Ep 33: I've Audited 100+ Business Ad Accounts - Here's What I Found

After auditing hundreds of ad accounts and running a group program with 200+ local business owners, Nicole's seen exactly what separates the ads that flop from the ones that take off. In this episode, you'll learn the five most common Facebook ads mistakes local service businesses make — and the five things the most successful accounts all have in common. You'll walk away with a clearer picture of what's holding your ads back and what simple shifts can start generating real leads. Whether you're brand new to Meta ads or you've been at it a while, this one's packed with honest, practical insight straight from the trenches.

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 — Welcome back + why Nicole's been MIA for two months

02:15 — How running a podcast mirrors how clients feel about advertising

04:00 — Nicole's background: agencies, local ads, and launching Hometown ADvantage

07:30 — Life update: done-for-you services, Ready Set Launch, and Q1 revenue recap

10:45 — Top 5 struggles: #1 — The Meta Business Suite nightmare explained

15:00 — Struggle #2 — Running ads that look like ads (and why that kills results)

18:20 — Struggle #3 — Not testing enough ad variations

22:10 — Struggle #4 — Not tracking results (and how to get creative with it)

27:00 — A note on realistic expectations for Facebook ads

30:00 — Top 5 successes: #1 — Meta lead form ads (and why Nicole changed her mind on them)

34:30 — Success #2 — Testing 3+ ads that speak to different types of clients

38:45 — Success #3 — Advertising a clear, specific offer

42:00 — Success #4 — Consistency (even when it's messy)

44:30 — How to work with Nicole: Done-for-You ad management + Ready Set Launch intensive

🔗 Links

🌐 Website: www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com

📸 Instagram: www.instagram.com/nicoleeldridge_ads

🚀 Book a Ready, Set, Launch 7-Day Intensive: https://tidycal.com/mp0lnv3/ready-set-launch

📞 Book a Call for Monthly Ad Management: https://portal.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/public/appointment-scheduler/690422e2baa8d706bfe38dc0/schedule

🎓 Free Local Ads Workshop: www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/localads

💻 Join Hometown ADvantage: www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/hometown

