What to do when your ads just aren't working (A Case Study) | 43
Ever wonder what to do if your ad campaign isn’t performing well? What happens if your ad campaign suddenly crashes after doing well for weeks or months? Today, we are diving deep into an actual ad campaign that started out working great then suddenly crashed. We spent 3+ months working on getting it back up and running... here's a peek into how we did it!
For more info on this campaign, check out our September 2021 Case Studies HERE
Unfortunately, it's inevitable that there will be times when your ad campaign may not be working the way you want it to.
It’s important to have a process you follow when things aren’t going as planned as well as a plan for when things are going well.
When things aren’t going well…
1. Look at the data and figure out what isn’t working.
Making data-driven decisions is essential to successful marketing. It can take time and patience to see results, but if you set expectations before starting then you will have a clear picture of what success looks like.
2. Lower the budget and/or pause the campaign while you make adjustments (but don’t just give up and move on).
Give yourself permission to take what feels like a step back. Especially if the campaign was doing well, it can be a hit to your confidence when the ad tanks, but lowering your budget or temporarily pausing the ad campaign will give to the time and space to make adjustments.
It is significantly more work to start over with a new offer from scratch, so don’t give up and move on… look at the data and make adjustments first!
3. Focus on improving the messaging first.
9 times out of 10, when a campaign tanks it is the messaging that is off. Okay, I made that stat up… but seriously, messaging is the culprit more often than not.
It’s important to do regular market research to keep your ad angles, sales page copy and messaging on point. Use their words and dig deep… like really really deep!
4. If you’ve updated the messaging 3-5 times and still not seeing success, it may be time to revamp the offer.
An offer that is not enticing could be the issue… however, I don’t suggest repackaging or revamping the offer as a first step because it can be time-consuming and unnecessary when the messaging is the true problem. But if you’ve updated the messaging 3-5 times and are still not seeing success then look at your offer and see how you can improve it.
When things ARE going well… If your ads ARE working, then slowly scale the budget up by about 20% every 4-5 days. Increasing the budget any quicker may shock the ad campaign and cause it to crash.
Check out the September 2021 Case Studies HERE
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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. Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest-based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie. Head to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.
Hello and welcome back to Market Scale Grow as you know, I'm Jenzaia and this is a Saturday strategy session. Today, we're going to be doing a little bit of a different episode. I have a client, a lovely, lovely client, Marissa, and her business partner, Jordan from The Nourishment Haven, and they have been running a slow funnel. So that's a self-liquidating offer. They've been running this campaign since the end of February, so it's been a good six months at this point. It has been an up and down road, so in today's episode, we're actually going to take a bit of a deep dive into this campaign, and we're going to talk about what to do in the highs and the lows of an ad campaign.
So before I really dive into the campaign, every quarter I release a case study of ads that I've run in the past quarter. There are three to five different ads, I talk about what our goals were, and the successes of those campaigns. I also in Q2, in quarter two's episode, I added in my top tips. Then this one for Q3 has those ad examples, it has the top tips, but it also has a deep dive into this slow funnel that Marissa and Jordan are running. So if you want access to that head to marketscalegrow.com/casestudies and you'll be able to download it. You'll just have to put your name and email address in to grab it.
Okay. So a self-liquidating offer is one of those $27 and $37 products where it's super enticing and you click on the ad and you go straight to the sales page to buy something. In this case, it's a $27 self-care toolkit. It's really awesome. I'll have the link in the show notes for you, so that if you are interested to see what the sales page looks like and everything, then you totally can go check out the setup of it and all of that if that's something that interests you. So in this case, it's a $27 toolkit that we're running. Like I said, we started it back in February.
Now the goal for a slow funnel is for it to break even. Slow funnels are a type of lead generation, which means you're trying to build your email list. While they are an advanced technique, they are awesome because number one, it's people who are buying from you already, and that's like a micro-commitment. The more micro-commitments people make, the more likely they are to buy your bigger product. So they buy this $27 thing like, "oh, well I already bought something from her so I can buy something else." The second reason that it's awesome is yes, you are paying ad spend to get people to see this. But because they're buying from you, those sales are balancing out the ad spend. So your goal for these campaigns is really to break even. You spend a dollar on the ads and you make a dollar. In this case, we spend $27 on the ads and we make $27, so we're breaking even is the goal.
