Moving from affiliate-reliant finance offers to running my own ads — which platform is best to start scaling?

Hi,
I’ve been running finance-related offers for a while (lead gen / pre-qual flows) and mostly depended on affiliates and media buyers to bring in traffic, usually from native and social sources on CPA/CPL deals.

Now I want to start running paid traffic myself instead of fully relying on external partners. I understand the basics like funnels, landing pages, tracking setup, and basic optimization, but I haven’t personally scaled campaigns before.

If I’m starting fresh as a media buyer, which platform makes the most sense to begin with — Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Bing Ads? I’m trying to figure out where I can get stable early data without burning too much budget, but still have room to scale once I find working angles.

Also curious what usually surprises people when they move from offer ownership into actually buying traffic directly.

Facebook and native ads (taboola and outbrian). Google and bing ads are good for sales offer not leads offer.

For finance pre-qual I’d probably start with Google or Bing before FB, just because intent saves you from guessing angles too much early on. Bing is slower but cheaper to learn on, Google scales better but will slap you around with policy/review stuff if the lander or claims are even slightly messy. FB can work, but you’re basically buying curiosity and then filtering hard, so bad leads look “cheap” until the backend tells you they’re junk.

Biggest surprise when you buy yourself is how different the traffic looks from what affiliates report. You start caring way more about reject rate, call center feedback, time-to-contact, and which keywords/placements produce people who actually qualify... not just CPL. Also budget goes faster than expected because the first spend is mostly buying mistakes.

One thing that surprised me was attribution. As an offer owner, I mainly looked at lead volume, but as a media buyer you have to constantly compare ad platform data, tracking data, and actual lead quality.

id start with google ads, intent traffic is easier to read n optimize before jumping into bigger scale on fb.

ngl go with google search first bro, facebook will just ban u instantly with finance and drain your wallet before u even optimize anything lmao.

go with fb for fast scaling or google search for high quality leads. bing is too slow. biggest surprise gonna be compliance issues... finance offers get flagged easily so be ready for ad dislikes and account bans. keep testing different angles!

Start with Google Ads. Search traffic is intent-driven, so you get early data faster, and you can scale once you find keywords that convert.