Show Notes:
Are you at the point where you’re starting to doubt your offer because your ads aren’t converting or creating that necessary impact in your business that you’ve been expecting?
Welcome to the second installment of this two-part mini-series where we’re diagnosing which of these two aren’t really working out: is your offer or your ads the real issue?
In the last episode we dissected if your offer was the culprit to a non-profitable funnel. In this episode I want you to be able to diagnose if your traffic is the reason your funnel isn’t converting.
From your cost-per-click to your messaging to your targeting, not getting these right can absolutely have your campaign suffering. This could result in attracting the wrong people or not getting enough people to your funnel.
Analyzing your data, diagnose the issue, and follow my tips for fixing this today.
Share-worthy Quotes:
“You need data in order to know if your ads are working or not!”
“Always look at your profitability, make sure it’s working for you.”
“If your messaging and creatives are off, you’ll see it in your cost per click and click through rates.”
Get the Transcript here:
Episode 8 – Part 2: Is your Offer or Ads the Issue?
Ho-ho-ho, everybody! Welcome back to the Ad Agency Secrets Podcast. We went over in the last episode part one- Is your offer or ads the issue? And I got an amazing response. And so I’m excited to dive into part two here of “Is your offer or ads the issue?”
So, in the last episode, we dove into your offer. If your offer was the issue in diagnosing that. And giving you some tangibles to start implementing, to make sure that you’re offering rock solid. Now dive into ads, right? So are your ads that you sort of you’ve run as to this offer or to possible other offers. And you said to yourself, “Man, you know, my ads are not working or you’re starting to have doubts about your offer because, you know, ads can do that to a person.”
They make you start doubting everything, you know? Well, my friend, hopefully, you listened to the last episode to help you determine that your offer is not the bottleneck. Or you determined it was, and you fixed all the issues based on the recommendations that I provided. So now that we know it’s not the offer, we’re going to dive into your ads and see if that is the issue.
All right. In a previous episode, we slightly went over some KPI metrics to look for, with your ads, to determine where to find the bottlenecks and how to fix them, which we will go in. The detail even more in a future episode, but now we’re going to dig deeper into why the issue might possibly lie with your paid advertising and not your offer.
So the first thing I want you guys to look at is your clicks. Are you getting enough clicks and views to your offer? So if you’ve had only 30 people view your page, that’s not enough data to say it’s the offer. You need more traffic. That’s important to know because again, you could feel that it’s your offer because you’ve run some traffic. You spent $20, $30, and maybe even $50 and nothing has happened.
You might feel it’s your offer. But in reality, it’s not, in reality. We like to see so many clicks to a page before determining if the offer isn’t converting. So for example, for a landing page, we might want to see. 50 to 50 to 60 clicks happening there just to see are people opting in for a webinar.
If you want to see if your webinar’s converting, we’d like to see roughly 150 to 200 webinar views before determining if the webinar itself is converting or not, right? So getting enough traffic to your actual page to see if it’s working is key. You’re not going to get a very good metric. If you had 10 or 20 people there, it’s not enough of a number to really make a big decision on.
Right. That’s why they do studies and surveys where they have a ton of people and not just a small little handful. You need enough people, you need enough data. So let’s dive into why you might not be getting enough clicks or views to your offer. So it could be just because you haven’t spent enough money on ads yet. Right?
Like I said, you might’ve spent 20 bucks. You see no opt-ins or sales, you automatically think the ads are the problem. You need data in order to know if your ads are working or not. And $20 is not going to give you that much data to review, right? So think of it this way. When you, when you start a new workout routine, do you make a decision on day two?
If it’s working for you or do you need more data before making that decision? Maybe 7 days, 14 days so that you can see if, if you’ve lost weight or if you’ve lost any inches or how is your energy level. That’s all data that you need in order to make an informative decision. All right. So another reason might be your CPC, your cost per click.
