Avoid The Biggest Meta Ads Mistakes Course Creators Are Making This Summer
Jul 26, 2024Episode 829
Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie
I cover two groups of mistakes: 1) what to avoid if you're outsourcing your Facebook ad management and 2) for those of you managing your own ads, five tactical mistakes to avoid. Plus, get ready for a crucial tip on why consistent lead generation is a must!
I cover two groups of mistakes: 1) what to avoid if you're outsourcing your Facebook ad management and 2) for those of you managing your own ads, five tactical mistakes to avoid. Plus, get ready for a crucial tip on why consistent lead generation is a must!
Welcome back to the Art of Online Business podcast, and in this episode I'm going to share with you the seven biggest meta ads mistakes that I see online course creators making this summer. We're going to divide it into two categories Two mistakes for those online course creators who are hiring out Facebook ad management, and then we're going to get into five tactical mistakes for you, online course creators, who are managing your own ads, and I'm going to, in that second section, give you one of the biggest mistakes first. I'm not even gonna make you wait to the end. You ready. So if you're hiring out your ads to somebody else or an ads agency, the biggest mistake you can do is not doing lead generation right now, early enough. Now, here's why that's a mistake. You're thinking you can just go straight up into your launch and turn on your ads or have an agency turn back on your ads, and that everything will go well. But when you take a big break from ads, facebook meta just doesn't like that. They want us to be consistent with ads, and anybody who's running an ad account all year round for themselves or on behalf of somebody else will tell you that better performance happens when ads are running all the time now if you already have a big ad spend and you're about to hire somebody to manage your ad.
Speaker 1:
Here's the other mistake I'm seeing, which is you wait until right before your launch. We're talking like three weeks before. Even four weeks before is too late, but just a little bit before your actual launch date. Now registration ads gotta run, like you know, two weeks. But then onboarding with an ads management business takes time. Account research that they're going to do for you takes time. Getting the ad creative ready and then having you review it and then make revisions if necessary takes time. Grabbing the assets, or collecting the assets, I should say, for ad copy creation and then writing that ad copy and then having it revised if needed also takes time, not to mention the intricacies of getting access to your ad account and making sure that the right access has gotten to your ad account so that things can be set up in a good way and managed right. But then working with you as a course creator, who you're also busy preparing the other mini launch things, it all takes time and when you wait to the last moment, you kind of get the detriment of the first thing that I talked about, which is not having run ads all the time, but then also, you're just taking your stress and skyrocketing it through the roof. And prior preparation prevents poor performance, and this applies to launches, all right.
Speaker 1:
So for everyone now who is running your own ads, I'm going to start with a mistake that I am seeing in ad accounts now and that someone asked me shout out to you Emily in the in the DMS, which is listening to meta's recommendations. Oh my gosh, a couple are okay. They're really bad. I'm just gonna give you a very bad example. I'm looking in a client account in order to make these notes and I screenshot this right here. So I'm looking at my clients ad set and the message from meta says it has this cool little blue bar with kind of like it's jumping higher and higher and higher right, like it's scaling up higher and higher and higher. And it says scale your high-performing ad set.
Speaker 1:
Consider increasing the ad sets daily budget by an additional 16.56, 16 dollars and 56 cents in order to further scale your results. Although your cost per result may rise, our models predict better returns based on the increased investment. Oh, so seductive and it sounds so good. Yes, facebook, I'll give you another $16.56. Oh, wonderful, meta. But here's the thing this is a lead gen campaign. There are nothing, there's nothing to be sold here. So what results are they saying will increase? What returns? What increase in returns are we talking about? No, and also, when you increase.
Speaker 1:
If you were to listen to this, it's telling me to increase my budget by 16, but the current daily budget is 23 a day. That's more than a 50 increase on my ad budget. If I did that, then the algorithm would go wonky, meaning that my ad cost would skyrocket or at least increase significantly, and then at best, I'm just giving more money to meta and I'm frustrated. Like I listen to these guys, what happened to my ad? Or, at worst, I turn off my ads. God forbid. It's a launch, which this is what this episode is about and then I'm missing out on valuable leads. Was that audience actually going to perform? Could that have been the audience that was going to yield my best leads at the lowest Cost? I'll never know, because I listened to meta's recommendation. Please don't do that, or at least please go find somebody who knows what they're talking about, that's actually run ads like me, who could tell you. Oh hey, if you're managing your ads and the budget's at the ad set level. You don't want to increase your budget in one day more than like 20%, unless you want to see higher lead costs. By the way, if you haven't already, it would help more online course creators, who need this knowledge, discover this podcast if you went down to the show notes below on Apple Podcasts and left me a genuine review. It helps me understand what you need and what you could want, but it also really does help other people discover this podcast. Thank you so much for doing so.
