3 Tips If Your Facebook Ads are Not Working | 114

So, your Facebook Ads are not working 😫. You’re not seeing the conversions you’d expect, or you’re in the negatives as far as profit goes. The truth is, this is COMPLETELY normal, especially at first. Unfortunately, we’ve been led to believe that if you set up an ad, you are guaranteed to see success, like RIGHT AWAY.

While most of my clients have seen tremendous success with Facebook Ads, that’s not always the case. That’s why this week, I am going to clear the air. What should you do if your Facebook Ads are not working?

Set Yourself Up For Success

Before running Facebook ads, you need to determine what success looks like for you and your specific goals.  

If you’ve run Facebook Ads before, use your historical data to determine what success is. If you typically see a certain conversion rate or rate per lead, use that information to see how well your newest ad is performing.

For those who haven’t run Facebook Ads before, I’ll give you a few general metrics to think about:

• If you target teachers in the classroom, you’ll likely spend $1-$1.50 per lead

• If you target teacher business owners, you’ll likely spend $2.50 - $3 per lead

• If you target business owners outside the teacherpreneur space, you could even spend up to $5 per lead

These general metrics can help you determine, at least initially, if your ads are working or not.

What to Do When Your Facebook Ads are not Working

#1 Try to Determine the Problem

You’ll want to start by analyzing your data to determine why your Facebook Ads are not working. For example, you might notice a really low click rate on the actual ad itself. That means something about the ad is not attracting people because most viewers aren’t even making it to the landing page or site.

However, if you’re getting lots of clicks on the ad but then not seeing a lot of sales or interactions with the landing page - you need to look at what is not converting with the site you are sending leads to.

#2 Change One Thing at a Time

For most of my clients, I recommend only changing one thing on the ad at a time and then running another test run. If you change too many items at once, and it still doesn’t work, then it’s hard to determine exactly where the problem is.

You might change the hook, image, or body copy. Then, run the ad again and reflect on the data. If you’re not seeing improvements, continue to make small changes until the ad does show improved metrics.

#3 Completely Overhaul the Ad

If you continue to make changes, but your Facebook ad is still not working, then it’s time for an overhaul. I suggest working on the messaging first… dig deeper.  Is there an angle you haven’t used yet?  Are you speaking directly to your audience?  Are you evoking emotions?

Are your Facebook Ads not working? Let’s meet for a 1:1 strategy session, and I’ll help you create a Facebook Ads strategy and work out the issues with your underperforming ads.

Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!

xo, Jenzaia 

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Episode Transcript:

Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.

Hello and welcome back. I'm your host Jenzaia and this is a Saturday strategy session. Today, I have a spicy one for you. We are talking about failure in marketing and failure with Facebook ads. This is a case study, so I'm gonna be actually talking about results that I got with some clients that I was working with a couple months ago. It was frustrating!

So before we dive into the details, I just wanna remind you that marketing is not always going to work immediately. It takes time, patience and a huge amount of effort. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it takes longer, sometimes, ugh, I don't even know. It can be so, so confusing, frustrating, and overwhelming when it doesn't work.

And it will take more work sometimes to get there. We don't always talk about this, but your patience and your consistency will pay off if you're having difficulties with some of your marketing. So the first thing that's really, really important is before you even start running any Facebook ads, you have some sort of an idea of what success will look like.

Whether you've run Facebook ads or not, it is possible to have an idea of what success will look like before you even start. If you've run ads before, then you can look at that historic data to give you a bit of an idea. If you've never ran ads before, I want you to use industry standards, and I will give you some metrics to think about specifically because lead generation campaigns are my absolute favorite.

We're gonna talk about growing your email list when we're talking about this, and then I'll also throw in just a couple other pieces, but specifically for lead generation. If you are targeting your ads towards teachers who are still in the classroom, who are going to be using your resources or joining your membership, you'll likely be able to get leads for a dollar. A dollar fifty would be pretty expensive in my experience. 

Most of my clients running ads to grow their email lists are getting leads for less than a dollar. That is kind of the benchmark that you can go into knowing that if you are targeting teachers who are still in the classroom, you should be able to get them on your list for less than a dollar per person.

