Lead costs on your Facebook and Instagram ads starting to creep up?
- Get the 48-Hour Ad Fix Audit
I share a real troubleshooting session I had with my wife after she hit a wall managing a client’s ads. Instead of changing targeting, we went back three months into the data, found the messaging that had consistently produced the lowest leads, and built new creative tests around it.
You’ll hear how looking for patterns in your winning ads—and improving the message before touching targeting—can help stabilize results and lower lead costs again.
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Please click here to give an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes! Thanks for your support!
Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:
- Get 1:1 Meta Ads Coaching from Kwadwo!
- Get Done For You Facebook Ads
- Say hi to Kwadwo on Instagram
- Subscribe to The Art of Online Business’s YouTube Channel
SPEAKER_00
So your Facebook and Instagram ad lead cost might be increasing, either spiking or gradually increasing over you know the past month or two. And no matter what you do, you cannot lower it. So in this episode, you’re going to learn from me kind of telling you what happened yesterday, at least yesterday at the time of me recording with my wife. She does manage some Facebook and Instagram ads for clients inside of the business. And she came to me with her laptop with this issue, you know, and she had exhausted her ad management strategies. She had tried a number of videos. I’ll get into it in a moment, but basically I helped her do and look at and troubleshoot things in a different way to come up with a new strategy. And you’ll learn, I promise, just from listening to what I walked through with her. And by the way, what we discovered had nothing to do with changing up ad targeting. In fact, many online course creators running their own ads try random changes instead of diagnosing what could be wrong. You know, like trying new audiences, maybe trying interest-based targeting, changing up their ad campaign structure, or pumping in more budget or even panic testing. Or they just kind of hide from their ads, like hope that everything will resolve itself. They don’t look at it. Not a good strategy. So, like these random changes, they erase ad learning and then your ad results drift, and you eventually, like a ship out at sea that has kind of drifted in a current farther and farther away, you’re not quite sure how to correct. And I’m gonna show you what I walked my wife through, and you’ll get some valuable insight from that. But first, my name is Quayjo. I handle Facebook and Instagram ads for online course creators with businesses that are already working. Really, what I do is responsible growth advertising for folks who want growth but don’t have a tolerance for risk, especially for online course creators who have businesses that are already working and like me, they are the primary provider for their households. So when my wife came to me with her laptop open asking for ad advice because nothing she had been doing had been working and the cost per lead was still increasing, the first thing I did was looked at the important metrics going back three months because I wanted to see, okay, you’ve ran all these different graphics, let’s sort them by cost per lead, since this was for a lead campaign. And then I wanted to see if I could discover any commonalities in the ads that were the winning ads. And so I looked at the lowest cost per lead ads going back three months, month by month, because success leaves clues and you gotta look for those clues, right? And here’s what I discovered, and maybe this will help you if you’re currently facing a difficulty like this with your ads. But I discovered that of the different kinds of graphics, because I believe she had tested like eight different graphics, there were two graphics specifically that no matter what optimizations she had done with the different graphics or ad copies she had combined, those ads were winning. And those two graphics had two different lines of messaging on those graphics. And so then I looked at the other graphics and I realized that the other graphics said other stuff. So I was like, huh, you got different graphics with different messages on them, and the graphics all have different images. Let’s take the two different kinds of winning messaging and combine those with the other images, right? So we get the winning messaging with different visuals and we see what rises to the top performance-wise. But she wasn’t just testing graphics, she also had started testing videos, and one thing I noticed, oh by the way, quick ninja actual practical tip. I tend to, although meta andromeda can accept videos and carousels and graphics or images inside of one ad set, I tend to be very meticulous as I label my different ads so that at a glance I know what ad copy version is in this ad, what kind of creative is in this ad. If it’s a bunch of graphics, I know the difference between the graphics instantly when I read the name of the ad, and I know if an ad is a graphic or a video, and including what headline that ad has in it. You should be doing that with your ads. It will save you so much time. And as an online creator, CEO of your business, you need to save time on managing your ads so that you can spend time elsewhere in your business that has like a high ROI, you know, like developing better webinars that convert or improving your email funnel that converts, or