When we first started this campaign back in February, we were breaking even, and we continue to break even through March. Then at the end of March, beginning of April, something happened. It probably was one of the tweaks we were making because we were trying to just increase that conversion just as much as we could, like, "Okay, we're breaking even. Well, let's do a little bit better." So Marissa was continuing to make changes, small, small, small changes to the landing page to try and increase the conversions. Well, something worked well because suddenly we were doubling or tripling our ad spend, and that was insane. Like these toolkits were selling like hotcakes for three weeks straight.
When a campaign is doing really well, the first thing that you should do is start scaling. Especially for something like a slow funnel where you're doubling and tripling your money when your expectation is to break even. Now, I don't suggest that if you're running it for $50 a day, you shouldn't just jump to a hundred or $200. You need to make small incremental increases in your budget. I personally increase the budget by about 20% every three to four days. So we started at $50 and then three or four days later, we would increase it to $60, and then three or four days later, we increase it to $70, and then three or four days later... We just kind of are building up the ad spend to continue to grow and to scale. So that is my biggest tip for you when things are going well is to be scaling it. If something is doing well and you can afford to add more money to it, then increase your budget.
But then, after about three weeks, it just crashed and burned. Now, this was about a week before the iOS changes. I was expecting the iOS changes to cause this kind of catastrophe. Everyone was expecting the iOS changes to cause this kind of catastrophe, but for whatever reason for us, it happened the week before iOS changes. So I'm going to go through the whole life cycle of this campaign, and then I'll get into more strategically exactly what we did and what you can do if you're in this situation.
So it crashed and burned two and a half, three weeks into April. Then for the rest of April and May, June, and the first week or so of July, we were working our butts off to do whatever we could to get the campaign back and running again. Changing the landing page, like the sales page, we were updating the copy, we were updating the messaging, we were updating the buttons, we were updating the images, the layout, everything that we could think of, we were updating. Now we did look at the data, which is one of the steps I'm going to talk about, and we knew that the ads themselves were doing well. So we didn't change or touch anything with the ads. We left the same images, we left the same copy, the same audiences, everything. We just left that to go because it was doing well.
We realized that it was the sales page that was the biggest issue. So that's where we were focusing our time and our energy is updating the messaging, updating everything there. After three months, three months of really trying to work on this campaign and just having literally zero success, we shut them off. Marissa was tired. I was tired. It was exhausting. But it was a pause, because one of my mentors that I have religiously followed for almost a year now, she says all the time, "Marketing always works. It's just a matter of when." So while we were exhausted and ready to be done with it, we knew that this offer had potential. It had sold really well in March and April, and we just hadn't been able to figure out the marketing, figure out the pain points that people were really identifying with at that time.
So we took a pause, and I just want you to know that's okay, but don't give up. It is so much more work to create a new offer from scratch than it is to work on the messaging, work on the pain points, work on the struggles, and to really find what resonates with your audience if you believe in your product, and we truly, truly believed in the self-care toolkit. So it was worth it for us to continue working at it and to continue to push and figure it out. Now that doesn't mean you can't give up on a product. That doesn't mean that sometimes you have to admit, "Okay, this was terrible." But if you've had crazy, awesome success, as we had seen, then you know that it is a valuable product that people want and people need. Those are the situations where it's worth it to put the time and energy into figuring out what isn't working and making it work. But we took a break.
Then in the middle of August, we made some more tweaks and more changes and turned the ads back on. One of the tweaks and changes that we actually made before turning them back on in August is a revamp of the product itself. So it's still a self-care toolkit, but it now includes some different pieces and different types of content. So before there was a lot of printables and that kind of thing, calendars, a bullet journal, things that you need to print off and then you could write in. So what they did, Jordan and Marissa is they changed the content type. They included different pieces of content, like audio files, videos, calculators and planners, calendar kind of pieces, instead of it all just being printables. So there's a lot of value in saying, "Okay, we're going to revamp and improve the product", but it definitely shouldn't be your first step, and we're going to talk about this in one second.
Since we turned it back in August, it's been running for about four, by the time you hear this, it'll be about six weeks, at the time of recording though it's the middle of September still. So it's been running for about four weeks and we are breaking even again, which is such a good feeling. It's very rewarding to be running something that is breaking even, that is supposed to be breaking even, so we are hitting the benchmarks that we are looking for.
