You will be able to launch a small, tracked test campaign and write a review with next steps.
Plenty of people who try paid ads get nothing useful from the money. They launch, refresh the figures nervously for a week, change things, and eventually stop. The step they skip is the review. A written review is what lets you learn from a test, whether the campaign made money or lost it.
Until now the course has been planning: account structure, tracking, audiences, ads, a campaign built to draft, a budget and bidding plan, a test plan, and a policy check if your category needed one. This is where you first spend money. The brief is one small tracked test campaign, on one platform, for one offer, from a real business (your own or one you have permission to advertise). Spend within the budget from Lesson 8.4, Write your budget and bidding plan, and let the campaign learn until your review date.
Launch either the social campaign you built to draft in Lesson 6.5, Build your first social campaign, or the Search campaign you planned in Lesson 7.5, Plan your Search campaign, and built to draft in Google Ads.
Before you publish, confirm three things. Tracking works, with a test conversion recorded in the last few days (Lesson 3.4, Install and test your tracking, shows how). The campaign passes the four checks from Lesson 6.4, Mistakes that waste a first budget. If you advertise financial products or services, your ads and pages have passed the policy check from Lesson 9.3, Ad policies for financial products and services, plus your firm's compliance approval where that applies.
After you publish, the platform reviews each new ad before it runs. This can take minutes or longer. If an ad is rejected, read the reason, fix the ad and resubmit it, rather than appealing straight away.
Make no big edits between launch and your first review date. Lesson 8.3, The learning phase: why results wobble at first, explains why.
Do check the account daily for breakage: things that are actually broken. These are rejected ads, spend going to the wrong country, a landing page that has gone down, tracking that has stopped recording, and spend running far ahead of plan. Fix these immediately and leave everything else alone.
At the first review, and again at the end of the test, screenshot the key report. It should show spend, results and cost per result for the campaign and for each ad set or ad group.
Work through the report in the order from Lesson 9.4, Read results and decide what to change. Compare cost per result with your target first. Then look at click rate and conversion rate for each ad set and ad to find what drove that cost. Then compare the platform's results with your own sales or leads for the same period. If the platform's sales count is close to your shop's order count, its numbers are believable.
Next, compare the outcome with what you wrote before launch. Did the test answer the question in your budget plan, and did any test you designed in Lesson 9.1, Test one thing at a time and decide in advance, reach its decision rule?
Farah sells clothing. Her Meta sales campaign spent S$420 over 14 days and recorded 9 sales, about S$46.67 per sale (S$420 / 9). Her break-even on a first order, the most she can pay for a first sale without losing money, is S$54, so S$46.67 is under it. Her shop recorded 11 orders from new customers in the same period, so the platform's count looked believable.
Each of her two ad sets spent S$210 (S$210 + S$210 = S$420). The ad set for people starting a first job got 6 sales, about S$35 each (S$210 / 6). The ad set for people returning to work got 3 sales, about S$70 each (S$210 / 3), which is above break-even. Together that is 6 + 3 = 9 sales.
Your one-page review has four parts:
What happened, in numbers. How the outcome compares with the plans you wrote before launch. What to keep, change and stop, each with the number behind it. The next test, written as a plan with a question, a measure and a decision rule.
Farah keeps the first-job ad set, at about S$35 a sale, and its best ad. She changes the landing page for the returning-to-work ad set, which had a low conversion rate and sent people to the general collection instead of the fit guide the ad promised. She stops one ad in the first-job set whose click rate was far below the others. Her next test runs two hooks for the first-job audience using Meta's A/B test, judged on cost per sale over two weeks.
When you finish, you have a set of documents: the plan you launched from, screenshots of a working conversion and of the results, the ads and landing pages you ran, a policy check if your category needs one, and a one-page review that ends in a specific next test. This set is your final project for the course. Share it for feedback and keep it as the record of how your account started.
The activity below asks you to launch within your budget plan and submit the plan, screenshots and review.
Launch a test campaign within your budget plan. Then submit the plan, screenshots of the results and a one-page review that names your next test.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).