Transcript

0:00

Hello. Welcome to the Hometown Advantage Podcast. Oh my goodness. If you're someone that's been following along listening to all my episodes, first of all, I love you. Second of all, you may or may not have noticed that I haven't posted a new podcast episode. I gotta look, oh. Eek almost two months. I can't even believe that much. Time has gone by, but I know if you're listening to this. You get it. And honestly, I really like to use the podcast and my goal with the podcast to help me see from my own client's point of view, right? So a lot of times when you are just all in serving so many different clients with what you are really good at. You get to this point where you feel like you've seen it all, you've heard it all, you hear the same things from the same people. No, you hear the same things, but from all different people. And sometimes it's easy to forget what it truly feels like or felt like to be on the other side. So this is especially for if you were someone who STR used to struggle with. Something that you now help people with? So what I'm getting at here is that the podcast is something that's really hard for me to make time for. It's really uncomfortable sometimes for me to hop on the microphone and just start talking. Sometimes it feels really overwhelming and like a lot of work and a lot of steps. And sometimes it can feel pointless, right? I am sitting at my desk in my tiny little office speaking to nobody, but that doesn't negate the fact that I understand how important it is that I do enjoy it once I get to it, and I can make it fun because I can make anything fun, right? And that. I know it helps grow my business in a really impactful way. So anyways, sometimes the way I feel about the podcast is how I know a lot of my clients or potential clients are feeling about advertising. It's overwhelming. It's hard to imagine how you're gonna fit it in your schedule when you literally have such a packed schedule. And my takeaway from all of that is that you are not going to be perfect with it and get to the whole process down to a science within a month, within three months, maybe within six months. It is a journey. My podcast is now over. A year old, and I haven't quite gotten there yet, but guess what? I do have 32. This will be 33 episodes out, which is 33 times better than having no episodes out. So I celebrate that. I focus on that, and I focus on the fact that sometimes. Business gets crazy, life gets crazy, and I don't hold myself to an impossible standard of complete and utter consistency, just that I always jump back in, even if it's two months later. Okay, so let's do a little update on what's been going on. If you don't know me, hi, my name's Nicole. I am a local advertising strategist, and what I really specialize in is helping local, small business owners run strategic and wildly profitable paid ads on meta Facebook and Instagram. And the very, very quick version of my story is that I worked in advertising agencies working with small businesses, and then I realized pretty quickly that I really wanted to go out on my own because I could not have as much control or say over what was happening behind the scenes in these advertising agencies that I worked for, and I did not like what was happening. So I started taking clients of my own and they were all local small business owners. I also worked in an agency where we worked with a lot of online business owners, scaling courses in group programs, and we were spending, 30 to 50 KA month in ads. So I had this experience scaling online group programs. And I had this experience on how to make local ads with smaller budgets work really well, and I saw a need and a gap in the space when it comes to advertising programs. They all seemed like they were for online businesses and they weren't relevant for local. So I was working for advertising agencies. I was taking my own clients. I was. Sleeping probably four hours a night. I have two small kids. I was losing my mind because if you think, keeping up with social media and advertising for your own business is time consuming. I was doing a lot at once. I had nine of my own clients with no help at the time'cause I didn't know how to hire or delegate plus contracting jobs with advertising agencies. And I knew if I could get this program off the ground, it would help so many people, first of all, and it could also help me free up some time. So I added that to my plate to get the program created, launch it off. The first round of the program, enrolled three people. It was amazing. I actually used to be a elementary school teacher in another life. I felt like I was getting back to my teaching roots and what I was really good at. I was combining these advertising skills that I had acquired with my tried and true teaching instincts that I honestly was just bored with. And it felt absolutely perfect. Now, there's so much work and maintenance that comes with keeping up a group program and making sure the standard of it is. As high as I need it to be, and so that my clients get the absolute best results. So when it started taking off, I actually decided to stop taking and working with one-to-one clients all together momentarily so that I could focus all of my effort on making sure the program was perfect, providing the best customer service, updating the curriculum as needed, supporting clients one-to-one as needed. And it was lovely. I hired eventually several people, but one of the people was my online business manager, and she really made it a goal to say, Hey, I'm gonna help you get your done for you services back off the ground. It's not gonna be stressful like it was once upon a time because you've got me, you've got ad managers to support you, and we're gonna systematize it so that it's much better. And that's what we did. And it's been about six months since we got that up off the ground. And it's been crazy. But in the best way, like we've gotten lots of great new clients, we launched a seven day intensive offer called Ready Sent Launch. I'll talk more about that in the rest of this episode. And I actually just did a little Q1 reflection. I think I'll do a full podcast episode on that, but my done for you services have brought in almost$50,000 in revenue already this year, less than three months into the year. And they are both offers and services that didn't even exist just over six months ago. So that is all amazing, but. It is pulling my time in a couple different directions, so we're working on onboarding our third junior ads manager to support me with all the client work. There's