Speaker 1:
Okay, since we're right here, a mistake of doing your ads by yourself. If you have a converting launch and you're managing more than, say, $5,000, $6,000 in ad budget, part of this mistake is just that managing ads is a full-time job. I could easily be spending between two or three hours in certain accounts per day during launch time. Here you are You're the course creator. You've got your email sequence to make sure that it's hooked up, or, if you have an EA or VA doing this for you, you still got to supervise them, unless you have, like super ninja help and you've got to make sure the sales page is done. You've got to look at ad copy. You've got to make sure that people are getting into your launch, just fine, and all these other little things. Do you really have time to spend on ads? And so let's say you are a practitioner of Facebook ads and you're pretty dang good, all right, but could you be taking that two hours a day and either resting or devoting it to another part of your launch, like preparing to deliver your webinar or to show up with as much energy as you can for those trainings inside of the live challenge, for example? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
And what about things that I see in the clients that I coach like one-on-one for Facebook ads? Like just recently I got off a call. Well, I got on a call and I saw the wrong objective being used the traffic objective being used for a lead magnet. It's like Facebook has been running ads or having this ad product for so long now. You have to choose the right objective. If you choose a traffic objective thinking, hey, I can cheaply send people to the lead magnet opt-in page and they'll opt in no, you're gonnaly send people to the lead magnet opt-in page and they'll opt in. No, you're going to get a higher cost per lead than if you just chose the lead objective, because Facebook, when you choose an objective, optimizes for the people who are most likely to do that thing. So that's just one mistake. Facebook has six objectives, so pick any of the other ways. You could mix and match the objective wrongly and you're kind of getting the picture here.
Speaker 1:
Let me go to another mistake now, if you're running your own ads, which is having your launch registration period be too long. Now, this is related to ads and it's related to your emails. Now, here's the thing. I also was on another call and we're trying to troubleshoot a low show up rate to the webinar. So I go through my standard number of questions which are out of the scope of this podcast, except for to say that I did ask all right, what does it look like if I? How long is the registration period? Two weeks, great, that's wonderful. But if I sign up on that first day and I have 14 days to launch, how many emails am I going to get from you? Oh well, there's the registration email and there's the second day email and I'm like and then, and then there's the show up email. You know that goes out 24 hours before and then an evening before and then the morning of. I'm like, well, those show up emails are great, but what you're telling me is is I'm not hearing from you. If I sign up on day one with 14 days to go, after day two, I go like 12 days because math without hearing from you, no wonder I'm not going to show up.
Speaker 1:
So this relates to Facebook ad, because, one, if you choose a launch registration period that's too long, like four weeks, and you're paying for those, those leads, a higher percentage of leads, are just not going to show up to your launch. Even if you are good about sending out emails every other day, every third day, to the people who registered, it's still going to be just because life and all the things that can happen, like they might be, they're very good intention, they want help from you, but they're just life will get in the way. So so you got to pick the right launch registration period, which we're seeing two weeks, and in accounts that's well, you know your account it's a little more difficult to get the right kind of leads. Maybe three weeks to give that algorithm more time to optimize on your behalf. But absolutely you want to be sending out emails at least every other day, emails at least every other day or at least every third day to people who register for your launch. So the next mistake is not targeting your email list with ads and I get it because I've managed ads for lots of clients, quajo. I already paid ad money to bring a good percentage of these leads onto my email list anyway before the launch, so why would I retarget them with ads to register for the launch? I'm just going to send out my phenomenal launch registration email sequence to my list and that's great.
Speaker 1:
But the stats are not in your favor. The stats are that two to four percent 5%, if you're extremely fortunate of your email list will register for a launch Period. So you know your launch revenue goals right, and let's say that you back those goals up and you reach the figure of 500 people that you need registered for your launch. Wonderful, but is your email list size 10,000 people? Because if it is, then 2% of that list is 200, 4% of your email list is 400, and 5% again. This is if you're super fortunate to get 5% of your organic list. Registering is 500 people. And if your list is smaller than 10,000, like, let's say, 8,000, 4,000, which I'm not like saying those are that's a super small size. 4,000 is a healthy list. I mean heck, I would like to have 4,000 people on my list, but it's gonna be a lot harder to hit that number of registration 500 in fact. I would say nigh impossible unless you take your ads and retarget your email list, not to mention your other warm audiences like your Instagram followers, your Facebook followers, your website visitors and people who have become leads in the past 180 days.
