165 | When Your Lead Generation Ad Isn't Converting [Case Study]

Have you hever had a lead generation campaign NOT get the results you were hoping for?

This week, we're dissecting a struggling lead generation campaign I ran recently.  In this case study, I share the problems we faced with the practical solutions we implemented to turn the campaign around.

From the crucial first steps of campaign setup to the testing of images, ad copy, and headlines, I walk you through a real-life scenario that faced high CPMs and low conversion rates.

I'm hoping that by listening in, you'll learn to identify weak spots in your campaign and gain the knowledge to perform precision tweaks that will breathe new life into your digital marketing strategies.


In this episode, we cover:

✨ Ways to Quickly Identify Red Flags in Campaign Performance  [03:01]

✨ Strategies for Testing and Improving Your Campaigns

✨ Tips for Enhancing Landing Page Conversion Rates [13:58]

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Transcript

Jenzaia: 0:06

welcome to market scale grow. I'm your host, Jenzaia, and this is a saturday strategy session, okay, so I haven't done an episode like this in a while. I thought it would be fun to do a case study and I had the perfect, the perfect ad sprint that I just wrapped up. So we're going to dive in to what to do when your lead generation campaign isn't working, when it isn't converting people, and what the steps are that you can take, and we're going to talk about this through the lens of a client's campaign that wasn't working and the steps that we took to turn things around. So, if you've never heard of my ad sprints before, they're a six-week experience where we spend about two weeks getting everything set up and then there's a week of testing where we figure out the best images, ad copy and headlines and all of that, and then there's three weeks of optimization and, at the end, the goal is that I hand back this lead generation campaign to you, to your team, so that you can continue managing it and you have a lead generation campaign that's up and running and working really well, without having to do the heavy lifting. I do the hard part I create it, set it up, test it, get it running well, and then you get to continue bringing leads in and when there's cases like this, it turns into an eight or 10 week long experience instead of six weeks, because the goal is to hand back a campaign that's working really well. When it's not working and we're struggling, we continue working together until it really is. So the whole like premise, promise, guarantee, if you will is that we keep working on this campaign until it's optimized and that I can confidently hand back a campaign to you. So this ad sprint was definitely longer than the typical six weeks.

Jenzaia: 2:14

Let's dive into what happened. So some of the background on this campaign. It was a lead generation with a free download specifically for music teachers. The opt-in had been previously tested and was previously successful. Organically. This was the first time that my client had run ads for this freebie. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, it was the first time they had really ever ran ads. I think there might have been a couple of boosted posts, but no like significant ads have been run. So it's always interesting starting up an account like an ad account, running those first couple of ads, because Facebook doesn't really know you well.

Jenzaia: 3:01

The pixel isn't seasoned yet and when we say, pixel seasoning. It's talking about getting traffic and for the pixel to really get to know your audience. The more people that cause the pixel to fire, the better the algorithm, the better the AI there is able to figure out who the audience is like in general, who's visiting website, who's clicking on your lead magnets, who's hitting those thank you pages, who's buying from you right? So, having the pixel installed and this is why myself and pretty much every other ad strategist I've ever met, will tell you that you should install the pixel as soon as possible, even if you don't have any intention of running ads in the next 36, 12 months, even because that gives the pixel time to know your audience better and collect that information and aggregate it. The more information it has, the better the pixels able to aggregate it. So, anyway, this was a new ad account. We set everything up, we got everything installed, everything was looking really good and then we started running the ads. So what we noticed is that it was a rough start with lots of problems right from the beginning. The CPM, so the cost per mille, cost per 1000 impressions, was really high, which is very typical and normal In that brand new ad account, the first few ads that you run, the CPM is going to be double or triple what it will settle down to. I've noticed that across the board pretty much every single time I started a new ad account for somebody, that's. That's what's going to happen.

Jenzaia: 4:36

The ctrs, the click-through rate, was hit or miss throughout the testing phase, and which is not great, because the this, the click-through rate, is what we use to determine if the ad itself is really working. It's one of the, the main numbers that we look at. I'm a big believer that each step of the journey should have one key metric tied to it, and so typically for the ad itself, click-through rate is what I like to look at. It's the percentage of people who click on the ad to go to the landing page, and really that's the goal of the ad is to get people onto the landing page, and I personally find that that click-through rate, the, the CTR, is a really great metric for that. And so in this campaign it was hit or miss. It was high, like really high 3-4%, and then there were times when it was like 0.5%, and our goal is 1%. So those are like really high highs and low lows. And then the last thing that we noticed right out of the gate was that the landing page conversion rate was really low. It was below 10, which was very strange because, organically, the landing page had a conversion rate of over 40, and so it was very unexpected that the landing page conversion rate was so low.

Jenzaia: 6:01

But this is the goal of the testing phase. Right is to find the best performers and push them out more, and so sometimes the numbers and the data are all over the place for the testing phase and we still are able to pull out the ones that did really well, so those three, four percenters, and we get rid of the garbage, if you will will. So the ones that so, and we do look at more numbers than just the click-through rate, but I'm gonna dive into key metrics to look at in a future episode. So for now I'm just gonna keep it really really simple and refer to only the ctr in this case. But so get rid of the garbage ones. I had like the 0.5 click through rate because we had some that were significantly better, right.

