The Life Cycle Of An Ad | 70
Unfortunately, ads don’t last forever… In fact, the average length that an ad campaign successfully brings in leads or sales is getting shorter and shorter! And to create a successful ad campaign, it’s essential to understand the process of creating an ad from start to finished. Today we’re going to dive into the 7 Phases of an Ad Lifecycle.
Phase 1: Planning - the most important part DO NOT SKIP!!
When you’re planning your ads you need to consider:
Where does the ad campaign fall in the customer journey?
What are your expectations/goals for these ads?
Is it an awareness ad, list building ad, or sales ad?
What micro-angles & pain points will really speak to your audience?
These answers will determine the images you choose, the copy of the ad, and the audiences you’re using.
You need to have a plan in place to be set up for success!
Phase 2: Creating - create the images, ad copy, the audience in this phase.
Plan to take 48 hours for this phase
Day 1 -create & complete ads, then think about what you’ve created overnight
Day 2 -come back to edit/perfect grammar, images, typos, or any mistakes.
Make sure you are using the most effective angels, hooks, images and ad copy for your target audience.
Pick out the best micro-angles from Phase 1 and use them!
Phase 3: Publishing
Create the new campaign
Do a final check to make sure the budget, audiences and ad variations are correct
Hit publish!
Phase 4: Waiting - The ads are now live & you need to be PATIENT!
The Facebook algorithm needs time to work and for the ad campaigns to stabilize.
I like to wait at least 72 hours and get at least 1000 impressions before making any changes, but this might be different depending on your budget.
Phase 5: Optimizing
Go back to your goals & expectations from Phase 1 and decide which ad variations and audiences are/are not working to make necessary changes.
Turn off any ad variations that aren’t working — this must be based on the data. By turning off underperforming ads, you’ll drive money towards variations that are working.
Phase 6: Scaling
Once you’ve optimized the ads it’s time to start scaling and doing even more of what is working to amplify your results.
Slow increasing your budget by increasing by about 20% every 3-4 days
Phase 7: Death - sometimes it's slow and other times it's quite sudden
You’ll know the campaign is started to crash when your CPM (cost per mille) starts to increase and it’s costing more to show it to 1000 people.
Once the CPM increases, your other costs will increase as well. Often your click rates begin to decrease simultaneously.
Remember: Attention spans for content have shrunk! The average ad right now that’s doing well is lasting 6-10 weeks.
When in doubt, start by refreshing the images & copy —> SERIOUSLY… do not shut everything down and start creating a new offer… REFRESH!!
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:
Jenzaia: 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.
Jenzaia: Okay, so before we hop into the episode, I just want to remind you to download my free guide to Facebook targeting audiences it has been created specifically for teacher business owners and I go through the warm look alike and cold interest based audiences that you need to have set up to be running Facebook and Instagram ads. There are checklists and brainstorming pages so that you know, you have everything. But as an exciting special, I'm opening up some audience audit calls, where you gonna hop onto a 15 minute zoom call with me and you'll get my eyes on your audiences so that you can make sure not only you have all the audiences, but they truly are perfect for your business. So head to marketscalegrow.com/audienceaudit to book your free audience audit call today. Okay, now into the episode.
Jenzaia: Hello, and welcome back to Market Scale Grow as you know, I'm your host Jenzaia. And this is a Saturday Strategy Session today we are going to be talking about the life cycle of an ad kind of like the life cycle of a butterfly, except for a no point in said lifecycle are there baby ads that are being made and continuing the cycle. But my point being is from egg or birth all the way through the cycle to unfortunate death of said butterfly and death of the ad. So there are seven different phases of the lifecycle of an ad that I want to chat about. So let's get started with phase number one, actually, let's not start with phase number one, let's get started with just I'm just going to list them all out. So you kind of have an idea in your head of where it goes. So the phases in order are planning, creating, publishing, waiting, optimizing, scaling, and then death. So let's get started with phase number one. Now, phase number one is the planning phase. And this is one that I see a lot of people skipping or glazing over, and maybe not going enough in depth in. And it is super, super important that you plan your ads. effectively. The first piece of the planning is where does it fall in your customer journey? What are the goals that you have for this? What are the expectations of that you're getting out of the ad, too often people just hit that Boost too Post Button, no idea what they're expecting no idea what's going to happen. No goals for the ad and surprise, surprise, nothing good comes of the ad. So as part of the planning, you need to know what your goals are, and where in the customer journey it's going to fall is this unawareness type ad where you're trying to get new people into your warm audience. Is this a subscribe kind of ad we're getting new people onto your email list or is this a sales ad where you're actually selling to people because that is going to change everything the images that you choose to use at the top of your funnel when people have never heard of you before your face might as well be a stock image but at the bottom of your funnel where you're selling to your hottest leads, they will likely know your face. So they'll definitely know if you're using a stock image or you're using a face assuming your face is part of your brand. So that's one difference of like the images but it also is in the copy how you're talking to people how long your copy is the angles that you're taking for the these people, all of these things change depending on where you are in the funnel, and also will change the audiences you're using at the top of the funnel, you're more likely to be targeting very broad, cold audiences. So you can draw in new people to your brand. Whereas at the very bottom of the funnel, if you don't want to use broad cold audiences that have never heard of you before, if you're selling your 997 course, that is almost certainly a disaster recipe waiting to happen, a recipe for disaster, a disaster waiting to happen, I think I just put two things together, that's fine, whatever, it's still a disaster waiting to happen.So having that plan in place, knowing where in the customer journey it is, what your expectations are, are going to help you to be set up for success from the beginning.
