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When your cost per lead suddenly jumps, it can feel like panic mode but most of the time, your ads are fixable.
- Cut your lead gen costs in HALF with my $37 mini-course–NOW only $17!
- Get 1:1 ads coaching from me – three Zoom calls with me and unlimited support in between!
I walk you through the exact step-by-step system I use to troubleshoot rising CPL so you know what to check first, what numbers matter most, and which levers to pull.
I also show you how to extend the life of ads that were once working instead of shutting them off too soon. These strategies will help you get control back so you stop wasting money and start getting leads at a healthy cost again.
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Panic. Oh my gosh, you open up Facebook and Instagram ad manager, and that wonderful lead magnet that you’ve been running and it’s been doing okay or even pretty good. Its cost per lead has crept up. And all of a sudden, what once was maybe, I don’t know, four dollars per lead is now like seven dollars per lead, and you’re like, what the heck happened? Your instinct is just to shut it off, but don’t because many ads are salvageable, you just have to know what signs to read and what buttons or levers to push or pull. And in this episode, I will give you the same step-by-step system that I use to diagnose and fix cost per lead. So here’s the context, which is important. I am assuming that you, as an online course creator who is using Facebook ads to grow their already profitable business so you can better serve people who you were destined to serve with your passions and gifts and also provide for your family, that your targeting for your Facebook and Instagram ads is already correct, and that you’re running website conversion ads, i.e., an ad with a link in it to click that goes to a landing page or opt-in page that may or may not be hosted on your website, but that definitely is not a lead form or instant form that is on the Facebook or Instagram platform. People are leaving Facebook and Instagram to opt in. And I’m assuming that your CPL, your cost per lead, was good before, but recently spiked or has recently been on the climb. And so the goal is to figure out what’s wrong and what to do for it. So we got steps one through nine in this episode. Okay, with a secret surprise along the way. Here is exactly how to troubleshoot. By the way, hi, my name’s Quayjo. I’m a Facebook and Instagram ads manager, uniquely serving, I have been serving for years now, course creators who are online, who have a lead magnet and a launch and maybe even a low-ticket offer so that they can grow their businesses and feed and take care of their families while serving the people who they were meant to serve. Now, step one, you need to before you just panic and make a change to your ad, check the trend. Compare the cost per lead to today and then to yesterday, and then to the two days prior to that, and ask yourself is this just a one-day blip or is it a three to four day trend? The rule here is that you do not want to overreact to a single day fluctuation and turn off or mess up a perfectly good ad. In this world of Facebook and Instagram ads, management, ads performance fluctuates from day to day. It may be doing well, and then boom, overnight, it blows up appear apparently, appearingly. So I don’t know what I’m trying to say, except for don’t undo your hard work or mess up your hard work because of one bad day. Establish a trend, okay, before you do anything. And also that will reduce the stress in your brain, because otherwise you might be making changes daily. And then the Facebook and Instagram algorithm, meta’s algorithm, will not like you either because you always tinkering, tinkering, tinkering. Step two, check to see if that ad set inside of your ad campaign has entered learning limited. Learning limited just means that Meta does not have enough conversion data to exit the learning phase. And so the algorithm, it’s learning on your behalf, is limited. Okay, now learning limited is not always a bad thing, just that when I see that an ad set has slipped into learning limited, I will monitor that those ads for their performance to see if it dips. If it doesn’t dip, I’ll just lit leave it there. Especially because again, the context is that the ad performance was pretty good, and I don’t want to mess with an ad that’s really good. So learning limited, it doesn’t mean the game is over, just means monitor more closely. For you, dear listener, if you see that the cost per lead is rising, though, and you see that your ad set has slipped into learning limited, you know, that orange dot, or at least right now it’s an orange dot, shows up next to the name of your ad set, then what you can do is duplicate your ad set and schedule it to relaunch the next morning, assuming that next morning is a weekday. Or you could increase the budget slightly and see if, especially because right, the cost per lead was strong previously, you could increase the budget and if you’re getting enough more leads, that influx of new data could help your ad set come out of learning limited. All right, now the next step. Look on your ad for comments. Lots of folks just don’t check comments on their ads, and negative or unanswered comments just crush trust, you know. Negative comments breed more negative comments, and those can cause your ad performance to go down, your cost per lead to go up. So if you check your comments, you can do a couple things, several, you can either respond to that comment, you can ignore that comment, or you can hide that comment, okay? Because you know, if somebody accuses you of being a scammer, you probably want to address that. Or if somebody very genuinely says, Hey, I signed up for your thing, but I did not get the freebie, you know, you want to address that too, right? Because remember, people are getting scammed and they are we’re they’re just suspicious of giving their name and email address. And email address is quite personal and they don’t want to give that online. So if you see those kind of comments, they’re gonna hurt your credibility. So answer them, okay? Even neutral comments, but that are unanswered, that hurts credibility. You want to be there and involved, and people who see the ad will notice if the creator of that ad, the owner of the course, the owner of the Instagram or Facebook account is actually responding. And look, sometimes there’s gonna be trolls, right? People hide behind the anonymity of their screen and they just get stupid. For trolls, you can either delete their ad, but then they could come back. You could just hide their ad. Then to them, you could delete their comment, is what I meant to say, or you could hide their comment. If you hide their comment, then you don’t have to argue with them. They see the ad and they still see their comment, but they’re the only one who can see their comment, which is which is quite nice, you know, because sometimes arguing with a troll or like trying to have these off-topic arguments just doesn’t matter. So hide a comment, delete a comment, or reply to a comment, depending on the situation. Step four, look at your link click-through rate. This to me is the most important metric. It’s what I look at. You can enable this column to see it in your ad