarely tanks overnight. It doesn’t announce itself with a crash.

Instead, it erodes quietly, CTR dips a little, conversions slip a bit, costs creep higher, until you realise a week later you’ve spent thousands chasing ghosts.

We’ve been there.

We learned this the hard way. And we built a process to fix it!

Our Simple Fix (That Actually Works)

Turns out the answer wasn’t more dashboards or bigger budgets. It was a simple routine.

Here’s where we started.

Step 1: The 10-Minute Daily Diagnosis

We used to overanalyze campaigns once a week (or worse, once a month).

By the time we spotted an issue, the budget damage was done.

So we built a simple daily routine—10 minutes, no more:

• CTR below 1%? → Weak hook. Time to test new ad copy.

• Impressions steady, clicks missing? → Audience mismatch. Wrong people, wrong message.

• Plenty of clicks, no conversions? → Landing page not aligned with the ad promise.

👉 The key: Don’t obsess over dashboards all day. But do run this quick health check daily.

Step 2: Testing Like a Scientist (Not a Gambler)

We thought we were testing. In reality, we were guessing.

Our mistakes:

Changing 3–4 things at once, killing tests too early, trusting “gut feel” over data

Now our rules are simple:

• A/B test one element at a time (headline, visual, or CTA—not all).

• Let it run until 100+ clicks or 7 days.

• Define success before launching.

Here’s a simple example:

• Version A (short hook): 0.78% CTR

• Version B (pain-led copy): 2.1% CTR

The winner was obvious. We scaled B. No guesswork needed!

Step 3: Refining the Audience Relentlessly

Here’s the truth: the audience you think works best often doesn’t work!

We used to keep targeting static because “it made sense.”

But logic ≠ performance.

Now, every week we do an audience wash:

• Remove dead-weight job titles, industries, or locations

• Add new segments from search reports & conversions

• Layer in exclusions (competitor employees, students, interns)

One tiny tweak was removing “intern” titles from LinkedIn dropped our CPL by 23% in two weeks.

The trick to making ads work long-term isn’t chasing daily spikes.

It’s knowing what to check, and when.

Not everything deserves the same level of attention.

Some metrics need a quick daily glance, others need weekly adjustments, and a few are better suited for monthly strategy calls.

Here’s the time-based framework that’s saved us from firefighting and kept performance predictable:

Daily:

• CTR, conversions, pacing, anomalies

• Check negative keywords

• Adjust bids if needed

Weekly:

• Audience wash

• A/B test results

• Keyword-level performance

• Spend vs. pipeline impact

Monthly:

• Strategy reset: What do we stop, scale, or test next?

If there’s one lesson we learned, it’s this

Everyone’s hunting for the big hack. But the real growth hack is discipline.

A 10-minute daily check. A test run properly.

An audience refined weekly.

Stacked together, those are the quiet moves that drive loud results.

If you want ads that don’t just survive but scale, that’s where to start.

Until next time,

Karthick Raajha.