Your ads don’t need more AI. They need better words.
Getting someone to buy online has become a genuinely hard problem. Here’s a simple way to see why, why cheap, average copy is pushing ad costs up, and why copywriting is the one skill you can’t skip.
Think about the last time an ad actually made you buy something.
You were scrolling, half paying attention, the way we all do. Hundreds of posts, offers and videos went past. Then one of them made your thumb stop. You read it, you clicked, and a few minutes later you’d handed over your own hard-earned money to a brand you might never have heard of that morning.
What made that one ad different from the hundred you scrolled past?
Mostly, it was the words. Somebody chose them very carefully, the way I’m trying to choose mine here. And that’s what this post is about: how to write copy for your landing pages and campaigns that actually persuades someone to buy.
Before we start, a fair question is why you should listen to me at all. My team and I have run more than 3,000 experiments and generated over $50 million in incremental revenue for the brands we work with. So I know a thing or two about what moves the needle in conversion rate optimization. If that’s good enough for you, let’s get into it.
A simple formula for solving any problem
I want to begin somewhere that might seem a little odd for a post about copywriting. It’s a formula I put together, and it isn’t really about copy at all. It’s about how effectively you can solve any problem.
It depends on three things:
You can picture it like a fraction. Skill and taste sit on top, pushing your effectiveness up. Complexity sits underneath, dragging it down. So the harder the problem, the more skill and taste you need just to stay effective.
Cooking is a nice way to see this. Anyone can boil an egg; average skill and average taste will do just fine. But if you’ve been asked to cook dinner for a 200-guest wedding, average won’t cut it. The problem got harder, so the cook has to get better.
Play with it yourself. These sliders don’t give a real score; they just show how the three pull against each other:
So, is selling online an easy problem or a hard one?
Here’s my question to you. As I write this, it’s October 2026, and I don’t expect things to get simpler any time soon.
Think about the person you’re trying to sell to. Every day they’re hearing news about AI, about the economy, about geopolitics, about global warming, about one uncertainty after another. And in the middle of all that, you’re asking them to part with their hard-earned money. On top of that, every marketing platform is packed with competitors asking them for exactly the same thing.
And we already know what the formula says about complex problems. If you want to solve this one effectively, you have to turn up your skill and your taste. There’s no way around it.
What’s actually happening instead
Almost everyone running ads has noticed the same thing lately: it costs more. What they really mean is that it costs more to acquire each customer.
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So why has that cost gone up? People like to blame the algorithms. In my view, the bigger reason is AI. Faced with this complex problem of persuading someone to buy, a lot of brands are putting their money behind AI slop, made with average skill, average processes and average taste, and hoping their campaigns and landing pages will work anyway.
That’s the formula running in reverse. Selling online got harder just as the copy behind most ads got more average. Of course the results get worse, and of course the cost of each customer climbs.
Saving a little on the words. Burning a lot on the ads.
I see this trade all the time. Saving $500 on expertise often means burning $5,000 or more on ads that don’t convert. When the copy is average, your ad costs are going to go up.
The five skills you can’t compromise on
I strongly believe that running marketing campaigns well takes a handful of skills you simply can’t skip. Let me list them for you:
I’m joking, but only a little. If you’re spending money on paid ads and you have a habit of forgetting how much the words matter, call your mother and ask her to remind you every day. If that doesn’t work, get it tattooed somewhere. If you’re paying for ads, copywriting is what decides whether they run profitably.
Skill, taste, and how to use what comes next
Back to the formula for a moment. Of its three parts, complexity is the one you can’t control. The market is what it is. That leaves skill and taste.
In this series I’m going to focus on skill. I’ll walk through the whole copywriting framework we use, broken down into steps, and show you the internal tool we built at our company to write copy for our own pages and campaigns. It isn’t public, but you’ll see how it works.
I’m going to assume you already have decent taste, meaning you can look at two pieces of copy and tell which one is better. If you can’t yet, writing copy yourself is risky. Then again, running any paid campaign without good copy is risky.
You don’t have to write the copy to judge it well.
Here’s the good news, though. Even if you never write a word yourself, you can use the same framework to judge copy that your team or a freelancer writes for you. If you’ve outsourced it, or someone on your team handles it, the framework becomes your checklist for whether their work is actually good enough to put money behind.
The takeaway
Getting someone to buy from you online has become a hard problem, and hard problems don’t get solved by average work. When the challenge goes up, the skill and taste you bring to it have to go up too.
That’s why the brands paying for AI slop keep watching their acquisition costs climb, while the ones investing in their words get more from every click.
Cheap copy saves you a few hundred dollars. Good copy is what stops you burning thousands.
