1: Standard or Advanced Tracking?

1: Standard or Advanced Tracking?

There are two options for tracking the ad performance: standard or advanced. The 5 Keys of Tracking remain the same regardless of which path you choose. However, the advanced templates offer you much greater insight into your ad data.

As such, I would strongly recommend using the advanced versions of the Facebook, BookBub, and Amazon tracking templates. These are designed to be copy and paste, but they require stronger spreadsheet skills to use well and maintain than the standard templates.

Spreadsheets are required to do the analysis regardless of which option you choose; they streamline the process and allow you to analyze dozens, or even hundreds, of ads (or keywords) quickly. If you’re not comfortable with spreadsheets yet, you have a few options:

  • This is not a spreadsheet course; however the Five Keys of Tracking video covers a lot of the formulas we’ll be using. Pause / try to replicate what I’m doing on your own. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t replicate things on the first try; a lot of learning Excel and Sheets is trial and error (making a mistake with a formula, then tweaking until you find what’s wrong).
  • Take this Google Sheets course on Udemy, which is probably the best course of any type I’ve ever taken: Google Sheets Comprehensive Masterclass
    • Note that this is usually $12 – $20; if it’s showing up for $199, just wait until it’s “on sale,” which is the actual normal price
  • Both Sheets and Excel are exhaustively documented, which means Google / YouTube have the answer to almost everything (especially basic / common formulas and features).
  • Consult with ChatGPT or Claude to help you with formulas. This works best when you have an idea of what you’re looking for and have a passing familiarity with the underlying formula (even if you don’t know the exact syntax to use).
  • You can hire a freelancer on a site like Upwork to build a template / troubleshoot your work. This is relatively inexpensive ($50 – $100/hr) and will likely only take a few hours of the freelancer’s time to build a basic template. A more complex template like the Advanced Facebook, BookBub, or Amazon trackers will take significantly longer.
  • Get an Excel / Sheets tutor—just search online; these are relatively inexpensive ($50 – $100/hour) and can walk you through both how to build the sheets + teach you the skills in a few hours.

Just as a general note: getting your data wrangled into well-structured and organized spreadsheets is workflow changing. If I could go back to when I started publishing books 10+ years ago and change one thing, I’d hone my spreadsheet chops from the beginning. It’s a massive upgrade that’s difficult to explain until you have the skill. Then it changes everything.

Additionally, spreadsheet skills are largely evergreen; features are added over time, but these build on foundational formulas that have mostly been around for years. So any time invested here won’t be obsolete in 3 months.

This course will help you organize everything with a clear structure. I do try to break down what I’m doing in the spreadsheets at key moments. However, this is not a spreadsheet course meant to teach you Sheets or Excel and is not designed as such.

The course listed at the top of this page is fantastic, with well structured action exercises that guide you from complete beginner to advanced-intermediate. It’s also long. The shortest path to learning just the formulas you need (e.g., the 80/20) will be to pay someone else to teach you. Don’t hesitate to do this, especially if you’re not interested in learning lots of nooks and crannies in Sheets or Excel. If you’re spending even $10/day on ads ($300/mo), not being able to fully drill down into your data might be costing you twice that compared to what you could be making.

Key formulas / features used for analysis (aside from basic functions like adding, dividing etc.):

  • SUMIFS
  • XLOOKUP
  • Filter feature in Sheets
  • Pivot tables

These are the 80/20 of more advanced formulas. There are plenty of other things you can do in spreadsheets, of course, but having these under your belt will unlock a ton of analysis possibilities that were previously impossible.