Market, Scale, Grow: Facebook Ad Marketing Strategy for Teacherpreneurs

179 | Turning Struggling Facebook Ads into Success: A Case Study

• Jenzaia • Episode 179

Share episode

Walk through the steps I took with a client to turn a floundering Facebook ad campaign into a success!

In this episode of Market Scale Grow, we'll cover...
✨ a simple yet critical mistake we made
✨ the power of a testing protocol that helps you identify issues
✨ the order we troubleshooted through the different issues

__________________

Find me on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/heyitsjenzaia/
Email Me → support@jenzaiadimartile.com
Join the Facebook community → https://www.facebook.com/groups/marketscalegrow

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, Inzea, and this is a Saturday Strategy Session. Hello and welcome to this case study episode.

Speaker 2:

I am pumped. Let's jump in. Today we're going to be talking about an unfortunate Facebook ad sprint that did not go at all to plan. Now, in the end, it was a happy ending. I would just like to let everyone know that before we get started but it was struggle, struggle, struggle.

Speaker 2:

So a bit of background. This client came to me with a lead magnet that was perfect for the end of school. It was an end of the year resource, or like a freebie resource packet, if you will. They had I think it was three different activities that were great for upper elementary. In Canada, where I'm from, we call it like junior, so I think it was grade three, four, five, maybe four, five, six, something like that. This like end of year resource packet was for them, and so they've had a lot of organic success. They've done testing, which was really great to see. They had different organic posts that we looked at and that they had results from, and so we were able to grab images and copy directly from what we knew was successful.

Speaker 2:

But they hadn't really ran any ads and, I'm not going to lie, it's always a little bit nerve wracking when somebody hasn't ran a lot of ads before, because it can be a lot. So our first mistake was forgetting the pixel. We did not install their pixel and that's a big nono. So my first learning point that I want to share with everyone is make sure that you install the pixel onto your TPT store, your website, your blog, as soon as possible. If there's any possibility that in the future you might want to run ads, I highly highly recommend that you install the pixel, because it cannot collect information or data retroactively. It starts from the moment that it is installed and this was a problem because it meant that our audiences were really really small. When there's no pixel and there's no audience, who's created? Yeah, there's no historic data, so we weren't able to make really great warm audiences or really great lookalikes from that pixel data. So getting the pixel installed as soon as possible is essential.

Speaker 2:

Now we got the images. They were approved, ad copy was approved, like. Everything felt like it was going really well and when we turned on the ads for the first day, it was a flop. As part of the ad sprint, we do a three-day testing protocol. On day one, we test the ad copy, day two, we test the images and day three, we test the headlines. It is not completely unheard of for day one to flop, because what I do is I pick one of the images and then I test the ad copy. I pick one image and one headline and then I test the different versions of ad copy so that everyone has the same image and everyone has the same headline, so it's not unheard of that I pick a bad image by accident. I pick the image that I like the best, but sometimes I pick the image that I like the best, but sometimes I pick wrong. And so we always move ahead with day two and in this case, day one was a huge flop.

Speaker 2:

None of the ad copy performed really well. We had a click-through rate of less than 0.5. No, sorry, less than 0.5, which our goal for the click-through rate is at least 1%. There's two different types of click-through rates, so the one that I was just referring to was link clicks. But we also had a really low, just all click-through rate for all, which means that nobody was clicking on the image to see it bigger or the read more button. Basically, people were not slowing their scroll.

Speaker 2:

So we continued with day two of testing, tried, pick the best can I put best like in quotation marks here, because, again, none of the ad copy did well, but we picked the best one. And then we tried with the images and womp, womp, none of the images did really well. So at this point this is where I start to my spidey senses kind of start going okay. Maybe we completely missed the mark. I usually do continue with day three of testing and test the headlines, but I've already started to get more images made if we don't have some in reserve.

Speaker 2:

When we're doing that, some of the things that I find very common for images to fail is that there's a lot of blue. Images with a lot of blue in them tend to not do well. I think a big part of that is because the Facebook the metaverse, if you will, that's the wrong word but like Facebook and Instagram, there's a lot of blue, and so when you have images that also have blue in them, they got lost in the sea of blue. That is Facebook, that is Instagram Instagram's better. So I try to avoid images that have blue. Oftentimes images with yellow will pop, because the blue and the yellow are contrasting colors, and then images with white also tend to do well. So that was one of the first things we did. We had a lot of blue in the images, so we revamped the images so that they had a more white, clean background. And then I don't want you to get discouraged if your brand colors are blue, because I have seen them work really, really well, but if you have images that are blue that aren't doing well. That would be my recommendation In this case.

Speaker 2:

We also looked at the text on it and realized that it didn't say free anywhere, and with an audience of teachers who love free things, we knew that that was a missed opportunity. So we got free popping out and we got rid of some of the blue so that it was a little bit more contrasty on the news feeds. We also did have to pause the ads for a few days because of this, like waiting for the images to get redone, getting them re-approved, going through that whole process again. It did take a pause. So I just want to encourage you here if things aren't working, it's okay to take a pause, revamp and come back in.

