Spending $100,000 on digital ads sounds like a dream to some and a nightmare to others. For me, it was a little bit of both. When I first got the opportunity to manage a six-figure ad budget across Google and Meta (formerly Facebook), I felt excited, confident, and slightly terrified. There’s something uniquely sobering about knowing every click you generate is costing real money — and that you’re responsible for turning those clicks into meaningful results.

Early on, I learned that scale doesn’t automatically equal success. Just because you’re spending more doesn’t mean your campaigns will suddenly perform better. In fact, without a solid structure, higher budgets can expose the weaknesses in your strategy even faster. On both platforms, poor targeting, unclear messaging, or weak creative will burn money quickly. I saw firsthand how a beautifully designed ad with the wrong audience could waste hundreds in a matter of hours.

One of the biggest surprises was how different Google and Meta behave when it comes to user intent. Google users tend to be searching with a purpose. They’re already in the mindset to find something — whether it’s a product, a solution, or an answer. That made Google Ads extremely powerful for bottom-of-funnel campaigns. On the other hand, Meta excels at discovery. People aren’t necessarily looking to buy, but with the right creative and targeting, you can interrupt their scroll in a way that sparks interest. The key is matching your content to the intent of each platform. Google is for closing; Meta is for introducing and nurturing.

Tracking performance was another learning curve. Attribution models can be frustratingly inconsistent. A user might click on a Meta ad, browse your site, leave, then Google your brand two days later and convert via a search ad. Which platform gets the credit? Understanding this overlap helped me shift from a “last-click wins” mindset to a more holistic view of the customer journey. The real magic came from campaigns that worked together — retargeting Meta traffic with Google Search or using Meta video views to build warm audiences for future offers.

Creative fatigue is real, especially on Meta. I underestimated how quickly ads stop performing once the algorithm shows them to the same people too many times. Having a steady stream of fresh visuals, headlines, and copy ready to test became essential. Google, by contrast, rewarded consistency and relevance more than novelty. It was more about refining keyword matches and landing pages than constantly reinventing the wheel.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson was learning when not to scale. There’s a temptation, especially with a big budget, to keep increasing spend when a campaign is performing well. But scaling too fast can tank your results. I learned to scale gradually — watching metrics like cost-per-result, conversion rate, and frequency to make sure performance held steady as the budget increased.

In the end, spending $100K didn’t just teach me how to run ads — it taught me how to think like a strategist, not just a technician. It taught me the importance of data, testing, storytelling, and above all, patience. You can’t force a funnel to work just because you have money. You have to build it, fix it, and constantly listen to the signals the data is sending you.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. But next time, I’d go in knowing that success in paid advertising isn’t about how much you spend — it’s about how smart, adaptive, and intentional you are with every dollar.