Jenzaia: 6:48

And then we move into the optimization phase, which is where we're looking to find the best audiences, and we push out those best performers from the testing phase to a bunch of different audiences to find which ad variations work best for which audiences. Audiences to find which ad variations work best for which audiences. And sometimes those best performers in a testing phase might not have done like super great, but they do better for the optimization phase and sometimes they do well in testing phase and don't do well in the optimization phase, and the ideal is when they do well in both. But in this one the best performers did not do well in the optimization phase and we were able to pull out. We couldn't get as many assets as I want. Typically I like to get two or three images, two or three versions of ad copy and at least one headline that we can take from the testing phase into the optimization phase. And I really, if I'm like looking at this and my notes properly, we had one of each and so that's not quite enough. So what we, what I did, was I pulled some like mediocre performers because, like I said, sometimes they don't do great in the testing phase, but you move into the optimization phase and things go better because we use different audiences and things are just a little bit different in that optimization phase. So we have to try it and unfortunately it won't, won't, won't, did not do great.

Jenzaia: 8:17

So we looked at the numbers a little bit more in detail, pulled out some of those more nuanced statistics and more nuanced KPIs, like there's two different CTRs that you can look at. So we looked at the other CTR, the CTR all, and decided to make some changes to the images, and the initial images had a kind of like dark, dark background. So we kept the images almost identical and just changed out to a lighter background. I find that that having a light background can be very, very successful and typically, if I see images that are on the darker side and that are performing well, that's one of the first changes we make. So we got some fresh images and did an additional day of testing to see if they would perform better, and they did at first, and then they kind of tanked as well, and so we decided to pause, like completely pause the ads and go back to the drawing board, and we changed the headline from the name of the freebie and I often see this like grab the blah, blah, blah with the name of it, and so we went with a different angle completely, because I was like, well, what if people don't know what this thing is right like. If they don't know the name of the freebie, they don't understand.

Jenzaia: 9:47

Sometimes TPT spellers especially will come up with catchy titles for their products and it's great and I love it. And because I had done a deep dive into this client's business and the freebie, I understood the name of it. But my thought was people are coming along in the news feed, they're seeing this ad and they're going what the heck is that like? I don't know. And because I don't know, I'm just going to keep scrolling. So we changed the angle from using the name of the freebie to calling out the people that it was for. So in this case it was like grade one music teachers and also leaned into the free music lesson plan so that you know anyone who's teaching lesson plan like music, be like. Oh hey, I want a free lesson plan, right. So changing up the headline, the big, big text on the image, is a really good step. So the first step with images I always take is that light background or changing the colors so the pops more. If there's a lot of blue, getting rid of the blue. That's one of the first steps and then the next step is looking at the words and trying to make those titles and the words pop more and grab the attention of the right people. The other thing that we also did simultaneously while the ads were paused was update the landing page because, like I said, the landing page was converting at less than 10% and so we wanted to get that conversion rate up higher.

Jenzaia: 11:25

I don't usually recommend making multiple changes all at the same time, but in this case the campaign was just spiraling out of control and it was important to try to rectify everything as quickly as we could. When you're making changes to a campaign, if things are already going well and you're trying to make them do better, making one change at a time is is the best thing you can do, because then you, if you change like the title and the results start to go down, well, you can just change the title back. But if you make multiple different changes, then you don't know what to attribute. If the results go down, like if the results increase, like that's great, you made multiple changes, they all worked, but if things go down and you've changed multiple things, you can't attribute the decrease to anything. So you kind of have to revert and then test each piece separately.

Jenzaia: 12:22

But because there was a lot of red flags and it was clear that multiple things in the funnel were not working well, and I don't want to say it was a disaster, but we were really really far off from the goal. Like the cost per lead, we were very far off from it and, while, yes, things have got, could have gotten worse, it was kind of one of those situations of like how much worse we're pretty much as far away from the goal as I could imagine being and anything can only help, right, and so that's why, while we were updating those images, getting the new headline and we kept the lighter background because they did do slightly better, so we kept the lighter background, changed the headline and we also made updates to the landing page, including changing the headline, similar to what we changed on the images. We wanted to call attention to the right people and pull them in with the idea of, like, free lesson plans instead of the grab your blah blah blah, because, again, if they didn't know what the blah blah blah was, it doesn't make sense. Decreasing the amount of text is another big one that I often recommend. We feel like we need to explain things and really the people who end up on the landing page are just going to scan, and so getting rid of paragraphs and substituting for bullet points is a huge recommendation. I make that one frequently, and then it wasn't the case in this one.

Jenzaia: 13:58

But the third recommendation that I find myself making often is ensuring that the button is very clear, obvious, that it doesn't blend in with the background, that they don't have to scroll to find it. Like you really want a person to be able to sign up for your freebie without having to do much work, and that includes like they know immediately where to put their name, they know immediately where to put their email address and they know immediately where to click to send me the freebie. And so, again, that wasn't the case in this one. The button was really well placed and very obvious. But that's another big one that I see and I wanted to include it.

