Run the ads. Make the creative. See what everyone else is running.

Advertising on Facebook means a campaign with one objective, an ad set whose budget can produce about 50 optimization events in a week, and several ads that do not look like copies of each other. Meta’s auction does the rest.

Running Google Ads starts with a conversion that records, then a Search campaign whose ad groups each cover one theme. Performance Max and Demand Gen come after Search is telling you which queries buy.

Instagram ads are bought in Meta Ads Manager, in the same campaign as Facebook. You choose the placements, and you cut the creative for Reels, Stories, and the feed. A separate Instagram-only account is rarely the better structure.

TikTok ads work when the video could have been a post. You buy them in TikTok Ads Manager, usually as Spark Ads that run a creator’s or your own organic post, with one ad group funded well enough to leave learning.

YouTube ads are bought in Google Ads. Skippable in-stream and Shorts are the formats that can ask for a click. Demand Gen is the campaign type that packages them with Discover and Gmail. A bumper is a reminder, not a first campaign.

LinkedIn ads reach people by job, company, and seniority, and the click costs more than Meta or Google because the audience is the product. Advertise here when the buyer has a title, and when one lead is worth the click.

Reddit does not publish a rate card. You pay the auction for a community: a CPM or a CPC that clears against other advertisers in that subreddit. A tiny subreddit and a low bid simply do not spend.

Facebook ads cost what the auction charges to reach someone likely to take your action. Industry averages are a bad budget. Your cost per result, on a budget that can exit learning, is the number.

Google Ads cost is your bid, the competition on that query, and your Quality Score, turned into a CPC or a cost per conversion. The budget is the cap. The search terms report is where the waste is.

TikTok ads cost a CPM to be seen and a CPA to get the action. Views are cheap relative to a finished view on YouTube. Customers are not automatically cheap. Budget the test around the action, and expect to pay for several creatives.

Demand Gen is Google’s campaign type for visual ads on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. You bring audiences and creative. It is not Search, and it is not Performance Max: you can see the placements and the ads.

A readable Google Ads account is one campaign per offer and geography, ad groups split by theme, and ads that repeat the theme of their keywords. Match types and bid strategies sit inside that, not instead of it.

Quality Score is Google’s 1 to 10 grade of a keyword, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. It changes what you pay and whether you are eligible. It is a diagnostic, not a goal.

Audit conversions before you audit keywords. If the account cannot see a sale, every other opinion about bids and ads is a guess. Then search terms, then structure, then the ads, then the bid strategy.

A partnership ad is a Meta ad that runs from a creator’s Instagram or Facebook identity, with the creator’s approval, so the ad looks like a post from them. Whitelisting is the older name for the same idea. The media spend is still yours.

Ecommerce on Facebook is a purchase event that fires with value, a prospecting ad set with creative of the product in use, and a catalog or a retargeting set only after the first one has buyers. The catalog does not replace the creative.

A Claude marketing skill is a saved way of working: the steps, the checks, and the format, so the next brief or audit starts from the same standard. The skill does not log into the ad account. Connecting the account is a separate product.

Claude Code is Claude in a project folder, able to read files and run steps. Marketers use it to keep briefs, naming rules, and UTMs consistent. It is the wrong place to be the only system that can change a live budget.

Higgsfield MCP lets Claude, and other agents that speak the same protocol, generate images, video, characters, and audio on your Higgsfield account. Higgsfield’s help center is plain about the catch: MCP generations spend credits. Unlimited and free web generations do not carry over.

Runway turns a still into a short moving clip. For ads, that is useful when the product photo is already right and you need a few seconds of motion. It is the wrong tool when you need a person who used the product, talking.

Pika Labs makes short AI video from text or an image. Advertisers use it for motion around a product that is already correct. They get in trouble when they ask it to invent the product, the hands, or a customer.

Luma’s Dream Machine makes cinematic short video from text or an image. Use it for a mood shot you could not afford to light. Do not use it for the product label, the demo, or the testimonial.

AI UGC is a script, a consistent face or a voice, and a product that stays true, cut like a creator video. It works for hook tests and explainers. It fails as a testimonial, a before-and-after, or anything where the hands have to be right.

A UGC-style ad is filmed and cut to look like a creator’s post: a person, a product, a phone camera, words on screen. The person can be a founder, a customer, or a generated face. The style is the pacing and the proof, not the invoice.

UGC ads are user-generated videos or images, usually made by a creator you hired, that you run as paid media. The “user” is often a paid creator, not a spontaneous customer. What you bought is the file, and sometimes the right to run it from their handle.