Jenzaia: Phase number two is creating and this is when you actually are going to sit down and you will create the images, create the ad copy, create all of the audiences that you need around it, I recommend that you set out at least 48 hours to do this, you probably will be able to get it done in like the morning or maybe full day of the first day. But then let it sit overnight, relook at your images, reread your ad copy, because it's super important that the messaging on your images and the ad copies is spot on and giving yourself that night to sleep on it. It really does wonders. It also will point out all of the typos and grammatical errors and oopsies that you made, maybe you use the wrong emoji or whatever it might be. But having fresh eyes, the next day will definitely definitely help you to be sure that this is the absolute best ad copy that you can create. And I'll talk about this in the next step too. But in a further step, I want you to reread your ad copy again, just to make sure but this creation phase is when you are going to be really taking all of that information from your planning stage and putting it into action. So what are the best angles for this audience? What are the best hooks that you can use and coming up with the different hooks like maybe five to 10 different hooks that you would use figuring out, okay, this one's just ridiculous, because when you're brainstorming, there's always going to be some that are ridiculous. So which ones are kind of ridiculous and which ones are test worthy that you can try throw out there, see what happens. Once you have your images and your ad copy created, your audiences are created. Like I said, let it sit overnight, come back to the next day, do the editing, do the revision, make sure that everything is how you want it to be.
Jenzaia: And then we move in to phase number three, which is publishing. Publishing is where you are going to set everything up in ads manager your going to actually create the ads, put the images and the ad copy in and get everything ready to go at this phase. You should also again be looking at your images just doing one final check is this the quality of image that you want, maybe you're going for that organic look. And it's super unpolished. Maybe you've created ads that really look like ads, and either one is fine. And either one will work in its own situation, you just need to figure out is this the right one for this situation, right, but just giving it that final look, reading over your ad copy one final time reading over your headlines one last time making sure that there's no typos, making sure there's no grammatical mistakes, all of those little pieces. And trust me, they happen because I have written ad copy, reviewed it the next day, sent it off to a client who's approved it made changes and edits and whatever and approved it and then I've read it again. And then I've uploaded into ads manager and then I realized, Oh, that's a typo. One example was it said live instead of life, right? So there have been four or five different instances of us already reviewing the images or the ad copy and still finding a typo after so even if you're like No, I've read it 8000 times, just read it that one last time, just make sure it will help you rest easier, then you hit publish.
Jenzaia: And as soon as you hit publish, you move into phase number four, which is the waiting period, this might be the hardest phase of all because once you hit publish, your ads will go into review, and there's nothing you can do. And then once they're live, you have to sit and wait. I mean that sit on your hands and wait, you can look at it. You can obsessively refresh if you want. But don't start making changes until at least 72 hours have gone by the campaigns can be extremely unstable in those first 72 hours with AD costs up and down and left and right and all over the place and it can take those 72 hours for the campaign to truly stabilize and for you to start seeing the actual results of you start turning off different ad variations and you start adding a new camp or new audiences and changing this and changing that. Before the 72 hours are done, then you're not giving Facebook's algorithm the time it needs to do its thing. I like to see at least 1000 impressions on an ad set before I start making any decisions. That's just a personal preference. And it really does depend on the budget. Sometimes if your budget is $5 a day, you won't get 1000 impressions for quite some time. But if the budget is $25 $50 $100, a day then that 1000 impressions will come really, really quickly. So just keep that in mind that you might want to have an impression level that you also we're looking for before you start making any decisions. Once you've gone through the hardest 72 hours of your life, you fall, you start to move in to the Optimize phase. And this is where you can start turning off campaigns that aren't working. So in phase one, during our planning phase, you would have created expectations for the campaign. And so you're going to go back to those expectations. We're going to look and see what were the ad costs that I was expecting to get what were the click through rates I was expecting to get what were the number of new subscribers I was expecting to get. And if you're not hitting those goals, you need to start looking at the individual ad variations the audiences and trying to make decisions about what is working and what is not working. And if you should be turning things off, do you need to go back to that planning and creating phase or are these doing pretty well. And you can let them go and continue for a little bit longer.
