Meta Ads, Funnels and Paid Traffic: What's Working Now w/Samantha Fine

Before you spend another dollar on paid ads, listen to this.

Facebook and Instagram ads can feel like a mystery. 

One person swears they're the key to scaling your business. Someone else says they're a waste of money. 

Meanwhile, Meta keeps suggesting you boost your post, increase your budget and trust the process.  

In today's episode, I'm joined by Samantha Fine, Meta Ads and Funnel Strategist, to talk about what's actually working when it comes to paid advertising and why so many business owners end up frustrated, overwhelmed and convinced that ads "don't work."

We discuss:

• How Meta's platform has changed, including the growing role of AI, the Andromeda update and the shift from audience targeting to creative-led advertising
• The role your funnel plays in ad performance and conversions
• How to know if you're actually ready to invest in paid traffic and how oto set an ad budget based on your goals
• Why copying someone else's ad strategy rarely works 

If you've been wondering whether Meta Ads are worth it, why your results have changed or what needs to be in place before you spend any money on ads, this conversation will save you time, money and a whole lot of frustration.

Links & References:

Come network with us! CLICK HERE to attend your first PWR Connection Network virtual speed networking event at no cost using the promo code  FIRSTTIME

Get Samantha's free Successful Ads Scorecard here: https://www.samanthafinedigital.com/scorecard

Book an Audit Call with Samantha: https://link.autopilotclients.io/widget/bookings/ads-audit-samantha-fine-digital

Connect with Samantha on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samanthafinedigital

Transcript

Welcome And Burnout Context

0:01

Hello, Samantha. Welcome to the Powerful Women Rising Podcast. Hi, Melissa. Thank you so much for having me. Yes, I'm so excited to have you here. We were talking before we started recording. I feel like I always get like the right people at the right times too, because I've been thinking about ads and paid ads, and I've done them before and things have worked. And now I have your interview scheduled today. I have an interview later today that is about burnout and how do you find your spark again after your burnout? And girl, I am so burnt out. And so I'm just so excited for today's interviews. I'm excited for it too. Ads can help with burnout too. They keep things running while you're doing your thing. So we can talk about that briefly. I'm like, I think that's part of why I'm burnt out is like I'm not getting as much dopamine as I used to get from my business. So if we could get some some ads creating some dopamine, that would be super. I love it. Yeah.

Samantha’s Background And Mission

0:52

Okay. So before we dive into talking about ads, tell everybody a little bit about you and about what you do. Yeah. So I'm Santha Fine, the founder of Smyanthine Digital. I help established female online business owners create predictable sales with meta-ads and strategic funnels before coming into the online space. I spent over a decade, close to 15 years, working for billion-dollar brands, Coca-Cola, Healthy Choice, Lysol. You look inside your kitchen, you probably have at least one of the brands I supported in my corporate career working in digital marketing and left that space after facing discrimination for being a mom and really wanted to find a way to use my expertise while helping other female founders and still being able to pick my kids up at three o'clock. And now I can. And so I really am so passionate about the power of using ads to grow your sales, create that predictable revenue, and be able to have that balance, getting those sales coming in, getting those leads coming in while you are not at the computer. And I think that's one of the really amazing things about meta-ads and having it supportive strategic funnel. Yeah, that's awesome. So before I want to talk like specifically about like what has changed with meta ads in particular.

When Paid Ads Make Sense

2:08

But before we get into that, I want to ask you, like just for the listeners who maybe have thought about doing ads, but they've never done them. Maybe they've never even thought about doing ads and they think like I'm really not at that place, or people who have done ads, but they haven't really worked. Who do ads work for? Like, how do we know we're at the space in our business where it's like, okay, time to start running paid ads? Yes, I love this because here's the thing ads support something that's already working. So if you have a funnel that is actively converting, if you're making those sales and now you want to pour some fuel on that fire and start to scale it, ads can work. Where ads don't work is if you are just trying to see if like getting more eyeballs is going to actually sell something that's not selling without those eyeballs. Yes, you can pay to test. People do that all the time. Just know you're going to be paying to validate something. So you may not know if it's the offer or if it's the ads. Ads are going to work best when they're pouring fuel onto fire so it's already burning, not when they're trying to ignite it in the first place. Okay. That makes total sense. So we want to have a proven offer. And then do we also need to have like the established funnel? I would have the, I would recommend having the established funnel at the very least, having that proven kind of end ticket offer. I have worked with clients where we are testing those pieces into the funnel. So I have what I call the buyer-builder blueprint. And one of the things within that is identifying your front end and your end goal offer. A lot of people start with that end goal offer, right? It's that higher ticket program, the membership, et cetera. And that's a great place to start when you're building your business. But how do you get people into it? And that front end piece is going to be the first thing you're sending a cold audience to with ads. So if you don't know what that is yet, it can be really challenging when you're trying to run ads and figure out what that front end is. It's again that same concept of you're going to pay to test. So, best case scenario, you have tested and validated it. Doesn't mean you can't test multiple with ads. I do that for clients all the time, but you want to at least know what these pieces are. Yeah. I think it's interesting that your expertise is in meta-ads and you're also a funnel strategist because usually I feel like we're going to hire one or the other. We're not going to hire someone who is both. So tell me, you alluded to it a little bit, but tell us specifically like why do you do both those things and how do those work together to support each other? Yeah.

