Ah yes, Facebook ads. You either love ’em, hate ’em, or are simply wondering… Why the heck is everyone talking about Facebook ads like it’s the gold rush? With 1 billion users and more data than God himself, Facebook Ads are one of the hottest and most effective ways to advertise. Move over radio, newspaper, and TV, there’s a new king in town.
If you’re a business, you’re foolish to ignore them, and you know this. So…you do what I like to call…DABBLE. You try a few ads, boost a few posts, see what happens when you throw $25, $50, $100 at Zuckerberg. Here’s the problem…
With the exception of newspaper ads in the olden golden days, whenever a business set up an ad budget and campaign, it wasn’t something they did themselves. They’d use an ad agency, coordinate with the networks, create the commercial, etc. In other words, it was a process. A process that wasn’t simply a ten minute, 5 click process behind the glow of a laptop in your living room.
This is the thing…Facebook ads are just SO EASY to do. Of course! Facebook isn’t dumb. Let’s let any Joe Schmoe try this and waste a crap ton of money and our pockets are full.
Which means…there are a lot of FRUSTRATED people wondering how the heck people are doing Facebook ads and rolling in it. So, from my desk to yours, as a Facebook ad strategist, I’ve boiled down your dismal Facebook failures to one of 14 problems.
#1 You’re using the wrong type of ad
When you log into the Power Editor to set up your ad, there are a million choices. Just look!
There are reasons to use a few of these, but let’s be honest…many of them don’t work very well at all. They suck {you’ll see that word a lot in this blog post}. Most FB ad strategists will stick to a few types of ads, the top right one being the MOST popular. This is the one we recommend. The ones on the left? It’s like stuffing wads of $100 dollar bills into your neighbor’s fire pit.
But wait, I want clicks to my website. I want people to read my blogs. Do I still want the conversion ad?
YES. And here’s why. The conversion ad uses the Facebook Pixel to track your audiences actions. So even if it’s only to read a blog post, you’ll want to use the conversion ad campaign.
#2 You’ve forgotten to set manual placement of the ads
Look how nice Facebook is? See, we’ll help you automatically place your ads so you don’t have to think about anything…let me give you a translation of what that actually means….
“We here at Facebook want as much money as possible, so we’re going to spray and pray your ad everywhere, even in places like our audience network where the quality of leads is terrible.” DO NOT use AUTOMATIC PLACEMENTS. Facebook is taking advantage of your innocence.
#3 You aren’t using the Facebook pixel
The Facebook pixel is the best way to measure the performance of your ad. You want to place your pixel on your website and on all landing and sales pages in your funnel. Every ad account has one pixel, so you won’t miss it. Go to your ad manager, click on the menu on the top left. Then choose PIXELS.
When you get to the pixel place, the first thing you want to do is click ACTIONS. Then choose VIEW PIXEL.
But that isn’t all. You’ll want to put little snippets inside your pixel, depending on what page you’re working on. So for example, in a simple lead magnet funnel, you’ll want your pixel on the THANK YOU page, not the landing page. When you place it on the thank you page, you’ll want to add one of the 9 possible standard snippets that Facebook offers. To find those snippets, you click on the CREATE CONVERSION button on the pixel page, and choose TRACK STANDARD EVENTS.
- Using the thank you page example, we would use either the LEAD or the COMPLETE REGISTRATION snippet.
- To place the snippet, you need to go into the code of your pixel, and find where it says ‘(page view)’;
- Hit return. Copy the snippet, and paste it in. That’s it!
#4 You are boosting posts
For the love of god and all things that are good and yummy, do not boost posts. It’s another simple Facebook tactic that used to steal your money with virtually no return on your investment. There’s nothing to track, and oftentimes, the boosted post is simply shown to people who are likely to make obnoxious trolly remarks anyhow.
But I have an organic post that’s doing amazing, don’t I want to boost it?
If that’s happening, go into the Power Editor, set up a Conversion ad campaign, place the pixel in your blog post with the VIEW CONTENT snippet, and take the pre-existing post and turn it into an ad.
#5 Your audience is too broad
People like to spend a lot of time on the ad graphics and copy, and yes…they are important. But what’s more important than virtually any part of the ad process? The AUDIENCE. So don’t skimp here. In fact, many ad strategists will spend HOURS testing different types of audiences.
If in the Power Editor and you’re creating an ad that targets 1.3 million people? That will be too broad my friend.
Facebook gives you a little odometer so really…it’s idiot proof. And I know I know, I’ve been telling you here how Facebook is a sneaky McTrickster, but in this case…let’s look for a nice vertical. Somewhere between 20,000 and 800,000 is a magic number for audience targeting.
#6 Your audience is too narrow
On the flip side, your audience might be too narrow. But perhaps not narrow in the way you think of narrow. Because really, you can show an ad to an audience of 2000 and get GREAT results, especially if it’s a warm audience like an email list. And yes, Facebook will tell you it’s too small, but you can ignore them.
HOWEVER, if you’re one of those people that spends time going through every behavior, demographic, and purchasing trends of your audience, don’t be so sure it’s going to ACTUALLY target those people. There are murmurings that some of that data is not so accurate anyhow.