So what can you do when your ads are bombing, when they're tanking? The first thing I really, really encourage you to do is look at your numbers, look at your data. In the case of the slow funnel, we had the ads that we were running, we had the sales page, and then we had the checkout page. We wanted to see at each of those three steps, were the clients, were the customers doing what we wanted? So at the ad level, were people clicking on the ad to go to the sales page? What was the cost to get somebody onto the sales page?
What we found is that the click rate had remained stable. The cost per click had remained stable. So our ads had actually continued performing well throughout all of this. So we didn't touch them. We left them alone because they were doing well. We found that the sales page people had stopped clicking to the checkout. Then we had also found that there has been a slight decrease in the conversion rate of the checkout page, but we're not sure if that was just because there was a lot, like a lot fewer people seeing the checkout page or something else. So step number one is to look at the data and then find the leakiest hole. In our case, the leakiest hole was the sales page. That's why we focused all of our time and energy and efforts on updating the sales page.
Tip number two, or step number two, strategy number two, is to be okay with pulling your budget back or pausing, but don't give up indefinitely. So like I said, when things were going well, we were scaling the ads up. We were adding budget, we were increasing it. But when they started to tank and especially when we knew that this wasn't just a little bump, that this was, "Okay, something big is happening", I pulled the ad spend budget back. So we were still putting in a good amount that we should be getting a couple of sales a day, but we weren't. But it wasn't spending that huge, huge amount that I had been previously, which gave us some more time to test and figure out what was wrong and to update that messaging to get it right. Then, as I told you already, in July, we needed a break, and so we turned it off. We paused it with the intention of coming back when we had had a bit of a break and our heads were clear again. So give yourself permission to turn it off and to take a break, and also to lower that budget back down so that you're not just bleeding money.
Number three is to work on your messaging first. One of the biggest problems that I see across the board is people are not zoned in enough with their messaging. You think that you've gone deep, but it's just a little bit too surface. So ask yourself why and then why again and why again, and funnily enough, Marissa and I spent an hour, maybe two hours on Voxer and I was acting like a six-year-old. I told her before I started, like, "Sorry, I'm going to be really annoying, but why? Okay. But yeah, but why? Okay but really, like, why? Why is important? Why would I be like laying awake at night, thinking about this?" And I am her ideal client, so I have a really good ability to say, "Yeah, that resonates with me" or "no way." There was a couple of times I was like, "I wouldn't be laying in bed thinking I need to print out that bullet journal. My life just won't be complete without it."
So if you need somebody to bounce ideas off, get them to just ask you why and to dig deeper until something truly, truly is going to resonate with your ideal client. Focus on that messaging, do that "why" game, go into Facebook groups and see what people are saying. Poll your audience. Send out a survey to your email list and just use their words and use their information to really help you zero in on what they truly need from you.
Then my final tip is if you have done those updates to your messaging, and each time you update your messaging, go back to the data and see what it says. Then follow the data, make those changes, make those updates, and then go back to the data. Then follow the data... And go through that cycle three to five times. If you're still failing, like we were, if things are still not coming together, then look at your offer. Can you make it more enticing? Can you package it differently? What can you do to improve the offer? But don't start there. Especially not, if like Marissa, it was selling well before. You don't want to restart from scratch if it is a messaging problem, and so often, more often than not, it is a messaging problem.
So just a quick recap of the four things that I want you to do if your ad is tanking, if your campaign is tanking, because this is really a holistic look at the campaign, it's not just the ads. Step one is to look at the data and find the leakiest hole to patch up. Two, give yourself permission to decrease your ad spend and temporarily pause the ads while you regroup, make the changes. If you do that, this is a pro-tip- if you turn your ads off at any point, don't just turn them back on, duplicate the campaign. Facebook has a thing where duplicating is a better option. Number three, work on your messaging. First, update it three to five times. Use your ICA's words directly from wherever you can get them. Four, as a last resort, look at your offer and see how you can make it more enticing.
I hope that this was really helpful. If you want more information about the self-care toolkit and the campaign that I've been running with Marissa and Jordan definitely had to marketscalegrowth.com/casestudies. Download the September 2021 version so that you can read all about everything that happened in more detail. Thank you so much for being here with me. I will be back in your ear next Saturday with some more strategy.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado, my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado. For 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.