If you were targeting business owners or entrepreneurs in the teaching space, it's likely gonna cost you closer to two or three dollars to get them onto your email list. And if you are targeting business owners outside of the teaching space, it could be anywhere up to $5. With that in mind, when you are growing your email list, you have a bit of an idea of what your success should look like. Now there are other metrics that you can look at, but I'm not gonna go into them in this episode right now because I don't wanna overcomplicate things. 

And if you're hitting that target, everything else is amazing and you don't need to worry about anything else. Now if you're running product ads, your goal is likely gonna be to be making a profit and getting a return on your ad spend.

And so you're looking at two to three times what you're spending. So if you spend a hundred dollars on your ads, you wanna make two to three hundred dollars in sales. But not if this is a trip wire. A trip wire would be, they sign up for that lead on the front end and then on the back end, instead of a thank you page, you're selling them something.

You're probably not gonna make double or triple your money for those, but if you're directly sending people to a product, I like to shoot for double or triple your ad spend in revenue back. So you spend a hundred dollars, you make two to three hundred dollars. It's kind of a good place to at least start. 

Some people are going to have more success in that. Some people will struggle to have that much success and it's all fine. Again, these are just very, very, very basic. Because I want you to go into the campaign with something in your mind so that you can say, okay, I think that this was successful based on that, or, I don't think it's successful based on that.

Now, it wasn’t working for these people. Our goal was to sell a product. We were directing people to a landing page, so the goal was to get people to the landing page and then they would purchase off of the landing page. This is a product that this company has sold tens of thousands of times, so it is very well proven.

They know people love it. There's tons and tons of testimonials. People use it in the classroom and absolutely love this product. We knew that the product would sell, so when the ads weren't working, we knew that the product wasn't the problem. And part of it was that in this particular case, people weren't even getting to the landing page.

The ads were not doing their job. And so that brings us to the first step. If you are not getting the results that you're looking for, the very first step is to look at the data and try to determine the problem. So in this case, we didn't have the return on ad spend that we were looking for. So we had to back up and say, okay, are the ads doing their job? Is the landing page doing its job? 

I didn't even get to the landing page in this case though, because the ads were very clearly not doing their job. The clickthrough rate was garbage. People weren't even stopping their scroll. And then if they did stop their scroll, they were not clicking on the link, which meant that we had a lot of problems.

We realized that the images were a problem, the headline was probably a problem, and the ad copy was also potentially a problem. And so we started with the headlines and the hooks of the ad copy. We didn't change the entire body of the ad copy, but just that very first line or two that they actually see before clicking “read more”. So we updated those first. Sometimes you are going to wanna do just one thing at a time. Update it and then see how that goes and update it again and see how that goes. Other times, like this one, you're gonna update multiple things at once.

The reason why we chose to do the hook and the headlines is because of what an utter flop the campaign was. To be completely honest, I would've also changed the images at the same time. But I had sent them back to my graphic designer to get them redone, and I hadn't received the updated graphics yet. So we changed the hook and the headlines first.

When you're making these changes, I highly recommend that you do your best to fix the biggest problem first. In this case, nobody was getting to the landing page, so we didn't even know if the landing page was a problem or not. We just knew that the ads weren't getting traffic there, and so that's the biggest problem because we couldn't see if the rest of it was a problem.

But if you are getting people to the landing page and you can see the ads are doing an all right job, but the landing page is just getting zero conversions, then you can start with the landing page. So start with the biggest problem or start from the top and work your way down. And that's the way that we were doing it. 

We started with the top - the ads are the top of the funnel. And then we worked our way through. So after we changed the hook in the headlines, we ran some more tests. The test did not really give us any good information, except for what we were using still sucked! This is the point where we got pretty frustrated. 

People hear about spending a thousand dollars on ads and then making ten thousand dollars. But those people who are doing that don't often talk about the last time they ran ads and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that. Like, they spent a thousand dollars and made two thousand dollars, or spent a thousand dollars and made five hundred dollars.

They don't talk about the losses and they don't talk about the mediocre success. They talk about the amazing results. So it's really frustrating because you sometimes will feel like this is only happening to you and it absolutely is not. I just don't want you to feel like you have to give up if things aren't working immediately.

The clients had brought up an option to switch out the product for a different one in the same line. And we definitely could have done that. But I hesitated a little bit because I really wanted to figure out if we could make the marketing work for the one that we had initially selected. Because like I said, it had sold tens of thousands of times, so we knew the product wasn't an issue. We just had to find the right messaging, the right targeting. 