Speaker 1:
Onto the next mistake I am seeing, which is speaking of numbers, like how many people you need in your launch to be profitable. A big ol' mistake is just hoping and praying for profit instead of knowing what your earnings per lead is. And, of course, I believe in praying, like I'll pray to Jesus all the time, but for your launch you must calculate your earnings per lead. You take your total launch revenue and you divide that by the total number of leads that you've brought in in the past to arrive at an EPL, an earnings per lead. And then you want to, if you're spending on Facebook ads, to have looked at your previous cost per lead and see what that is historically. The more launch data you have, the better right. And then you take your cost per lead and you subtract that from your earnings per lead lead like if your cost per lead is $5 and your earnings per lead is well, I don't know 20, let's say $30, then your profit per lead is $25.
Speaker 1:
And here's the thing if you haven't calculated this, you could have a huge, healthy gap between your earnings per lead in your cost per lead, which then is telling you it's screaming at you you want more money, bring in more ads Every, or bring in more leads, spend more money on ads, because even if your cost per lead is a little higher this launch Shoot, the last three launches, you had like a $50 or like a gap between your earnings per lead and cost per lead You're getting paid for more and more leads. You can absorb a lead cost of, say, $10 and still come out positive. So if you're not making this calculation, you could be leaving thousands on the table. But also, if you're not making this calculation and here's the scary part you could be losing thousands because maybe your earnings per lead on ads, maybe you're losing money per lead on ads because your cost per lead is actually very close or higher than your earnings per lead. Maybe the numbers are telling you that, hey, it's your quote-unquote warm traffic, your organic traffic, that's converting in the launch. And so then the numbers are saying rather than spend so much money towards cold traffic at your launch, you need to shift that budget to lead generation before your launch and let your email nurture sequence, nurture those leads for you so that you can convert more of them into the launch and serve more of the people who you were blessed and meant to serve. Right, you? You gotta calculate your earnings per lead, cost per lead, for sure, among there's other data too, but we're just gonna stop there.
Speaker 1:
How about this other mistake, which is very closely related to the one I just shared with you? It's a big mistake. It's just not turning lead generation's ads on well before launch. It's related to one I shared in the beginning. If you're having somebody else run your ads, this is a shift that I'm seeing with my clients, and it's because we're in I didn't coin the term, but a trust recession. Right, the market sophistication has come up, meaning that there's a whole lot of people doing what you do and doing what I do, and that that's fine. We can shine amongst the competition, but a lot of it has to do with building trust, and people are coming into launches cold, sitting through a launch and purchasing on the second launch or the third launch, and the shift that I've been seeing from my clients is to put money into the lead magnet well before launch.
Speaker 1:
If somebody is going to take time to get to know you, yes, they'll understand rather quickly that you are the person to serve them, as in you can serve them with your knowledge and your skills and your passion, right, but it's taking them longer now to decide if what you stand for, what you believe in, the way you show up, the values that you represent are a match with them, because that's where the market is right now. There's plenty of people that provide the service or the skill set or the knowledge that you do, and customers are coming to you not necessarily because of your knowledge. They believe in your knowledge, but they're coming because they believe in you and they align with your worldview or your outlook, or how positive or even how negative you are, you know. So those are the mistakes. In closing prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare.
Speaker 1:
Invest in learning if you're managing your own ads. Invest, if you're managing your own ads, in somebody who can teach you, who's done it a lot, like me, self plug, but can show you. This is how a campaign is set up. Follow these metrics to best understand ad performance. And follow these metrics plural to best see when your ads are about to tank so you can make a left turn.
Speaker 1:
Or if you're managing a bigger budget on your own and you just need to get that off of your plate, then that's where you want to hire out and management, so that you can show up like the boss you are and have a great lunch because you aren't just worried about ad spend and all these other calculations and things that I've talked about. And am I going to choose the right suggestion that meta makes or am I gonna choose the wrong one and lose out? In the description below, you can either book a call with me for one-on-one coaching or apply for ad management. Don't wait to the last minute. I hope this Really, really really helps you out. Share it with a friend too, by the way, who has an online business and please it would do me so much good and help other online course creators who need to find this episode. If you left a review on this podcast, the link to do so is in the show notes below.