setting up or finding in the people to collaborate with and setting up strategic partnerships. I’m not just an ads person. If you don’t know me, I do also do business strategy. In fact, before I really managed ads as a business, I was coaching in a high-level mastermind for online course creators, troubleshooting, delivering, consulting, really, not coaching. Coaching can be so vague, right? Helping them figure out what is the best decision to make versus consulting, just showing them better decisions based on experience. That’s what I did. And so for funnels and ads and this sort of thing. So back to how I helped my wife troubleshoot the ads because I don’t want to get lost on this tangent. We also looked at the videos that she had ran on behalf of the client. And I was like, well, first let’s take that winning messaging, this overlay that we had put on the graphics and make sure that’s on the videos. It was on some of them, but not on other videos. And some videos had like the call to action show up after a moment. And I was like, well, then let’s test something different. At the very minimum, we’re going to have the winning messaging slash call to actions show up the whole entirety of each video, right? And see how that changes conversions. But then also I noticed that in the videos the client was saying something, but the client’s voice had been muted. You know, pleasant music had been placed over the video, and the focus of the video was then not what the client was saying, but the call to action, the messaging that had been placed over the video. And I thought, what is the client saying? My wife was like, She didn’t remember. Let’s see what the client was saying. So we found the unedited videos, looked at what the client was setting and it turned saying, and it turns out that the client had delivered some videos to us that were like more educational videos, kind of behind the scenes style. So I was like, well, let’s test what happens when we redo these videos in a more educational format. And so I said to my wife, we’ll have our video editor then turn on, instead of covering up the videos with pleasant music, which tends to work, let’s just go ahead and turn on the client’s voice track in the videos and edit the videos so that the best parts of what the client is saying, you know, are there and audible and put some captions on those videos and also include the winning messaging and call to action and see what was work or what would work best. And by the way, this is a normal process that I do with my copywriter. For example, after a period of time, my client’s ads have been running. I’m like, hey, we need to refresh those ads. Here, copywriter is the best or are the best two performing graphics. Once my copywriter knows what the best performing graphics were and the best performing ad copies are, then she can iterate on those. And then we usually get ads that work even better than before. You can do the same process in your business. And that’s how a professional ad manager goes about improving ads. It’s not the way that works all the time, it’s a way that can work. Understand that, like, you know, maybe the difference between me and you as you’re running your ads, and I’ve been running ads for five years, six years now, is like if we’re like archers, ads management is like archery. A beginner has like just a few arrows, you know. And if you ever watch the Avengers, I like the Avengers, but there’s this one guy, Hawkeye, I think is his name. You know, he has all those different arrows, and it’s not like he has any superpowers, he’s just like has an arrow for everything. That’s like me, a professional ads manager. You know, I have I can see what the situation requires to make ads work better, and pull out 20 different ad strategies based on my intuition and which comes from experience from managing ads. And like you might only have yourself, like, you know, which is normal starting out. I had the same thing, like maybe one or two reliable ad strategies. And even like my wife here, she might have 10 ad strategies and she exhausted them all, and I still had like 20, you know. So that’s just ads management for you. You have to use your intuition, which is developed from learning how to manage ads in different situations to still get the results you want, like learning how to read, for example, that what are the most important ad metrics? And then how do you know which combinations of certain ad metrics what you need to do? Like what the metrics are basically, what the data is basically telling you to do to change to get better results from your ad. Is it the targeting that needs to change? Is it the messaging? Messaging, is it the graphics that need to change? Should I try video? Should I change up the hooks in my ad copies? And on and on and on. If you are already running Facebook and Instagram ads in your business as an online course creator and you want to get your ads working better and have me look at them and give you an audit so that you have a clear plan, like one, two, three things that you should change up that I would change up on your behalf if I was your ads manager, but I’m not. And so that you’ll change up to get better results from your ads. If you need ads help that way so your ads can work better, then go down to the podcast show notes right below and click over to the link and get and sign up for an ad audit. Until the next time you hear from me or see me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one.
