Online advertising is a difficult skill to capture, more difficult than anyone realizes. It requires planning, creativity, writing skills, analysis, and constant editing. I have been running the advertising for my company for the past 6 months and I have to say I still find it challenging.

When you start out advertising you watch videos and do some research on best practices, and just like anything that is a great starting point, but realistically you are taking a shot in the dark and flying blind at the same time. You don’t know how much it entails until you are in the middle of spending company money to promote the company. In the first few months of your advertising, you are running the most automated campaign you can find. You just want the computer to show it to people for you and you guess at what people want to hear in the ad. Running ads like this at the beginning works, and there is nothing wrong with running ads like this. You see decent results and get your ads in front of a lot of people. But I found that I didn’t secure a lot of actual business from this, I couldn’t tweak small settings, and I wasn’t learning anything. So, it was on to the next step, taking the training wheels off.

Trying to take more control of your ads, you soon find that you regret it, and you are not as good at advertising as you previously thought. But then slowly you start to make headway. With little victories here and there and more research, you begin to make small changes that all add up. After many trial and error efforts, you start to see results that you didn’t think you could get. All of it starts to come together. It takes a lot of time, energy, and studying analytics, but it does start to pay off.

I still have a long way to go with advertising and much to learn. But I have come a long way from where I started, and it feels good. I still constantly do research and look for little tricks and tips, or anything that will help improve my ads at all. Ads are a lot of trial and error, more so than people will lead you to believe. That is why I find analyzing your past ad data is a major key to success in the advertising game. Being able to see when you were doing good, doing bad, what worked, what you haven’t tried all can lead you to become a successful advertiser. Right now, I find that writing the actual ad text itself is the most difficult part. There is a fine line you have to walk to make sure your ad doesn’t sound too corny but at the same time, making sure it doesn’t sound uneducated or isn’t attention-grabbing enough. It is a difficult skill to master, and I do research on it every day. If anyone has any tips or wants to talk about advertising skills, leave a comment below and we can chat about it!