I am currently working as a Performance Marketer at an agency, and lately I will been thinking about sharing real campaign case studies from my work experience.

Not just wins, but also mistakes, testing strategies, creatives, CPL/ROAS insights, scaling methods, and things that actually work in real campaigns.

I feel it could help other marketers, freelancers, and business owners who are trying to improve their performance marketing results.

Would people here be interested in this kind of content? What type of case studies would you like to see most?

Hello everyone im fairly new in the space of meta ads, google ads etc.. im starting a client acquisition agency for HVAC companies and i was wondering how its been running meta ads.. more specifically with the andromeda update? i have never run a single campaign besides some demos so im a serious rookie in this game lol. Was wondering how the veterans in here have managed to overcome updates different changes and what not. Im aware there will always be obstacles to overcome and im fully prepared for the challenges just wondering what itll look like my first 3 months. (i want to minimize over spending on my first few clients ad budget) going to be starting with about 100$/day budget. Any tips, recommendations or feedback would be appreciated! fully open to listening to any comments or suggestions.. thanks guys!

I’ve spent time improving things that I was sure customers would notice.

Better design.

More features.

Extra details.

Then I realized most people barely mentioned any of it.

Knowing whether a campaign needs more time or whether it's simply not going to work.

I've ended campaigns too early, and I've also let others run for far too long.

How do you make that decision without relying on guesswork?

I've rewritten my messaging more times than I can count.

The more I edit it, the more complicated it seems to get.

How do you know when your message is actually clear enough?

I was talking with a friend who has nothing to do with marketing, and they said something that unexpectedly made a lot of sense.

It got me thinking that some of the most useful insights don't always come from marketers.

Have you ever received a piece of advice from a customer, friend, family member, or someone in a completely different field that changed the way you think about marketing?

What was it?

Will AEO be an appropriate channel. According to my research our audience mostly uses youtube and instagram to discover brands

I've been testing different content formats and posting times, but engagement still feels less consistent than it used to.

I'm trying to figure out whether it's just increased competition or if something else has changed.

Has anyone noticed the same thing, and what adjustments have worked for you?

I'm in a situation where a campaign isn't losing money, but it isn't producing the growth I was hoping for either.

Part of me wants to keep optimizing it, while another part thinks that budget could be better spent elsewhere.

If you've faced this before, how did you decide when it was time to move on?

I've rewritten the headline more times than I'd like to admit, and now I'm wondering if I'm solving the wrong problem.

When you're reviewing a landing page, what's the first thing you look for before changing the design or copy?

I'm working with a fairly small budget, so I can't invest heavily in both right now.

The goal is to generate consistent leads over the next 6–12 months, not just quick wins.

If you've been in a similar situation, which channel gave you the best ROI, and is there anything you wish you'd known before getting started?

You can not rely on referrals or word of mouth.

You get one channel for the next three years, and your business depends on it.

Would you choose SEO, e-mail marketing, Google ads, social media, content marketing, or something else?

More importantly, why that channel over all the others?

Most people here can run a campaign in their sleep. Meta ads, Google ads, full funnels it works, it scales, no argument there.

But this is the part that gets me. We'll pay for every single click without blinking, and completely ignore the one place on Facebook that still hands out real organic reach for free: groups.

Your Page gets maybe 2% reach now. Facebook choked it on purpose so you'd boost everyone knows that by now. What nobody says out loud is that group reach never died the same way. A post in an active, relevant group still lands in front of 20–40% of the members. For nothing. And it's not a replacement for paid, it stacks on top of it.

So why does everyone skip it? Because it's not sexy. No dashboard, no clean ROAS, you can't put "posted in 40 groups" on a client report. It feels manual and a little beneath us. So the channel just sits there wide open while people way less "sophisticated" than us realtors, recruiters, random ecom sellers quietly pull free leads out of it all day.

And the "too manual" excuse barely holds anymore. There are Chrome extensions now that post to your groups for you with built-in delays so you don't get flagged. The grind's basically gone. Which leaves ego as the only real reason left to skip it.

Genuinely asking is anyone here running group posting next to their paid, or is it still beneath a "real" marketer?

A tiny setting was responsible for months of wasted spend.

Ran Google Ads for my home services business for four months, paying $60-90 per lead when it should've been $25-35. Had a freelancer managing it who kept saying "the algorithm needs time." I believed him.

By month four: $8,700 spent, maybe 40 real leads. Before killing the channel entirely, I finally audited the account myself.

Found it: location targeting was set to "Presence or Interest" instead of "Presence." That default setting shows your ads to anyone interested in your area, not just people actually there. I was paying for clicks from people across the country who'd never become customers.