It might be super expensive. So that means it’s costing you a lot to go to click to your page, which means a less clicks for the same amount of money. So, for example, you could have spent a hundred dollars with a CPC cost per click of $10. And that means a hundred dollars with a CBC of $10. You only had 10 clicks, 10 clicks, that’s it for a hundred bucks at 10 people click your ad.
And maybe 8 of them actually ended on the actual page because not everybody lands on the page. Eight people is not going to give you enough data to know if it’s your offer or not. And unfortunately, that kind of stinks, right? A hundred bucks. Now, if your cost per click was $3, much better. By the way, then out of a hundred dollars, you would have had 33 clicks. 33, much better data to at least start with, again. The more data you have, the better decisions you can make. Right.
And remember we mentioned in a previous episode, if your cost per click is high, that means you need to increase your click-through rates because are probably too low right now. It also means your CPM is probably high, which means you may need to adjust your targeting to get your CPM lower.
Both of those affect your cost per click. That’s how you can get that lower. But again, that’s kind of in a different episode. So your messaging and creative is the next one. This is a huge one. Your messaging and creative. Could be off and not really identifying with your ideal client, which could be why your cost per click is high, right?
Less people are clicking. If your messaging and creatives are off, you will see it in your cost per click and your clicks, your click through rates. And we talked about these in phase five of the GPS method, optimizing scale. You want your cost per click as low as possible, costing you less per click to your landing page and your click-through rate as high as possible.
More people are clicking through to your landing page. Those are important. Messaging and creatives are two of the most important aspects of your ads. This is what is going to attract them to you. Okay. And your brand, and eventually to your offerings, they are what derived people to stop and read and click-through to your offer.
So if you can’t get people to do that, they will never even get to see your amazing offer that they’ll never get to see it. We’ve had clients who have killer offers and come to us saying that they’re offered doesn’t convert any help. When in reality, after we do an internal audit on their ad account, we can want a hundred percent tell that the ads are the problem based on the data.
And they just didn’t get enough people to their page or, you know, or not based on the profitability that they want. Right. We spend tons of time internally at the agency. Creating multiple images and copy to test because that’s the quickest way to find winners and be able to scale. So in the end, messaging and creative that are not hitting, the mark will result in less clicks and higher costs, which means less people to your page.
You will see that in the numbers, in your ads, it just follows the data. Like I always say, so targeting is next. Knowing your ideal avatar and their interests and behaviors. We’ll help you narrow in, on your targeting. So targeting is probably where a lot of people always kind of pinpoint. They come to us and they’re like, my targeting is off, or I worked with an agency and the targeting was horrible. Or they’ll even come to us and say, “Hey, it doesn’t seem like the targeting isn’t working.”
When in reality, that may not be the problem. Okay. So, and I’ll talk about that in a second. So getting in front of the right audience is super important, and obviously, that’s why we’re talking about it here. And the reason why I say targeting is important. It is, but I want you guys to understand that your messaging is way more important.
And this is where I’m saying like, they’ll go. They’ll say, “Hey, my agency, or you guys, or whoever targeting’s out working. But your message is more important.” So when you put the two side by side, right? So if you are, let’s say in front of your ideal audience, you put an ad out in front of them and it’s the right targeting.
What is going to have them click your ad and take up on the offer your messaging. You can get in front of your ideal audience all day long, but if your messaging isn’t on point, they won’t click. And then you’re thinking, man, I’m not in front of my ideal audience. We have other people clicking people who aren’t ideal.
Those are the people that are clicking my ad. Your audience is going to attract your ideal client base. So, your messaging is going to attract your ideal client based on what it says. Are you speaking to them? Are you attracting them? Are you repelling? The non-ideal clients, so that you really are just bringing in only the right people into your funnel.
So you can funnel them down to your paid program. Right? So targeting is important, but again, it doesn’t matter if your messaging isn’t on point. And I just want to make sure I said that because a lot of people put way more emphasis on the targeting and targeting is super important, but if your messaging is an appoint, it doesn’t matter how good your targeting is.