Funnels And Ads Must Work Together

4:38

So because of my corporate career, I know that you have to have that full marketing strategy to activate the ads. I know the power of it. I've done that for clients for many, many years. And when I started my business doing ads, I was always really interested in the funnel side of things because at the end of the day, your ads are supporting the funnel, right? And without that information, without knowing what's working in the funnel, without having access to that data, without making sure that the funnel is set up to convert, your ads aren't going, you're, but they're not going to work as hard for you. And so for me, I'm happy to work with other funnel strategists when clients have separate ones. But that's one of the benefits that I bring to the table is I do both for you. When especially for my done for you clients, I have access to their back-end data. So when I do reports, I'm looking at the full picture, not just what our ads brought in, but how did they contribute to the overall launch or what we're running for the month, if it's evergreen, et cetera. It's a full marketing system, not just ads on its own, your funnel on its own. They work together. Yeah, I love that. It's kind of the visual I was getting, I my listeners know I come up with a lot of analogies that I think are really great. And sometimes they are, and sometimes they make no sense. But I think this is a good one. When you were talking, I was thinking like, okay, so this is basically like you print out thousands of flyers about this event that I'm having, right? And you're running all over town, like giving people the flyers, and here's where the event is, and here's what time to show up, and here's the butt we don't have the event ready to go, right? So like thousands of people get these flyers, everybody's like, yeah, we're going to the event, and then they show up and like nothing's happening. We have no food, the door's not even unlocked. That's kind of the difference between like running the ads and getting the awareness out there and finding the people. But then also you have to have like something created that they want that works, that converts when they actually get to the party, right? Yes, 100%. Okay, thank you. Thank you for validating my analogy. No problem.