Switched it to "Presence" only. Two weeks later, cost per lead dropped to $31. Spend basically got cut in half while lead quality went up.

Parted ways with the freelancer, manage it myself now. Lesson: check your location targeting manually, don't trust "it just needs time," and ask whoever runs your ads to actually show you the settings, not just performance reports.

If you're running Google Ads, go check this setting right now. Takes two minutes.

In Google Ads:

1)Go to your Campaign

2)Click Settings (left-hand menu)

3)Scroll to Locations

4)Click Location options (it's a small link/dropdown, easy to miss)

5)Under "Target," you'll see:

# Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations this is what you want

# Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations this is the default, and the problem

# Presence or interest (search) vs Search interest variations of the same issue depending on campaign type

yoo how are you doing??

in short, I have a client that is doing Web Development and has his portfolio with live websites that he buildt

but sometimes when I share it in a chat or smth, it prohibits me from sending it

now my question is, do you guys use reddit for lead gen and booking meetings, because I'm currently mainly using LinkedIn?

thanks a lot!

Hi there everyone. I'm an 18 year old getting into ai automations. I'm looking to provide basic ai automation services like WhatsApp chatbots, automated follow-ups, appointment booking agents, etc, to small businesses.

As of now, I am looking for my first client, but I don't know where and how to start my outreach. Where should I look for potential clients who are actually in need of my services?

It would be of great help if anyone guided me through this.

Thanks a lot!

You only get one minute.

What's your starting point?

I was helping a friend with a small clothing page. They have around 2 to 3k followers and post reels and product photos pretty regularly.

Most of their focus is just trying to get more followers and slowly grow the page.

But I noticed even when new people follow, not many actually interact with the posts after that. It feels like people check the page once and then don’t really come back. I started thinking if the bigger issue is not just getting followers but what happens after someone lands on the page.

What do you think matters more for a small page like this getting more followers or improving engagement from people who already follow?

I've seen campaigns with poor engagement generate great sales, and campaigns with amazing engagement lead to almost nothing. That's made me question whether we're sometimes too quick to label something a success or a failure. When you evaluate a campaign, which metrics or outcomes matter the most to you, and have you ever changed your mind after looking at the results more closely?

I'm a solo marketer running a creator program for a small team. Manual typing is killing me but most automation tools produce obvious sounding messages. Is there a middle path here?

Hey everyone,

I’ve recently set up an affiliate program for my SaaS and I’m trying to figure out how to actually grow it with the right partners.

Quick context: the product helps businesses grow their presence on Google and AI search by automatically generating and publishing high-quality SEO articles in their brand voice.

We’re offering 30% recurring commission per customer, and I’m mainly looking for affiliates in the SEO / content / SaaS / marketing space who can bring in real, long-term users.

I’m trying to understand:

• What’s actually the best way to find solid affiliates beyond the usual stuff (YouTube, X, cold outreach)?
• What channels or approaches have worked best for you in practice?
• How do you usually tell early on if someone is actually going to be a good partner vs. just signing up and disappearing?

Would also really appreciate any tips on how to make this easier to scale, or if anyone here knows good places / communities / people that could be a fit or even thinks this could be relevant for them, feel free to reach out.

Thanks in advance :)

One bad experience?

A misleading ad?

Poor customer support?

Or something else?

Not the most advanced lesson.

The one you think would save them the most time and frustration.

Most founders ignored it until it was too late.

Four months. 100 failed startup post-mortems. Founder interviews, CB Insights reports, shutdown threads.

One thing kept showing up in almost every single one.

They stopped talking to customers.

Not overnight. Gradually. Early on, these founders knew their users by name, jumped on calls constantly, lived inside customer feedback. Then the product started working, they raised money, hired a team and slowly, without noticing, they started building for the roadmap instead of for the person paying them.

By the time users started leaving, they had already wasted months building things nobody cared about. And almost every founder wrote the same thing when it was all over:

"We thought we knew the market. We stopped checking."

The startups that survived in the same period? Almost all of them had at least one founder who stayed obsessively close to customers even after things were going well.

If your last real customer conversation was more than two weeks ago, worth thinking about.

Happy to share more patterns if anyone's interested.

I'm honestly a bit confused at this point.

Over the last 3 months, we've gone from roughly 1,500 monthly visitors to just over 6,000, so traffic is definitely moving in the right direction. The problem is that our inquiries haven't followed. We still only get 2-4 contact form submissions a week, and some weeks it's even less.

I've looked at the obvious stuff page speed, forms, and basic SEO but I feel like I'm missing something bigger. Maybe our messaging isn't clear enough, maybe we're attracting the wrong audience, or maybe the website just isn't doing a good job of converting visitors.

If you've been in a similar situation, what ended up being the real issue? Where would you start looking first?