What’s a safe bet? To create an audience with the following:
- Geographic filtering
- Age filtering
- Gender filtering
- Language filtering
- Target one Facebook Biz Page audience at a time
This means you search for Business Pages that are your competitors, and use that filter to create your audience.
#7 Your ad copy sucks
Clever is out. Clear is in. Ads perform well when they don’t smell like clickbait. The copy must invoke some curiosity, but you also want it to look like it’s a normal story in the newsfeed. Too crazy and you’ll give yourself away to mindless scrollers that it is in fact, an ad.
Both long and short form copy above the ads works fine. We’ve seen success with both. And…if for some reason you can’t get that nice chunk of long copy? It’s because you’re not in the POWER EDITOR. You need to create your ads there.
One other trick? IF you can’t hit a hard return when writing your copy in the editor, it’s because you’re making mistake #2 and your placements are including Instagram.
#8 Your ad graphic sucks
Following the theme of #6, many ads are just trying to hard. Guess what is an absolute giveaway that you’re an ad? Text splayed all over the graphic. Facebook has now done away with the 20% text rule on an ad, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t like it any better. Unless your ad absolutely needs text, work with photos or graphics without text.
And yes, there’s reason to believe that color matters greatly, so if you have a photo you love, create 8 versions of it with hue-tinted overlays to see which one performs better.
#9 You aren’t testing enough variations
There are experts out there that create 25 variations of 1 ad, and THEN, test all 25 variations with 50 audiences. Do the math. It makes my head hurt. If you are setting up ads with one graphic, one type of copy, and showing it to a few audiences, yes…you might get lucky….or you might be like most people, who need to test!
Here’s my advice.
- Start with one graphic.
- Writer three different versions of copy for above and below the ad.
- Set those up.
- Start with your next graphic.
- Make three variations with those versions of copy.
- Do it over and over.
This way, you’ll be able to isolate the variable. Is it the graphic or the copy? Be as systematic as possible. This is money you’re dealing with.
Handy tip* – Use the NAME fields when you’re in the Power Editor to name your ads. Use details…like this.
#10 You’re trying to sell something to cold traffic
Ads that perform best either lead to a blog post, a video, or some free lead magnet. Sending cold traffic to a sales page is risky at best, disastrous at worst. Can it be done? Yes. But your offer better be more compelling than wine and chocolate with Grey’s on Thursday night or it’ll be a big ol’ waste of time.
What’s better? Is to create sales ads and advertise to WARM audiences. So your email list for example. Those people know about your business. So upload your email list as a custom audience and try that.
Another way to test warm traffic with sales ads, is to use the Facebook Pixel to curate a custom audience. Say what now?
Remember how I said to place your Facebook pixel on your website, or on a blog post that you’ve run ads to? Well, once you’ve done that for a little while, you’ll be able to use all those visitors to create a custom audience.
Here’s how it’s done.
- Place your pixel on your site or in your blog post.
- Set it and forget it awhile.
- Then, go into your ads manager, and in the top left, click the menu bar and choose audiences. Then click on Create Audience, and choose CUSTOM.
My two favorites are the top two. You can use your email list, or…you can customize an audience based on website traffic and specific URL’s they’ve visited.
Even better? Once you have that audience, you can create lookalike audiences that are similar and test those as well.
#11 Your offer sucks
I’m not really sure how much explanation is needed here. If your free offer sucks, no one will care. Are you offering a freebie that has 10 tips to do something? Guess what? There are SCORES of bloggers who are writing 10 tips posts without requesting an email address so go back to the drawing board and try again.
In my work as a Facebook ads strategist, I’ve had luck with:
- Free courses
- Free webinars
- PDF checklists (that have significant amounts of items)
- Swipe files (things people can have that save them time!)
- Fun quizzes
- Web tools
#12 Your landing page sucks
There are a lot of fun and fancy landing page builders on the market. LeadPages, Instapage, OptimizePress, Clickfunnels, Beaver Builder, Thrive Themes, etc. Just because they are easy and come pre-loaded with templates, does not mean you’ll convert your ad into endless leads. So many of them just SUCK. So take some time to design a nice landing page. A couple power tips for ya:
- Try to get the whole opt-in copy above the scroll line so a passerby can get a snapshot of what you’re offering SUPER quick.
- If you need longer opt-in, don’t feel obligated to put ALL the copy above the scroll. You can place the most important text above, and then continue on.
- Test your opt-in on mobile! Many of the landing page builders will require you to create or at least modify the desktop version so it looks right.
- Create compelling and curiosity inducing bullet points.
- Make sure there is congruency between the ad graphic and copy, and what they see when they land on the landing page.
Here are some landing pages that performed quite well!
#13 You are too impatient
People in the online marketing industry love to tout their successes. Awesome..but also, not awesome. And here’s why…because so many people starting with ads think they should be able to flip on an ad and watch thousands of leads come pouring in. It doesn’t work that way!
What you’re not seeing are…
- All the other ads that didn’t perform well.