Your messaging has got to be in point. Now going back to targeting. If you’re going after, let’s say a very competitive audience that could mean it will cost you more to get in front of them or let’s, you haven’t really narrowed down enough on your targeting. I mean, you know, you’re kind of broad, but that could mean you’re getting in front of a ton of non-ideal clients and you’re paying for that.
So for example, if you are targeting people interested in building a business online, that’s your ideal avatar? Now that was, that wasn’t a very descriptive idle avatar. So I was very, it was very high level there. But let’s just say they’re interested in trying to build an online business, but going after someone like Gary Vaynerchuk and that’s all you have in your targeting. That’s it, it’s a bit broad and Gary’s pretty competitive.
A lot of people are trying to target him. So if you target Gary V and you narrow it down by Facebook page admins, and then you narrow it down by those who have specified that they’re interested in entrepreneurship. And let’s say you narrow it down again by those who have purchase behavior. They’ve shown that they’ve purchased something in the last 20 days.
Now you’ve narrowed it down, right? There are four, four levels. It might be narrowed down a bit too much. And really honestly, probably that, that example didn’t really narrow it down very well. To be honest with you, but it’s probably narrowed down a bit too much, so the audience will be small and therefore your CPM could potentially be higher.
And we just talked about for CPM is high. Your cost per click, which is your cost per your, um, your cost per click will be higher. So fine, right? Targeting setup and testing, which ones are converting best is powerful to do at the beginning stages. And honestly, should be something you’re doing all the time in a testing campaign.
If you ever think I found my audiences and this is it, you are doomed. So always be testing more audiences and always be testing new creatives in a testing campaign. So that. If what you were running that was working really well decided to stop working so well. You’ve got backups ready to go, that you already know convert.
All right. So that was it guys. That was a really quick one. I just want to recap real quick. I, I, we talked about, you know, not spending enough money on your ad. So if you’re not spending enough on your ads, then you know, you can’t really determine that if it’s your offer at that point. It’s your ads, which could be because your cost per click is super expensive.
It could be because you have poor messaging and creatives that just aren’t hitting the Mark with your ideal clients. And it could be because of poor targeting, that’s costing you more to get in front of them. These are key areas that could be the reason why your ads are the issue. And you think it’s your offer.
And it’s really not. You’re spending money. You’re just not seeing the results because of the ads. It’s not your offer. Right. Again, you can see these in your numbers are crystal clear by looking at your numbers, keeping in mind, some audiences will cost more to get in front of them. And sometimes paying more for a lead means you really honed in on your ideal audience.
And so they just, they just cost more. And that’s fine because remember profitability is more important than your lead costs. So at the end of the day, if your, if your CPC is a little bit higher, but you’re able to convert these people, you know, your then makes your lead cost high, but you’re able to convert to a sale and you’re profitability is, you know, two or three x return on ad spend. You’re getting put in the dollar in and getting two or $3 out. Then you’re not doing too shabby, right? Then you don’t. I always tell everyone, right. You don’t fix it. If it’s not broken. If your profitability is there and you’re good, then that’s great.
Always make it better. Always, always try to aim for better numbers, but I don’t want you to say it’s not working if you’re like, “Oh man, my cost per click is $5. And Jessica said it should be $3.” That’s not what I’m saying. Right. Always look at your profitability, make sure it’s working for you. Make sure it’s working for your business.
And if it is then that’s gold, then you can always look. Keep that running and test on the backend. And in the background to see if you can get better numbers, but don’t stop what you’re doing. Don’t say it’s not working. It is working. I always give you guys general kind of industry standards. What we see with some of our clients, but at the end of the day, always look at your numbers and make sure it works for you.
All right. So if you’re seeing any of the things that I talked about today in your eyes, and you have an add issue, it needs to be fixed. Now do it for your ship sinks. All right. Make sure you’re fixing it now takes in the tips I provided today, implement them. And then I will see you guys in the next episode.