Once you've run that second set of tests, you can look at the numbers again and make more adjustments. So at this time, there was one headline that was doing decently. There was a version of ad copy that was doing all right. And usually I like to have a couple different versions of ad copy in a couple different images, but at least we had the one that was doing all right. And so by that point, I got the images back from the graphic designer and we could use the all right ad copy to test the images. That way we know, is it the image? There's no other variable. The only thing we're changing is the image, and we knew that this ad copy was all right. Then we ran more tests. We looked at the data and made some adjustments. 

Now, because we were still struggling at this point, it was time to check something completely different. So we directed our attention at the messaging and the overall ad copy. So if you remember before we had changed the headline and the hook, but we hadn't really touched the body of the messaging or the ad copy at this point. And so that's where we focused our energy. 

The product that we were talking about had a very specific name that would be recognizable to the client's customer base. But because we were running Facebook ads, I was wondering if maybe the name of the product line had something to do with the lack of success. And so this was a digital product that we were promoting with print and everything, but primarily a digital product. So in the next round we actually completely stripped the ad copy of the name, and we focused on the digital aspect and increasing the use of the digital products in your classroom.

Instead of leaning on that brand and name recognition, we got rid of that to see if that would help. And finally, FINALLY things actually started to work! So I can't definitely say for sure because one of the versions of the ad copy that we used did still contain the name of the product in it, and it was doing really, really well. But the headline, we had gotten rid of it. 

When someone is scrolling the newsfeed on Facebook specifically, the image is what's going to stop their scroll. But they'll read the headline first and then examine the image in greater detail to decide if they're going to read the caption or not.

So by stripping the product name and focusing on that digital aspect of the product in the headline, that probably made a difference. And then also once they were reading the ad copy, we were evoking the emotion of making digital easier and engaging your students with this digital activity. 

I think a lot of teachers, even after the last couple of years, still feel very overwhelmed by bringing digital into their classroom. And so with this product, we really focused on that “make your life easier” aspect. And I think that really worked. 

The package that this client was on typically takes about six weeks. It's the Facebook Ads Sprint. There's a couple weeks at the beginning where it's all of the setup and onboarding. And then there's typically four weeks of the ad campaign. The first week is testing, and then there's three additional weeks to optimize the audiences. 

In this case, because the testing went like this, it was like six or seven different attempts before we found enough different elements that we could start to actually run “the real ads”. I'm putting it in quotations because the testing ads are real ads. But before we could get into that optimization phase where we're really looking more at the audiences and less at the ad creative, so the images and copy. It took close to two and a half weeks to make this happen. So we actually extended the package because we wouldn't have had time to optimize the audiences, and I've never had that happen.

So this was a bit of an anomaly, but it's just such a great example of how perseverance can really help and really make a large impact. Once we had got the ads figured out, we were actually getting a decent amount of traffic to the landing page, and then at that point, the clients were able to look at the landing page data and information about the sales to start making decisions about how the landing page was.

In the Facebook ads sprint, that's not something that I support with, but with my ongoing ads manager clients, when we're doing longer term ads, it's definitely something that I support with. So looking at the landing page, seeing how it's converting, and really supporting if that next step was needed.

But like I said before, we had started at the top and worked our way down. So now that the ads were figured out, we could have moved on to that next step of the landing page. Is the landing page converting or not? And if we weren't, then we would've gone through this exact same process again; looking at the numbers, looking at the data, making adjustments, running a bit more tests, making changes, adjustments, more tests.

So it's all a process! It will eventually work if you have enough perseverance. If you are struggling with this, reach out to me. I will support where I can. I love digging into these. And this is actually a really great question or problem to bring to a strategy session. So again, if you are struggling with something like this, feel free to reach out, book a strategy session and just remember that it does work and it will get easier!

As you find something that is working, you can continue to use that. So find an image that works? Okay, we're gonna keep using that image. Find ad copy that works? Okay, we can keep using that ad copy. 

So it does get a little bit easier as you keep going and I know you got this! So as always, thank you so much for being a part of this journey and being here with me. I will be back next Saturday with another strategy session. I can't wait to see you then!

Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!