There are about 20 different things that you have to set up, to make your ads perform reasonably well. From ad format, bidding, objective, creative etc.

But none of that matters if you get your target audience wrong. Unfortunately, most B2B brand ads fall flat on their face on the first hurdle.

By far the most common issue is that the target audience is too big for the budget. If your daily budget is $50 and your audience size is 200k, you are going to waste that money.

For ads to be effective, you want your average monthly frequency to be at least 3. To achieve that on 200k audience, you need to spend at least $250 per day, not $50.

Reduce the audience size.

Audience size is just one of the things that can go wrong. You also  don't want to mix several industries and geographies in a single campaign. Another very common mistake.

Add broad match job titles and you are done. If you don't have any exclusions, you are toast as well. Come to think of it, there are at least 12 ways to screw up your audience definitions.

I've been there and done than. I've made all of these mistakes.

Now I spend disproportionate time honing the audience definitions of a new campaign.

Because if you screw that up, nothing else matters.