Jenzaia: 14:36

This landing page I really liked how it was laid out. In general, it had an image of the freebie, the form was really obvious, the button was really obvious and then, if you scroll down, there was space for testimonials and additional information, and so when we took the text and reduced the amount that was at the top, we were able to put it back down lower so anyone who wanted that information would like scroll and was able to find it. Definitely a personal preference. If you want to use that shorter landing page, like all of my landing pages, you can't even scroll. I mean, I guess it depends on, like, how your screen is set up and if you're on mobile or a computer. But if you have the landing page open full screen on a computer, you're not scrolling anywhere on any of my landing pages. But I also have seen lots of success with the ones that have that form at the very top and then if you scroll, you scroll again space for testimonials, space for detailed information about what's included in the freebie. Sometimes there's like a about me, about the author, kind of section as well, and then, if that's the case, I always recommend that you have another form or at least a button that takes you immediately back to the form at the bottom so people aren't having to scroll back up.

Jenzaia: 15:51

It's insane how little work we're able to, we were willing to do, and I include myself in that, because there's times where I'm like I don't remember or I'm just like, oh, I can't be bothered. Right, like, the easier you can make it for somebody, the more likely they are to do the thing you want. So once we were going to go back to running the ad, I decided to use dynamic creative instead of manually setting up the campaign, and the reason I did this is we did have a bit of a smaller budget for this campaign. It was about $10 a day, which is on the smaller side, and using dynamic creative is a really great way to make the most of a small budget. If you're not aware of what dynamic creative is, you basically drop up to 10 images and or videos into one ad and then you also put up to five different variations of ad copy into the ad, and then it's the algorithm, the AI, that matches up the images and the ad copy to find the best performing combinations. The manual setup is you put one image and one ad copy, one image and one ad copy, one image and ad copy. So you'll have, like, if you had two images and two ad copies, you'd have four different ads that you've set up manually, whereas dynamic creative you just have one ad and you've dropped everything in.

Jenzaia: 17:15

You do lose out on some control with dynamic creative, because if something's not working, you just have to trust the algorithm is going to stop spending money on it, whereas if you've manually set it up, you can actually toggle that underperforming variation off. So there's definitely pros and cons, but the algorithm is getting and has gotten. Over the last like three years that I've been using it has gotten better and better at finding those variations and spending no money on the ones that aren't working, spending all the money on what is working. I find that it's really really great for those low budget campaigns and for small audiences. So I wrote down in my notes here like to let the algorithm do what it's best at. There are definitely some challenges that come along with dynamic creative.

Jenzaia: 18:06

Along with the losing some of the control, social proof also doesn't build up the same way. So social proof being the likes and comments and shares when you've manually set up the ad, because the people are seeing that exact post every time, the comments and shares can get built up. But with dynamic creative, because things are changing and things are being substituted in out and there's different variants, the social proof doesn't build up at all. And so if you're going to be running an ad for a really long period of time or if you have a larger budget, dynamic creative is a like a lesser of the choice because you want that social proof to be running. But in a case like this, where there's the smaller budget and things weren't working, I really wanted to lean into the algorithm and let it do some of that heavy lifting for me so that once the algorithm kind of figured out what the best combinations were, I could then pull those and set it up manually. Now I didn't end up doing that because dynamic creative was doing so well. When I handed it off I decided to just let it keep rolling.

Jenzaia: 19:12

Dynamic Creative is also easier for someone who's less confident and a little bit nervous about the ads manager, because you don't have to be looking at the numbers every like, all of the details. The algorithm does a lot of that work for you, and so it's a really great way to get into running an ad campaign for the first time and really understanding or not even having you don't have to understand the numbers the, the ai does it for you. So definitely consider using that dynamic creative. If you're newer to ads and you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by all the numbers and data, that can really like take some of the the pressure off of you, and if you do want to look for dynamic creative, the toggle button to turn it on is under the ad set level, not the ad level. I even still now will look for it in the ad level, but it's the ad set level. So, yeah, okay, I think that that's kind of the overview of what happened.

Jenzaia: 20:11

I was able to optimize the campaign after we made all those changes and hand off a much more successful campaign at the end of the ad sprint than what was happening in the testing phase. Between making the changes to the images, making the changes to the landing page and switching to the dynamic creative, the results of the ad campaign definitely improved and the cost per leads cut more than in half. So I was really happy to see that, and the client was also pleased with that. So so thank you so much for being here. I hope that this experience gave you some ideas of what you should be looking for and what changes you can make in the event that you have a less than successful campaign. And knock wood. I hope you don't, but if you ever do, those are my tips for you.

Jenzaia: 21:07

So thanks for being here and I will be back in your ear next Saturday with another Saturday strategy session. Thank you for listening to this episode of market scale grow. Every week on Saturdays we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday Strategy Session.