Ep 6: How to Know Your Ads Are Working

🎙️ Wondering if your local business Facebook ads are actually working? In this data-driven episode of Hometown Advantage, I'm sharing my 3-step framework to determine if your ads are delivering real results (and what to do if they're not).

You'll discover:

• The #1 question to ask yourself first (hint: it's simpler than you think)
• How to set up tracking systems that actually work for local businesses
• The key performance indicators (KPIs) that reveal the truth about your ads

I'm also sharing real success stories from my clients like Jen (who booked $600 worth of detailing services from just $27 in ad spend) and Melissa (who's seeing a 7x return for her brother's electrical company).

🔥 PODCAST LISTENER SPECIAL: DM me "podcast promo" on Instagram for $200 OFF my 3-month Hometown Advantage program! (Limited time offer)

💡 Ready to stop guessing and start seeing real results from your Facebook ads? Join my Launch Your Local Ads mini-course to get started: [INSERT LINK]

📱 Connect with me: Instagram: www.instagram.com/nicoleeldridge_ads
Email: nicole@nicoleeldridgemedia.com Join Hometown Advantage: https://hello.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/course

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to episode four of Hometown Advantage, a podcast for local business owners where we don't just focus on views and visibility. We prioritize turning social media scrollers into actual paying customers for our local businesses. I'm Nicole Eldridge. I'm a marketing strategist that's supported now hundreds of business owners with Facebook and Instagram ads. I changed my little authority statement from over 100 business owners to now hundreds of business owners because my ads for my Launch Your Local Ads mini course have been blowing up. It's been so fun. So if you haven't taken that course yet, you should. It walks you through step by step how to launch a visibility ad for your local business. The visibility ad is the first step that I teach local business owners inside of my program. It's not the ad that's going to get you a bunch of leads and new customers, but it is an important ad to have rolling while you are running other types of ads and retargeting ads and implementing the complete strategy. So, with that mini course you get Facebook group access for feedback from me, there's a bonus module on a second type of ad called the local follower ad, and I've been getting great feedback on it, so that has been so fun. It is crunch time over here at my house because my family is prepping for a Disney World trip, which is so crazy, I never thought I'd take my kids to Disney World at their ages, they're three and one, but my husband. Works for a company that's completely remote and they pay for families to go on these trips and every year. So we were obviously not going to pass that up. They pay for the flights, they pay for the hotel, they pay for The Disney World tickets. We're going for two days. I'm so excited. Um, and then we're going to stay in Florida a little bit longer and just enjoy the sunshine. So that's kind of where my brain is headed after this podcast episode. Okay, let's get to it. I did a poll asking about possible podcast episode topics and Knowing if your ads are working was a clear winner. So I'm going to dive into my thoughts on this. I have three steps you can walk through, and right here, right now, some of them, to know if your ads are working. Let's start with the very first one. Let's just get right to it. My first go to for knowing if your ads are working is to answer this one specific question. Are you getting new business? If the answer is yes, I'm going to say your ads are working. If the answer is no, I'm going to say they're not. Now, you may be thinking, Yeah, but I don't know exactly if the new business is coming from the ads. So, we're going to talk about this in the next steps, but Here's what I want to say first. If you weren't running ads strategically, and now you are, and now you have new business that you didn't have before, we can pretty safely say it's because of the ads. So, my client Jen owns a car detailing business here in Michigan, and when she turned her first ads on, that she learned inside my program, She felt an immediate uptick in the phone ringing at her shop and bookings going on the calendar, like within days. So she didn't have exact tracking, a way to check specifically who's coming from ads and who's not. But the ads turned on and the phone started ringing more. So that is one way to know. So, the ads are working, right? Step two to knowing if your ads are working is to make sure that you do have systems set up to at least loosely track who's coming in from the ads. So with most of the ads I teach inside my program, the ads will do this for you. Like when you're running lead generation ads. Specifically, you can then track back and record who has come from the ads and who has come from somewhere else. For example, my client Melissa runs ads for her brother's electrical company and she is running a lead gen ad that she learned inside of my program, which is where they run their ads through Messenger. And those people who started messaging her from her Messenger ads have gone on to book electrical jobs. So they know that Their ads are working that way. They can say this job came directly from an ad. Same with my client, Misty. She owns a luxury aesthetic studio and learned how to do a different type of lead gen ad with me. We did have to test several different types of things that I teach to find something that works for her, but once we found it, she now gets new local followers and new messages every day to her Instagram, and then she books several of those people that are in her DMs every week as new clients. So she knows that she has new business. It's coming straight from our ads. So sometimes your business isn't going to be running an ad like this where you can track back. So you might need to create an ad specific offer that whenever someone inquires about it you know they came from an ad because that's the only place you promote it. Sometimes it can also be just as simple as asking people where they heard about you. Um, that's better than nothing, although it will never be completely accurate. Also because people don't usually know or remember if they did find you on social media, if it was like an ad or organic or what have you. Usually we can assume it was an ad since our organic reach is crap. Okay, step three and the last step is to know your KPIs or key performance indicators. So we have ad specific ones that we look at that help us know if people are even interested in our ad, if we're speaking to the right people. And then we track things on the back end too, like how many booked jobs or clients came from those ads, how much revenue did we make from those clients? And then we divide. Our ad spend to get our return numbers. So, my client Melissa that I mentioned who runs ads for her brother's electrical company, she spent about 400 on ads, but booked, I think she told me it was like 3, 000 maybe, on jobs. So her ads are bringing an overall 7x or a little bit higher return. My client Jen, the one with the auto detailing shop, at one point in my program she had only spent 27 and booked three appointments for 200. Straight from ads, which is a 22x return. Knowing these numbers helps them know exactly what type of ads to run, how much to spend, what kind of creative to use, what to say in their copy, and most of all, it just helps them have confidence that their ads are working exactly how they should be. They're not going through their days so nervous about spending. 10 a day, 20 a day, 50 a day, because they know that their ads are working for them and their ads are making them money, are growing their business, bringing them new business. They're not just continuing to throw spaghetti at the wall and pray that something works. They are able to have confidence because the data doesn't lie. The numbers show them that. But ultimately, They didn't get to that point on their own, because they're not ads experts and they don't claim to be. They are experts in their field where they spend time. While I spend time on ads, learning exactly what works and what doesn't, basically so you don't have to, right? When they joined my program, they committed to watching. The modules where I lay it all out as clear as day and then learning and trying things and coming to the calls and showing me the ads they created, showing me the numbers that are showing up in their ad manager after they launched them so they could start filling their calendars and client lists quickly. They weren't messing around. They didn't want to keep guessing anymore. They wanted to know exactly what to do. I told them. They did it. And it worked. So, If you don't know for sure one way or another, if your ads are working, you're never going to stop spinning your wheels here in this part of your business. So if you're ready to learn the local ad strategies that work, get expert feedback and support in your back pocket for three months while you build and launch and grow, I want to invite you to join us inside Hometown Advantage now. When you're not in there, you are wasting time and ad spend on strategies you don't even know if they work or not. This is an amazing opportunity. to get expert guidance without the expert price tag. The program's 1, 500 or three payments of 500. And I just decided for being a podcast listener, I'd love to offer you a special promo if you want to join. in the next couple weeks. So this isn't going to last forever, but if you DM me on Instagram or send me an email just saying podcast promo, I would love to send you a code for 200 off. Like I said, I'm not going to make it last forever, but if you're listening to this within the next couple of weeks, definitely reach out and we can talk about what things might look like for you running ads using the strategies I teach. Thank you for being here and I'll see you next week.