The Biggest Meta Ads Mistakes

6:40

Okay, so let's talk about ads and what some of the common mistakes that you see people making with ads are. Yeah, I mean, the first one is really what we just talked about, right? Like it's using ads thinking it's gonna fix something that's broken or suddenly make people buy things that isn't validated that they don't necessarily need or want, right? So having that proven offer, that proven funnel, you know it's sold, you know, organically or however you're selling it, using that with ads, that's what's gonna work, right? So that's number one. Number two, and this is something I have seen time and time again, is using someone else's strategy. So just because something worked for someone else does not mean it's going to work for you. I have seen so many courses and course creators that are like, I ran this ad strategy, so now I'm gonna teach it to everyone. And here's the thing: they do not have the same offer as you. And even if they do, maybe you're taking their course on a particular funnel and you're building it the same way they did. They have a different audience. They have an established audience. They've been selling this long before they started running ads and before they started teaching you this ad strategy. You cannot take their same business model and ad strategy and replicate it to yours when you don't have the exact same number of sales, the same data that you've been sending back to Meta, the same audience size. They're not copy paste. And so one of the things that I am like I repeat it a thousand times over. Your ad strategy needs to be customized to your specific business, your offers, your goals, your budget, your audience, your audience size, your the health of your pixel, which is a piece of code that sends data between your website, sales pages, et cetera, back to Meta. All these things need to be customized to you and your business in order for you to have success with ads. Copying and pasting someone else's strategy does not mean you're going to copy and paste the same results. And I've had so many clients come to me after taking a course or working with a coach who was replicating something else, and they're like, I didn't get any results. And it's just, it puts a bad taste of ads in a lot of people's mouths, so to speak. And it's it's not that ads don't work for them, it's that they're not using the strategy that's designed for them. That is probably the biggest uh mistake I see. And alongside that, it's the you know Googling of things and using the wrong strategy for their business. You know, there's even Meta, you following Meta's prompts uh today, and we could spend hours talking about AI and ads. I'm currently doing a whole series on it over on Instagram. But Meta has invested millions of dollars into AI. So all of their recommendations inside of Ads Manager are pushing people to use their AI, pushing people to use Advantage Plus, which is their in-platform AI. From an objective standpoint, from an audience standpoint, doing different AI creative layers, like they are pushing it hard. They're even, they have this new up, what's not new anymore, but they have this thing called an opportunity score. And it can scare people if you do not know what it means and you're just in there and you're like, oh my gosh, my opportunity score is only 60%. Like I have so much room to grow. I have to do all these different things that it's telling me. Every single thing it's gonna tell you is to turn on Advantage Plus. But it's not always right for your business. And so this is a huge mistake I see people make. I I was just in one of my own clients' accounts, and it continuously gives me this prompt to say uh that I should increase or change our audience to include people 18 to 39 and to include men. Her membership is for women 40 plus. So no, I am not going to add in men. I'm not going to add in 18 to 40, 39. Like that's not her audience. So I don't care what reaching them is going to do for her, you know, for her ads, it's not going to align with her goals. The other day I went in to create a campaign for the same client. This one literally had me laughing out loud. It said, you should change your budget. You'll get more results if you increase your budget, of course. But the change it gave me, we were doing $40 a day, and it said to go up to $439 a day. $439 a day from $40. Meta does not know your goals, your business, or your budget, apparently. Or your budget. Like it doesn't care about any of these things. It cares about it, they are a business. It cares about their bottom line, their priorities, their prompts do not necessarily align with your business. So do not follow them blindly. And having the support of a strategist or understanding these things about the inner workings of ads manager is gonna make a huge difference in results because it you can have that guidance on what to listen to and what not to. Yeah. It's it blows my mind how incorrect their AI can be. Yeah. 439 is weirdly specific too. It was so specific. I like I I literally started laughing out loud, and my husband was like, is everything okay up there? I'm like, I this isn't. This is not this is insane. They gave me tons of content to create. I like went on a whole thing, but I mean, it's ridiculous. Some of these prompts. Yeah, yeah. There, I mean, this could be a whole other series of podcast episodes, like the limitations of AI. But I mean, I think I love what you said about not trying to copy someone else's strategy. I was laughing, flash, dying on the inside. Cause when I first years and years and years ago, um, I was a dating relationship coach. And my certification I got was still ridiculously expensive, and I'm going to tell you how to pay for it. But part of the appeal was like, we're also going to tell you how to build your business and how to get clients, and it's going to be amazing. And that entire section of the training was runoff, right? Because we had run out once we started for business. And we absolutely crossed it. And that was a totally different time, right? Like ads were at a different place. I don't know, it was probably like that I got my certification in like early 2020, maybe. So she had probably been around ads since like early 2000s, uh, which was a total different era where different things were working. I think it was much easier then. I think it

Meta AI Prompts You Should Ignore

13:18

was much cheaper than it just everything was different, right? And we're going to talk a little bit about what is changing with ads right now. But I think that's part of it too, is like, yeah, it worked for her when she did it two years ago, but how much has changed in two years? Probably quite a lot. Yeah, I mean, things change constantly. I mean, uh, when I launched my business, I've launched this business twice now. And the first time I launched it was during the pandemic, and ads were in a whole different ballgame back then. I mean, if you had success back then and you're trying to replicate those exact same things right now, you are in for a sore response because it is a very different ballgame. Even people, I have people coming to me all the time that are like, my ads used to work, but then late last year they stopped. Well, that's because Meta made a huge change in the entire ads ecosystem. So if your ads were working last year and you have not been keeping up with these changes,