- The time it took to test the audiences.
- The research into the offer that would perform best.
When you’re working with ads, here are some things to remember. Start with a low budget threshold of $5 or $10 a day. Let them run for a solid 2 to 3 days before turning them off or up.
When it’s time to turn them up, go in small increments…so from $5-10 is a great jump. After a few days, move it up again. Remember, ads are a longterm game. So if you need to get a wide reach quickly, plan in advance so you have time to test and raise the budget incrementally.
Facebook ads is an art, not a science. Some ads will start performing right outta the gate. Others will flop. And to make it more confusing, if you take the floppy ads, tweak them, and then start a whole new campaign and try again? They might work better the next time. Sometimes it’s best to scrap the campaign and try again, even if you’re using the same type of graphics, copy, and offer.
Finally, use the Facebook Ad Revelance Score as an easy barometer. It’s a quick score between 1-10. 10 out of 10 means Facebook LOVES your ad. 1 out of 10 means you’re showing underwear ads to a nudist colony. The relevance score will show up once you’ve reached 500 people, but it’s not the FINAL number. It’ll continue to go up or down over several days.
#14 You aren’t spending enough
Let me qualify this last point. You can have an effective ad campaign with $300 or $400 bucks. Yes. However, when you read about peoples’ results with their funnels and launches, chances are….thousands of dollars a month are part of their ad budget, not hundreds. As long as your expectations of your ads match your budget, you’ll be okay.
There is a tipping point in almost every funnel. Given industry averages, you have to hit a critical threshold before a funnel starts turning a profit. Let’s do a bit of math.
If you want to make $1000 profit per month off of your ad and funnel, let’s start with industry averages. Let’s say you have a free offer, to a $10 tripwire, to a $200 upsell.
- 20% of people will opt-in and every lead costs you $2.00.
- 2% of people will buy your tripwire.
- 1% of people will buy the upsell (either off the funnel or in your email sequence).
As a beginner, you may see results like this…
- If you get 2000 leads, you will have spent $4000.00.
- 40 people buy your tripwire equalling $400.00.
- 20 people buy the upsell either in the funnel or through your email sequence equalling $4000.00.
- Your revenue is $4400.00.
- You’ve made $400.00 in profit.
With a higher budget…
- If you get 5,000 leads, you will have spent $10k.
- You’ll get $1000 on the tripwire from 100 people who buy.
- You’ll earn $10k on the upsell totalling $11k in revenue for the month if people continue to buy in the funnel and through the email sequence.
- You’ve made $1000 PROFIT per month.
So yeah…$10k a month in ad spend leads to a $1000 profit per month.
If you can tweak EITHER….the opt-in rate, the buy rate, the upsell rate, the price point of your offers, or the cost per lead, your funnel DRASTICALLY changes.
- Let’s say you raise the upsell price to $300. Now your profits look MIGHTY different. That $10k ad spend leads to $6000 a month profit. HOLY COW.
- What if you can get your lead price down to $1.50 per lead? Then your ad spend is $7500.00 a month and with your original offer, your profits are $3500 a month.
- Combine the change in lead price and the upsell? $8500 in profits per month.
- Imagine what happens if your percentage of buyers climbs beyond 1-2% up to 3, 4, or even 5% like our Healthy Habits Happy Moms client?
Listen..these are just numbers. But it illustrates my point…there is a tipping point. The more you spend, the higher your profits. So the less you spend, the less likely you are to see the true potential of your funnel.
And this example illustrates just how important it is to have a VALUE LADDER in your company. You need multiple high and low end offers, so that the funnel can supply you with leads that will continue to buy and move up the ladder.
Not sure if you have one? That’s what we’re here for. 🙂 Send us a message and we’ll pow-wow with you for 2 hours and build you an entire value ladder and create funnel plans to keep you busy for the next year (or more). Just click the contact button on the menu bar.
So there you have it. The top #14 mistakes that when fixed, will DRASTICALLY change your success with Facebook ads.
Jen says
Good lord. Where do I begin. This article stopped me in my tracks today and I’ve spent the whole day revising my Facebook game plan. Your metaphor about throwing my money into my brother’s fire is right on the money. I have been throwing money at boosts and closing my eyes hoping it works and hearing how others in my business (teacherprenuers) are having great success with FB ads and wondering what the hell I’ve been doing wrong. Pixels are no longer just something I think about in regards to dimensions. Thank you from the bottom of my wallet for this post. I really need to step up my game, and this is just the right kind of kick in the ass tutorial I needed.
Ryan Stewart says
Hi Julie,
Very interesting article. Number 14 is one of the common problems I’ve seen with people who advertise on Facebook. They’re either too thrifty to spend $$$ or they spend a lot of $$$ in the wrong way. I don’t mind spending a lot as long as I know that it will be worth it, but how would you know if it’s worth it? Simple, learn from experience and read these types of blogs once in a while. One does not simply do stuffs randomly, we need knowledge before doing it be it ad campaign or not, in order to avoid wasting time and money. I hope this blog will reach those people who are currently at lost in advertising.