The IKEA effect applied to digital marketing

When working with clients who have little to no experience with paid ads, I usually encounter two major barriers.

The first is their lack of a clear understanding of their own business. Any question about their target audience or customer acquisition cost typically receives, at best, a vague answer or an arbitrary number.

The second challenge is the visual aspect of the campaigns.

Most clients openly admit from the start that they have a strong aversion to anything related to design or copywriting. While involving professionals is always a great idea, the initial steps can be easily handled by the clients themselves.

Creating ads isn’t as difficult as it seems because we’re surrounded by inspiration. In fact, you can almost carbon-copy successful ads:

You can simply open the Meta Ad Library, explore campaigns from small and big brands, and deconstruct their strategies for inspiration.

Take this image ad from AG1:

You can paste the ad into any editing software (most of you probably use Canva) and overlay your own elements on top to get the exact proportions, positions and texts size. (By the way, would you be interested in a tutorial on this? There’s a poll at the end of this post where you can vote for the next topic!)

You can do the same with video—analyze the timing of key segments, break down the editing style and script, and then repurpose it for your own content.

But here’s the tricky part—just because an ad looks good to you doesn’t mean it’s effective or will convert.

This is where testing comes in. You need to find what works for your customer, not just what looks good to you. After all, you’re not the one buying the product.

At this point you might think: “I’ve spent so much time on it, and damn, it looks amazing. I’m sure it’s going to work”.

Wrong.

It might work, or it might not. That’s why you need to explore multiple options—design more variations, film different videos, or hire someone to help.

The ad is 90% of the campaign. If it sucks, you won’t get results—simple as that.

This is known as the IKEA Effect.

You probably already know what I’m talking about—the IKEA Effect. It’s our biased, non-objective attachment to anything we’ve created with our own time and effort. The more effort we put in, the stronger our bias.

I don’t know about you, but this happens to me all the time—especially with practical things like cooking (somehow, four hours and a pile of dirty dishes make anything taste gourmet!) or anything craft- or art-related.

But think about this: If you eat something tasteless at a restaurant, you probably won’t go back. The same logic applies to ads. We can’t stop at the first version just because we think it’s good or because we put so much effort into it.

Even if we’re proud of our creative work, we shouldn’t stop at the first version. Too often, I see ads with either too much or too little information—or with such low visual impact that they fail to stop the scroll. And if you don’t stop the scroll, you lose.

The IKEA Effect doesn’t just impact ads—it’s even worse when it affects the landing pages where our campaigns drive traffic.

While an “ugly” ad might actually resonate with your audience—sometimes overly polished ads can backfire and scare customers away—a bad landing page can hide serious user experience flaws. I’ve seen too many custom-built websites, flawed WordPress setups, and buggy Webflow pages that completely kill conversions.

Spending money on a campaign only to waste it because the conversion path isn’t clear sucks.

So, here’s my advice:

1. Invest in your ads. Whether you design them yourself or hire someone, don’t rely on just one ad that you think will work—test multiple variations!

2. Optimize your landing page. Test every possible flow, show it to friends and family, and ask them about the messaging. Use tools like Microsoft Clarity or PostHog to record user sessions and identify roadblocks preventing visitors from reaching the most important parts of your website.

And if you need help, reach out and I’ll be happy to give you an hint or two!

I hope you found some good information here, but before you go I have a couple of questions for you, since we have a lot of new subscribers (the Ads Dude is growing very fast!).

Would you mind answering this poll?

And I have another question for you. I’m preparing the future content of the newsletter and I’d love to have your feedback on which topics might interest you more:

Thank you for your help! I’m working hard on the newsletter, aiming to provide original and valuable content—without being boring, repetitive, or too shallow.

If you’re looking to take your paid ads knowledge to the next level, I offer consultation sessions:

• Single session

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And if we are not yet friends on x.com, please add me (@giftedio)!

Cheers!

F