manager setup. It’s called link click-through rate, Ctrl link for short, and you are hoping to have a 1% link click-through rate or above 0.75 is bad, 1% is good, above 1.25% link click-through rate is strong and even better. What a link click-through rate even means. If you see an ad and you notice that the link click-through rate is the percentage of people that see your ad that actually click on the link in your ad to go to the website and opt in. Okay, best practices here, make sure you actually have a clickable link in the ad copy. And if your link click-through rate is low, the easiest thing to do is just change up the diff the headlines. That’s the bold text on your ad that shows up next to a the blue call to action button. And by the way, if you’re not watching this on my YouTube channel right now, just click in the show notes below and you can click over to the YouTube channel because you can see a visual ad on the screen, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about as far as this next part, okay? The component, the next step five, where you troubleshoot the CTR all, the all click-through rate, right? One more thing about link click-through rate. You can swap out headlines, that’s the quickest lever to pull. You can also test new hooks. The hook would be the top one to two sentences in your ad copy. A hook in general speaks to a frustration that stems from a problem that your lead magnet or your free or paid launch or your offer that you’re attempting to sell will solve. So by changing up the hook, you are thereby speaking to a different frustration, and not all frustrations convert the same. They’re not all equal. Some convert way better than others. So it’s your job to test. Okay. And then finally, you can rewrite all the ad copy. But usually just by changing out some headlines and/or the hook, you can rejuvenate that ad and bring the cost per lead down again. Step five is well, what if the CTR all is off? The click-through rate for your ad in general is off. And all this means, by the way, is that you’re not seeing this three to run three to one ratio, whereby the all click-through rate, if you will, is three times greater than the link click-through rate. Okay. What does that mean, by the way? If someone clicks anywhere on your ad, that’s CTR all, okay. It could be clicking on that, it could be that somebody’s clicking on the little profile logo at the top left of your ad. It could be that they click on the graphic of your ad or they click on the video of your ad to play it, and then they stop playing it, right? Or they click on the like button or the heart button or the laugh button, or they click on the comment button to leave a comment, or they click on the share button to make a share, or they click that dot dot dot see more that shows up at the top of your ad, just underneath, to expand the ad copy. I would be speaking about how your ad looks in a Facebook and Instagram feed. You might see an ad as an as a reel, in which case they’re expanding at the bottom of your ad, the ad copy, you know, but that is all all of that stuff is inside or measured by CTR all. And it should be three to one ratio where the CTR all is three times higher than the CTR link. So if that ratio is healthy, move on, okay, and check your cost per mill, but as in the cost that it costs to show your ad to a thousand people on Facebook and Instagram. Check that, right? I can’t tell you what a good cost per mill is. In general, if it’s over a hundred dollars, you know,$120, it’s pretty high, but it changes for every different industry. And within every industry or every niche, it also changes per business, right? It depends on your messaging and a lot of other factors. So look at what the cost per mill should be in your ad account because you’ve been running ads and just make sure it’s not all of a sudden way high above that because maybe you were using some wrong words that the algorithm does not like. You know, you can Google lists of those kind of words. Look at the frequency, okay? Is your frequency above three? And frequency, that just means that within a certain period of time that you’re looking at your ads, somebody in the targetable audience that you’re showing the ads to, that’s how many times they have seen the ad, right? So if it’s above three, that means your ads are fatigue, are kind of going through fatigue, meaning that people have seen the ads too many times and thus are less likely to respond to the ad. And that is why your cost per lead is going up. Now, if you only have one ad inside of an ad set and you have above a three frequency, then just go ahead and add in some more ad creative and ads inside of that ad set to lower your frequency. Okay. Now, if you’re testing warm audiences or running ads to a warm audience and your frequency goes up, start showing ads to a larger or different cold audience if you’re already you know showing ads to a cold audience. My computer’s running out of disk space. I guess I’m going to have to finish this episode after I share the final tip, which is that you can troubleshoot your landing page conversion. That could be a reason that your cost per lead is too high. So remember, a healthy conversion, as in the percentage of people that visit your landing page that also opt in would be 30% or above for warm traffic, 30% or even 20%, 20 25 to 30% for cold traffic. Okay. If it’s below 20% or wait below 15%, my gosh, pause your ads first of all, and look for either a targeting mix mismatch, like you’re not targeting the right kind of people, and that way, and because of that, they’re not opting in, or maybe your opt-in page is too long, or it’s unclear, or just not highlighting the problem that your lead magnet actually solves, or maybe above the fold on that first mobile cell phone screen, it’s not in a clear way saying who it serves and the problem that it solves for them. That first screen messaging is important. You know what’s also important? Buttons that are clear that people can click on. Okay. So a rising cost per lead is not random. You can figure out why it’s rising and then pull one of those levers or one of these buttons, if you will. Push one of these buttons or pull one of these levers to begin to lower your cost per lead. Do not give up on ads that were working well and stopped working. Extend the life of those ads by following the instructions that I gave you. And if you need help step by step, like you want to see what it’s like, how to lower the cost per lead, or even the best way to test ads when you first launch them, so that you bring in a high quality client at the lowest cost per lead possible. That is my ad testing cheat code. It’s quite an affordable offer, and that is in the below. And if you’re like Quayjo, can you just already look at my ads that are running and coach me how to make them better because I need your help on these ads and don’t want to just take another course that does not have one-on-one support, well, then do coaching with me. It’s for a month. We will get on calls. Not only will I help you fix your ads or set up your very first successful lead magnet ad campaign, but I also will look at your funnel and troubleshoot it and give you ideas on how you can improve conversions within your funnel. That link is also below. Take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
