Terro has worked well for me on the east coast, but was pretty unimpressive in southern California. I assumed it was probably the decentralized Argentine megacolony thing, but we could conceivably have had splintering colonies. The only things that sort of worked were physical barriers and tightly sealing all our food. We even had an incident with a peanut butter jar, though making sure to screw the lid down seems to have prevented repeats. It was an old, porous house, so really blocking them was tough, and we never fully succeeded. We were convinced we had multiple colonies inside our walls.
One trick with Terro: the liquid can be messy if you're not careful. Honestly it seems to wander out: maybe ants are tracking it out? Anyway, it helps to sit the thing inside a ziploc bag, with a bridge of paper towel or something to help the ants find it. It makes cleanup way easier.
It's also possible that the formula they used has changed -- my bottles are several years old now.
The stuff that I used was a small bottle with waxed cardboard "targets" to place it on. You can use waxed paper as well, and I've never had a problem with it running out onto the floor.
One trick with Terro: the liquid can be messy if you're not careful. Honestly it seems to wander out: maybe ants are tracking it out? Anyway, it helps to sit the thing inside a ziploc bag, with a bridge of paper towel or something to help the ants find it. It makes cleanup way easier.