Speaker 2:

You don't have to let the ads continue running for a long period of time. I've been told by many people that they want to leave their ads running for long, long periods of time because and I'm quoting ads get better with time, and that is true if they're doing well initially. It is very unlikely that an ad that flops in the first 72 hours is going to suddenly turn around, and so in a case like this, where the ad was not doing well. We didn't have great ad copy, we didn't have great images, we didn't have great headlines nothing was working. If we just let it keep running, it's going to keep not working In the first 72 hours. If things are going well and you continue to let the ads run, they probably will get better over time, because the AI is designed to hone in on what is working and do more of that. So, whether it's find more people that are the same, or if it's to show the same image, that's really, really working. Whatever it is that's working, the AI is going to help. But if it's not working, pause, revamp and come back.

Speaker 2:

So we did that. We came back with those new images and redid some of the testing. We actually didn't even change the ad copy at all. I changed one of the headlines, and that ended up being the headline that we used. Was that new headline that I decided to test out, but mostly all we did was change the images and suddenly the ads were getting clicks, which is fantastic. That's obviously what we want to see. We want to see people that are stopping their scroll, clicking on the ad, going to the landing page. The problems did not end there, though. Now we had traffic going to the landing page and we had nobody signing up, and I don't even mean like a couple people here and there, but it felt like nobody. We literally had had zero people sign up. I had told my clients to just hold off on making any landing page changes at first because the traffic was so low and we were having such a rough time that I didn't want that to be a focus.

Speaker 2:

But in the end, we did need to revamp the landing page as well, and I want you to come back if you think that your landing page needs revamping or you're curious about that or you're getting it set up for the first time and you want to make sure you avoid any mistakes. Next week's episode is five common landing page mistakes and how to fix them or how to avoid them. So come back next week for that episode. I'm not going to dive into it. I gave her tons of those tips that you're going to hear next week and we were able to turn the landing page around. We got it converting from about 5% up to 43%, which mind-boggling Like. I was so, so excited to see that increase in landing page. Oh, you know what? It wouldn't have been 5% I have 5% written down here but the only person who had opted in was me, just me. So it was 0% because I don't really count as a service provider working for the business, as a service provider working for the business. So we went from no opt-ins 5% because I had opted in up to 43%, which is amazing and it's so great with some small tweaks.

Speaker 2:

The lesson here that I takeaway is there can be multiple spots in a funnel in an ad campaign that need to be tweaked and you don't need to do it all at once. In fact, I don't usually recommend that you sort out all the problems at once, because it doesn't always work. And if you focus on one thing at a time, then you can iron out those problems more quickly and move on faster than if you're trying to do a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit there. You really want to figure out exactly what the issues are and get them sorted out one at a time. That also lets you know, like if you make one change and things get worse, then you can go back because you know exactly what you changed. But if you change five different things and things get worse, well then you don't know what you changed, so you don't know. You don't know what part of it made things worse. Obviously, the hope is you change something, you change five things and things get better, but that doesn't always happen. So by focusing on one thing at a time, you really know what those changes, how they're impacting the campaign and also the order doesn't really matter of what you decide to change.

Speaker 2:

There's two different kind of ways that I like to go about it. The first one is what I just explained in this case study like what we did with this client is we start at the top, where the problems are starting, and we just work our way through the funnel. So the first part of the funnel is the ad and then it's the landing page and then it's the thank you page and then it's the thank you page and then it's the email sequence. Right, we just from top to bottom, we work our way through and try and sort out the problems that way.

Speaker 2:

The second way that I use less often is going with the biggest problem first, and for me the landing page would probably have been the bigger problem here, because that's where you're getting the email addresses and that's the real big goal of this ad campaign. But the reason that I don't as frequently go with that method is because if the ads aren't working and there's no traffic getting to the landing page, then it doesn't really matter how well the landing page converts because there's no traffic getting there. But you can always go for the biggest problem first and fill in that big hole, like if it's a bucket with a whole bunch of holes, finding the biggest hole and fixing that first, or just starting at the top and working your way down Totally your choice. They both work. In the end, we got this client converting.

Speaker 2:

Like I said, over 40% of the people who landed on her landing page were ending up as leads, and we were spending about 85 cents per lead to get them onto the list, and so we went from well, infinite amounts of money because nobody was opting in down to less than a dollar a lead fantastic, just by patience and one step at a time. So I hope that there are some things here that will help you if you're troubleshooting an ad campaign, if you come across some problems and you are feeling a little bit lost. I hope that these tips and strategies will help you and, like I said already, come back next week. We're talking about five mistakes that I often see on landing pages and how you can fix them, and so hopefully that will be helpful as well.

Speaker 1:

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.