Andromeda Changed Targeting And Creative

14:12

they're not going to work this year. Uh, one of the biggest things they changed is the algorithm that powers your ads. So in the past, we used to get really specific with who we were targeting on Meta. So we could, you know, layer in a bunch of different interests to get really niche into who we were targeting and have like a handful of creatives, but we didn't need that many. Right now, with this new update, it's called Andromeda, Meta relies really heavily on your creative to inform who to reach within your audience. Now, a big misconception there is that this now means that you can just use Advantage Plus, their other AI, or go really broad, just demo targeting, and then let your creative do, you know, the targeting. And that's what a lot of experts, I say in air quiz, because not everybody is the right kind of expert, but they're saying, yes, go do this. Broad's working for me, broad's working for me. Again, these people have very different audiences. So broad might work for some people whose offer is relevant to the masses or who has a ton of sales data. Like we're talking 50 sales a day, kind of tons of sales data to send back to Meta to say who their purchasers are. But if you don't have that volume, if you don't aren't consistently sending sales data back to Meta, you don't have a big audience, you don't have a big budget, that may not work for you. And so I still recommend for the majority of my clients that you need to still have some layer in uh the audience targeting in there, whether it's category or you know, deeper demographics or life stage or something, to be able to then live with your really, really specific messaging and volume and variety within that messaging to help Meta find who within your audience is likely to take your desired action. And so that's one of the biggest changes is you need to really hone in on that messaging and let your messaging really speak to who that person is that you're trying to reach, why they should, you know, what the benefits are of what you're offering them into order to get them to take your desired action. But pair that with the right type of targeting doesn't mean you can't test broad, but and that's you know, another part of my my framework is testing should be something that you're always doing. But you shouldn't just go broad because everyone's saying to go broad. It's not right for everyone. So that has been the biggest, one of the biggest changes in addition to all these AI levers that are constantly happening, is this switch from having to get really specific with your audiences to having to have this volume, variety, and extreme specificity in your messaging to inform your targeting essentially. Something that I've seen a lot of people who used to run ads do is um, you know, they were running one or two creatives and then just like letting their creatives run for a while. That's not working anymore. You have to refresh it, you have to have that variety formatted to figure out what's working. I'd say another thing that I've seen with Meta because it's relying a lot on the actions people are taking.

Why Lead Quality Needs Purchases

17:20

In the past, you used to be able to run lead gen, you know, free lead magnets in between launches, for example. Uh, and you might not have anything to sell to them for three months. And it was fine. But now you need to tell Meta who those buyers are much much sooner. Like the sooner you can tell them if that lead is converting into a buyer, the better quality your lead's going to be. So that long window of just doing free, free, free, building up my email list with no paid, and then just doing a big paid launch, that strategy, both from a funnel and an ads perspective, isn't working anymore. You need to be able to get people to buy even low ticket, like little things throughout in order to feed that back to Meta so that they know who the buyers are. That's going to help with lead quality. So that's another thing I'm seeing in one of the big changes over the last really six months. Yeah, that's interesting. Cause that's what I had always heard about meta ads was that it was actually more helpful to do like a long period of your lead magnet or your freebie or whatever it is, right? Because that's how you gather all that information and you tell Meta who you want and who wants you. And then you run the paid thing. But so it sounds like what you're saying is like it's not that you can't run ads to your free thing, but you want to intersperse that also with paid. Yeah, absolutely. So, like whether it's a tripwire funnel or a low-ticket funnel that you're doing, or even if it's like um, you know, you might do a free lead magnet, but maybe you do a low-ticket paid pop-up or something that happens, you know, it's a month or whatever it is. I mean, every strategy is different. And that's where coming up with the right funnel is so important when it comes to, you know, having the right ad strategy. They like we talked about earlier, they go hand in hand. But having opportunities for your your email list, for your audience to buy from you throughout the month, throughout, you know, the quarter, not just during a big launch, that's going to help feed that data faster to Meta. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, so we've established that if you have not run meta ads and you want to, and you feel like you're in that place where you have a proven offer and relatively structured funnel, obviously could always be improved and judged up. But um, so the answer is obviously higher Samantha, right? Because everything you just told me has just like boggled my mind. And now I'm like, no wonder people pay her. That's also something that you should pay ads too, right? Like they used to be like, I can probably figure this out myself. Like I've got Canva, I can answer these questions, I know who I'm looking for, I'll just run it for $20 a day and see what happens. And I mean, years and years and years ago, things did happen. And now I feel like it's so complicated, it's so hard to figure out on your own. It is. And that's why Meta is often pushing like the boost. Um, we didn't even talk about that. My goodness, I could go on for hours on that one. But like they feed that to everyone, you know. They I get it all the time too. You post something and it's like boost this post. Yeah. That's not running ads. Yeah. It's so much easier than going into ads manager, way less complicated. And it's not actually designed to get you business results. It's designed to get you like vanity metrics. Yeah. And um, you know, like we talked about earlier, Meta does things to align with their goals. You know, the more, the more you do things correctly on their platform, the more money you'll spend and therefore the money, more money they'll make. But that's not how they're pushing things out, right? Like they're pushing out what is go, what they believe is going to work for more of the masses and what's going to make them the most money. And so, you know, it's really about understanding how ads work, whether it's through working with someone I have done with you and done for you services. So it's learning it, being able to do it on your own or hiring it out. But trying to figure it out on your own can be so confusing, so overwhelming. It's just not straightforward anymore. I mean, even me as someone who's been doing this for a very long time, I go into Ads Manager and I go into my clients' accounts and sometimes they look different, like completely different because they roll changes out, not like all at once. They might roll something out to a handful of accounts and then trickle down. And so I will see things that are happening across different accounts at different times. They look different. It's one of the reasons why I have I have tried a couple of times to figure out how to create an ads course. And I am just like, besides the fact that I am so passionate about customizing things, and I just want to make sure that it is set up that way, I the amount of times you Have to re-record in order to get ads manager to look the right way is insane. And it's one of the reasons why people, when they take ads courses, they're very confused because if it's not updated regularly, it may not look the same, it might be very different. And I mean, it's just one of the many reasons why just not learning ads from a course is not always the best way to go. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So for people who have run meta ads before and didn't really get the results that they were hoping for, what advice do you have for them?

