The Art of Online Business

Why the Best‑Performing Facebook & Instagram Ads Aren’t the Most Polished

• Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie

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0:00 | 6:18

Some of the ads that make the most money don’t look impressive at all — and I explain why that is actually a good thing. 

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I share how low-production, “ugly” ads can outperform polished ones because they blend into the feed, feel more relatable, and are faster to produce and test. You hear how one client agreed to try this approach for retargeting ads and ended up with creatives that deliver positive ROAS. 

If perfectionism has been slowing you down, this episode shows why testing more simple ideas often beats waiting for the “perfect” ad.



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Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:

The Five-Minute Ad Secret

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Some of the highest converting Facebook and Instagram ads that I have run for my online course grader clients look like they were filmed in five minutes. And here's the secret: they were filmed in five minutes. You might be over there thinking about producing your ads, and actually you're overproducing your ads, which is hurting performance. And have you ever heard about ugly ads and them working? You know, I'll share this story a little bit later in this episode, but I had mentioned ugly ads to a client, and the client said, yo, you know, I've heard about those. I would like to try them. And I thought, great, let's do it. And so we did. And how did that work out? Well, that's coming right up. But first, why in the world would a let's just go ahead and call it a low production value ad. Why would that work? Well, I can think of a couple reasons. Number one, what works is what you can produce quickly and test, because it takes testing 20 ads to find the one ad that outperforms the 19, right? And so the quickest way there is to just get the thing done. And two, think about how people are posting, let's just say videos on Instagram and Facebook. Instagram specifically, they're opening up the app and creating a reel right there into the app. They're recording, maybe on their little mini tripod with their phone, and then putting text on the screen. And then Instagram is automatically captioning. So we're used to seeing that kind of content, and we don't like to see ads, but we do need help. So when an ad comes across my Instagram feed, if it's produced super well, it had better be over the top really good. Otherwise, I'm like, yeah, what is this? Unless it just looks like organic content because that's more relatable and it fits the platform. Now, you know, I was gonna give you a disclaimer, which is I am a Facebook and Instagram ads manager. Have been at the time of the recording of this episode for over five years. Now, my advice is based on what I see in client accounts. However, since I'm not your ad manager, never just take a random Facebook and Instagram ad manager's advice. You need to take the applicable knowledge from this episode and apply it to your own ads that you're already running and test. Testing is the way forward. Some tests might work, other tests might not work, but if you test, I can guarantee you that one of your results will work better than some of the other results. And that's the way forward to get more profit in your business and serve more people. And now I will also say that, you know, when you're running Facebook and Instagram ads, you're most likely going to lose money. I'm not giving you the end all super guaranteed like way to make money from Facebook and Instagram ads. Of course, you're going to have to test it out in your own business, okay? So when I told my client about ugly ads, the context was is that we were setting up retargeting ads, or I was considering setting them up and wanted to run some ideas about ad creative past my client. And he had heard about ugly ads before, never mentioned them until I did, and said, yes, go ahead and try them. The concept here, in case you're not sure what an ugly ad is, that's just an ugly ad. It's usually text on a blank background, right? Now you can play around with the colors of the text and the colors of the background, but the ad, it ain't that pretty, and it works because we see so many Instagram reels ads, or we see so many beautifully designed carousel ads, or even graphics. But you know what? An ugly ad, it's like a pattern interrupt. As we're scrolling, we're like, oh, what's this? I don't see many of these, and that's the beauty of it. So, long story short, I took his brand colors and we made like five different backgrounds, and I came up with some very simple messaging that was displayed on this graphic. And because we tested, you know, more than a handful of these ads, we were able to arrive at some of the ads that provided a positive ROAS, as in he made more money from the ads than we were spending. And it was a success. Counterpoint to everything I said, if you must absolutely have beautifully well done ads, or maybe you're working with like a design agency that can make a creative for you, then go ahead, make the beautifully designed ads. Just make them and test through them and don't take forever. But if you're paying somebody to do all that wonderful work for you, they can execute and you can have stuff done, you know, in a week or however long it takes them to turn around the creative for you. But if you're doing it yourself, I highly recommend getting over this perfection and just making some ads and getting them running to test against the ads that you're already running to your proffer, to your profitable offer. Is that a word? I could make it. The ads that you're running to your proffer, your offer that's profitable. There we go. Because here's the truth the real bottleneck in your Facebook and Instagram ads is not quality. The bottleneck is your throughput, how much testing you're doing. I love that quote from Thomas Edison. It says that we miss out on opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and it looks like work. And of course, I believe that responsible course creators like yourself who want profit but want to lower risk should listen to this advice because it's by definition, testing until you get a result that works better than what you have now is the way to mitigate risk. And if you're stalling to make things perfect, or if the genuine desire to make things perfect is causing you to stall and waste more time, then you're not testing. And if you're running your ads right now to your lead magnet or to your self-liquidating offer, you know, your low-ticket offer that has an order bump and an upsell, or to your membership, or to your launch, and you're not sure whether the issue is ad creative messaging or your ad accounts or your ad campaign setup structure, and you want my eyeballs on your ad so you can walk away in two business days with the exact three next steps that I would take in your ads in order to increase ad performance. You need my 48 hour turnaround Facebook and Instagram ad audit. You can find out more information about that in the show notes below. Until the next time that you see me or hear from me, take care, be blessed, and we'll see you in the next one. Bye.

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Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie

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