Paid ads

Paid ads sit with the marketing team for now. They have two jobs: capture demand that already exists and introduce SucuriLabs to people our brand and content do not reach on their own.

We try to split our budget 50/50 between conversion and awareness.

Ads are expensive, so we typically only advertise products once they are generally available, have pricing, and have a feature set broadly on par with the main competitors.

For the moment we optimize for demo bookings. SucuriLabs is not self-serve right now, so our ads should help someone understand the product and book a demo.

How we run paid campaigns

Every meaningful campaign should move through the same loop:

• Propose: Define the audience, problem, hypothesis, objective, budget cap, creative, landing page, success metric, and what we will not be able to measure.
• Launch: Use consistent campaign names and unique UTMs, QA the analytics events and destinations, confirm the budget cap, and set a decision date before spending.
• Evaluate: Check delivery and tracking after five days, leading indicators after ten days, audience and creative quality after two weeks, and conversions in three to four weeks, depending on the objective.
• Learn: Scale, change, or stop the campaign, write a brief postmortem, and share creative and landing page findings with the #marketing-team-ads channel.

We run experiments on a rolling basis to improve performance, but we work hard to avoid testing paralysis. If something works, we go for it; if it doesn’t, we try something new. We do not fix what’s not broken, but no campaigns should go more than 30 days without a touch from the marketing team, and we do not spend budget just because it is available.

How and when we use LLMs for paid ads

Our team is small, so using AI to extend our capacity is critical, but we limit it to optimization with a human in the loop. We use agents to keep tabs on current campaign and creative performance, and to investigate the data.

All campaign ideation, creative work, strategy, and plans are designed and written by humans.

Remember our marketing values: no AI slop.