Jenzaia: When I'm optimizing, I do a couple of things. The first one is I turn off ad variations that are not working based on the key performance indicators that I set up. So I turn off ad variations that aren't working, that allows more budget to be funneled to what is working or potentially what hasn't been tested yet. There is a fine line between phase five and phase six which are optimizing and scaling respectively. And so once you start to optimize, you also will probably start to fall into the scaling side of things as you're turning off campaigns or not campaigns, but ad variations and potentially audiences that aren't working, what you're doing is scaling what is working because your budget is going to be redirected to the pieces that are working. So that helps them scale. But phase six truly is about increasing that budget substantially, or maybe not substantially, but increasing it over a couple of days over weeks over the month so that you're scaling what is working, and you are able to increase your impact and to truly grow the campaigns to be more beneficial to your business.
Jenzaia: And then the final phase phase seven is death. The sad, sad slow death of an ad campaign. Sometimes it's slow, sometimes it's not. But that's okay. What you'll start to notice is that probably the first thing is that the cost per Mill, the CPM or the cost per 1000 impressions will start to increase. And what that means is it's costing more to show it to 1000 different people, once the CPM starts to increase, all of the other costs are also going to increase and your click through rates will probably start to decrease. And so as they go down, well, again, costs continue to go up. And so as these two metrics start to falter, that's when you know that your ad is starting to die. And it's time to go back to that creating and planning phase and start the new wave of ads for this campaign. And that's totally normal. The average ad that is doing really well right now is probably lasting six to 10 weeks, two or three years ago, maybe closer to five years ago, an ad could last for six to 12 months without being touched at all like it just continued to work. But as Instagram and Tiktok have introduced these features, like stories, and reels and TikToks itself, our attention span for content has shrunk. And so if we see the same ads again and again and again, then we get fatigued really easily and we start to hide them. And so the Facebook algorithm takes this into account and says, Okay, you've been showing the same image or the same ads for six weeks, we need something new. So even if your ad should or could still be doing well, Facebook goes Nope, we need new people want new, the audience wants new, we don't want to see the same ads over and over again. So time for a refresh. And that could just mean it's time to refresh the campaign. And so you would just go back to the planning, go through the creation. And then you know, keep going with the ad and I have one client we've been running the same ads since July or say the same campaign since July. we've refreshed it I want to say four or five times we're in the middle of another refresh right now. And we just update the ad copy we update the images and we continue running it to the same audiences sometimes we put a new audience in but we just continue to run because it's continuing to work but unfortunately costs become prohibitive. And so that's how you know that the the ad campaign is coming to the end is that costs become prohibitive and that does not mean you need to make a new offer. I do not recommend And that just because the ad campaign has died slow death that you make a new offer, what it means is to refresh the images, refresh the copy and put out something new that will keep people engaged and keep them coming back to your brand. So I hope that you found this episode helpful. And that you can go in and take these seven phases and apply them to the lifecycle of your ads so you can see where they are. And just to know that ads do not last forever, and that's totally normal. So just go back, make sure you do not stop the planning that you do not skip the planning step and that will help your ads be even more successful. So thank you so much for being here with me today.
Jenzaia: I will be back next Saturday with another episode for you.
Jenzaia: Thank you so much for listening to Market Scale Grow. If you're ready to build your email list and generate consistent leads on autopilot, then we would love to partner with you. Our growth package is perfect. For course creators service riders and coaches are looking to inject their list with fresh leads so that they can amplify their amazing program and get it out to new people. This six-week package is perfect for you. If you have a proven lead magnet that you're ready to turn into an established lead generation machine. To get started today, head to marketscalegrow/worktogether fill out the application and someone from my team will be in contact with you to schedule a free strategy session to ensure that it's a good fit and to get you on the path to consistent lead generation with Team JD. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to working with you.