Fixing Weak Results And Setting Budget

22:32

So one of the things that I would say is first understand if it was your ads that weren't working or if there's something within your funnel. I actually created a scorecard that does just that. You literally plug in your funnel metrics, plug in your key at metrics for ads, and it score uh changes it into like red, yellow, green is stoplight to tell you where things need to be optimized. Uh I would also think about, you know, what when you were running your ads before, when was it? When were you having success? Was it before Q4 of 2025? Because that's when things, that's when Andromeda rolled out and things changed drastically. So if it was before then, I would strongly urge them to relook at that strategy, make sure they have that volume and variety. Um, or contact me, happy to look at it with you. And um, really make sure you're creating your strategy to align with the needs of Meta today. That's really the biggest thing I have seen for people who've had success before and are not anymore. It's because they haven't optimized their strategy to align with the needs of Andromeda. Yeah. That or their funnel isn't actually set up to convert with ads. Right. Awesome. I thought that was my last question, but then I just thought of another one because I feel like I, especially when I was building my business, I always was thinking like, we I don't know if other people think this way, but I think like paid ads are for like Coca-Cola. Paid ads are for, you know, like the big companies that have millions and millions of dollars to invest. And I noticed earlier you were talking about a client that had an ad that her budget was $40 a day. And so I just before we wrap up, wanted to circle back to that to see if my thinking is accurate in terms of like, do we have to have a big, huge budget in order to do ads successfully? No, you don't. Your budget needs to align with your goals. And so this is one of the things I have people ask me all the time, what should I spend on meta ads? I don't give blanket statements for it because it depends on your goals. And from there, we reverse engineer what your budget should be to help meet them. But your budget needs to align with your goals, the price of your offer, you know, your conversion metrics. That's for having that funnel metrics that have already worked, and that being able to understand what those metrics are is really helpful because it helps us figure out what the right ads budget is. But you don't have to have a massive budget. I have clients that spend, you know, $20 a day. I have clients that spend, you know, $50 a day. I've got ones that spend $100 a day or more. So, you know, it really again, it just is so dependent on your goals and you can have success with ads. You can get those consistent sales without having, you know, million-dollar budgets. Okay, good. I'm glad I asked that question. I love this conversation so much. This has been really helpful. I think there's just like so much, there's so much that goes into paid ads and so much like that we assume that we know or that the quote unquote experts are telling us that maybe isn't necessarily accurate.

Scorecard, Ads Call, And Where To Connect

25:28

So I feel like this has been very enlightening. Um if people want to get that uh successful ad scorecard that you mentioned, or they just want to connect with you, they want to learn more about you, they want to see what you're talking about on Instagram, what are the ways for them to connect with you? Yes. So I will get you the link to include in the show notes for the successful ad scorecard. It's a great resource if you've been running ads and you just want to see, you know, what you can optimize, or even if you're thinking about getting started and you want to make sure that your funnel is set up for success, plugging in those funnel metrics, as long as you've got those greens, you'll be good to go to get started with ads. Uh so I'll make sure that that link is in the show notes for you. And then if you want to learn what it's like to have the support of someone uh who can give you that ads, proper ad strategy, either teach you ads or take it off your plate. I can also include the link to my uh ads call. You can we can hop on a quick call and walk through what success with ads will look like for your business. And the best way to connect with me is on Instagram at Samantha Find Digital. Awesome. I will put all of those links in the show notes. I will be scheduling my call with you for sure to talk more about doing ads for my business. And thank you again so much for coming. This has been really helpful. Thank you so much for having me.