A UGC video for ads is a short creator clip with one hook, the product visible, and a claim you are willing to run in paid media. It is not a brand anthem and it is not an unboxing with no point.

A UGC creator films a video of your product for your ads. They are not necessarily an influencer: many have a small audience or none, and you are paying for the file. Posting it, and running it from their handle, are add-ons.

Fiverr is a gig marketplace, and UGC creators sell videos there the same way designers sell logos. You can hire quickly. You have to read the gig for usage rights, because the platform is not built around ad licensing.

Upwork is a freelance marketplace. UGC creators there send proposals to a job you post. You can hire well, and you write the usage terms yourself, because a generic freelance contract does not know what a partnership ad is.

JoinBrands is a marketplace for UGC, influencers, and TikTok Shop creators. Brands pay a platform fee on top of the creator, and purchased content includes unlimited usage rights. You still write the brief and decide what runs.

Collabstr is an influencer and UGC marketplace with escrow. You search creators or post a campaign, agree a price, and pay into escrow that releases when you approve. Usage is whatever you and the creator agree before the order starts.

Billo is a pay-per-video creator marketplace. From $99 per video. The creator assigns all rights to you, for paid, owned and earned media, worldwide. The creator’s price for posting or for a partnership ad is extra, and unused balance is not a full refund.

Insense is a subscription creator marketplace. $400-$500/mo + creators. Creators start around $100 a video, and the Brand plan adds a percent on what you pay them. Partnership ad connections are a further monthly add-on.

TikTok Creative Center is TikTok’s public gallery of ads and trends: top ads, songs, hashtags, and products, filterable by region and industry. Use it to see which hooks are already working. Use your ad account to see whether they work for you.

Meta’s Ad Library shows ads a page is running: the creative, the copy, and the dates, for free. It does not show spend, audience, or results. Seeing the ad is the start of a brief, not the end of the research.

You can see a competitor’s Google ads in the Ads Transparency Center: the creative and the advertiser, across Search, YouTube, and Display. You cannot see their keywords, bids, or conversions. Analysis is what you do with the creative and your own search terms.

A useful Facebook video ad shows the product and the point in the first second, with the offer readable silent. Examples are worth more as structures than as files to imitate.

A carousel ad is a sequence of cards the person swipes. It works when each card is one step, one product, or one proof. It fails when it is six crops of one photo with the logo on card six.

Real estate ads on Facebook lead with the property or the payment, name the area, and ask for one action. They also sit in a special ad category, which limits the targeting you are used to from other campaigns.

A lead ad offers one thing, asks for the fewest fields that still qualify, and hands the lead to a person or an email the same day. The form is not the campaign. The speed of the follow-up is.

A YouTube ad example is worth studying for the first five seconds, because that is when a skippable ad loses the viewer. Shorts examples are a different cut: vertical, and gone when they swipe.

Reddit ad examples that work look like posts: a specific community, a plain first line, and a product mention that can survive a skeptical comment. Polish is not the advantage here. Accuracy is.

A before-and-after ad puts two states next to each other so the change is the hook. It converts when the change is visible, true, and permitted by the platform. It gets ads rejected when the change is implied, borrowed, or in a category Meta and Google restrict.

When advertisers search for MrBeast ads they usually want one of two things: the ads for his own brands, or the editing style, a cold open with stakes, that they hope will stop a feed. You can study the style. You cannot rent the audience by imitating the captions.

An AEO tool tracks how often AI answers mention or cite your brand for the questions your buyers ask. Choose one on the questions, the engines, and whether you can act on a miss. A dashboard of vanity prompts is a research project.

Answer engine optimization is the work of being the source an AI answer quotes: the right question, a direct answer, and proof on the page. It does not replace SEO. It changes what “ranking” means when the click never happens.

Generative engine optimization, GEO, is the work of showing up in answers that a model writes instead of a list of links. In practice it is the same craft as answer engine optimization: a page with a quotable answer and proof.

AEO and GEO are two names for showing up in AI-written answers. Answer engine optimization is the more common practitioner phrase. Generative engine optimization is the phrase a research paper and then a category of tools made famous. The page you publish is the same.

ChatGPT cites pages it can fetch that answer the question in a sentence it can stand behind. You get cited by publishing that page, being specific, and checking the answer. You do not get cited by adding the words “as an AI language model” to your blog.

Perplexity ranks sources in public: the answer has footnotes. You “rank” by being one of those sources. That means a page that answers the question, can be fetched, and is specific enough that the footnote is doing work.