The Ad Recipe
The Ad Recipe is a cookbook for ads. Step-by-step playbooks for running Meta, Google, and TikTok campaigns — written the way a recipe is written: exact instructions, honest amounts, and an explanation for why every step exists. Free, for every business, no gatekeeping.
Small business advertising advice comes in two flavors: platform documentation that tells you what buttons exist but not what order to press them in, and $997 courses that promise the “secret” — which is usually just the order to press the buttons in. The order isn’t a secret. It’s a recipe. Tracking and foundations first, cheap data-gathering campaigns second, automation only once there’s real data to automate on, and disciplined measurement forever. We’d rather publish that for free and let the work speak.
Every recipe gives you the exact campaign types, the setup steps as the platforms name them, starter keywords where keywords apply, suggested budgets, and honest timelines. And every recipe carries the same warning, because it’s true: a recipe is not a guarantee. Results depend on your offer, your prices, your website, your reviews, your support, your competition, and your timing. Ads amplify what’s already there — good or bad. Get your house in order, then cook.
This site is a potluck. Anyone who runs ads can share a recipe, and anyone can take an existing recipe, run it, and publish their improved version as a User Revised recipe — with automatic credit to the original. See something wrong or outdated? Every recipe has a flag button, and a human looks at every flag. Curious exactly how recipes get made, including where AI helps and where humans decide? We wrote it all down: How Recipes Are Made.
The Ad Recipe is built and edited by Gorilla Public, an independent web and marketing studio in Murphys, California, with twenty years of running these exact playbooks for real businesses — from Main Street shops to auto dealer groups to our own e-commerce brands. The recipes are free because this information should be. And if you’d rather have it cooked for you, that’s what we do for a flat fee — never a percentage of your ad spend.