a lot of training that goes into the way I do things to make sure that our standard of care and our client results stay tip top priority. And as ads Manager is always changing, so it's been really great to have these clients and to be able to keep up very firsthand with exactly what's working and what's not. But anyways, that is where I've been. I've been really just spending my time delivering and focusing on client work, which I know is where a lot of you are too. And listen, I, this is important and this goes for my hometowns and my done for you clients. That's where I've been putting all my focus right now. And of course there's times and seasons for that, but ultimately in the end, I still believe that as a CEO and as a business owner that's scaling to seven figures, we absolutely have to be able to do both. We have to be able to prioritize client success and experience and work. On the business and not just in the business as they say. So marketing, advertising, systems, hiring, all of that. And that's what we're getting back into. That's why I'm here. So thank you for sticking around for that little story time of me justifying myself. But also it's just to share with you that we are all there and there are seasons, and I'm. Really not knocking myself for being off my game as far as marketing and advertising for the past two months. Things have slowed though because of the lack of lead flow and things like that. I'm gonna do another episode on that in my most recent launch and some things that went wrong there because my focus has been elsewhere. But it's part of the game. Part of the game, baby. So today I wanna talk about the top five struggles I have found after auditing hundreds of business ad accounts and the top five successes that I've found from the ones that are doing really well. As I mentioned, I run a group program. We have had 200 people come through that program. I have also audited dozens of ad accounts of people not in the program. And it really gets to this point where over time you start seeing those patterns. Patterns across the board of everyone who's doing these five things seem to be struggling, but everyone who's doing these other five things seem to be taking off and just shooting for the moon. Okay, so we're gonna dive in, starting with the struggles, and I know you're gonna find one of these that you can relate to, if not all of them, because the very first one is the Meta Business Suite nightmare. My heart rate elevates a little bit, just saying those words, meta Business suite, nightmare. And listen, I feel like me and my team have become complete meta business suite experts. If that's a thing. It's actually impossible to be an expert in it because it's impossible to learn it because a lot of it doesn't make sense. Everyone's meta business suite looks different. They have different buttons and their buttons are in different places. There's different rules popping up, different bugs all the time, so there's really no such thing as an expert in it. But if there could be, we would be as close as it could get. Because not only have I audited so many accounts, I have set up so many Meta Business Suite accounts, and I've seen it all. So a couple things with this. I like to explain it as your meta business suite is like a binder, so you're probably listening to this and not watching, but like I have a binder in front of me. Actually, I didn't plan this. Your meta business suite is like the binder and your assets, which are the things that you can advertise with and the different things you can own. Inside of meta, like your Facebook page, your Instagram page, your ad account, your pixel, or your dataset, those are like the individual papers that you put inside of your. Okay, so the Business suite is the thing that houses it all and everything that you own should live inside of there. So some common problems that come up with this is that you don't have a Meta Business Suite account. You would find out by going to Meta No business.facebook.com. And you can see your little name in the top left with a dropdown, and you can click that and you can create a business suite account if you don't already have one, you can see if all your assets are in there by going to the settings button and you can see all the different assets you can have in there. You can have people, you can have ad accounts, you have Facebook page, Instagram, all of that. So sometimes people have more than one meta business suite or more than one binder, and they have some of their pages or assets living in one suite and some living in the other. That's problematic. Some people haven't created a business ad account yet, and they're running ads from what's called a personal ad account, which you're automatically given when you sign up for a Facebook account for some reason. And as a business, you're supposed to run ads from a business account. But how are people supposed to know that? This is so ridiculous. I'm telling you. So a lot of times, your ads aren't gonna be as successful if you're running from a personal account, if you're running, not running them to Instagram because your Instagram isn't linked as an asset if your pixel isn't set up. All of these things, this is why my team offers an ad account set up fast action bonus when I launch the program. We do this almost every time. I've been advised to change up the fast action offer, but people need this so bad that I don't, this will likely be an offer until we just have too many people signing up that we're not able to do it for them, which honestly, sometimes we're getting close. I had to set up, me and my team had to set up 40 last launch, and sometimes it can take a while and there can be tech issues. The good thing about having my team help you set it up is that we're all meta verified, so we have a direct chat link to real people at Meta that help us get things sorted out for you. Okay? So that's like the technical one that most people struggle with. As far as the ads themself, this is the big thing. That I notice can make all the difference when you run ads that look like ads. This is my saying. We don't run ads that look like ads. Your results will struggle. So the thing about advertising on meta, people talk about how amazing it is, how great it is how many people are on there. Your people are on there. The reason it's so great is because you can create ads that don't look like ads. That's why it's great. So if you are advertising on meta and your ads look like ads, which I can explain what that means in a minute. You are not harnessing the power of meta ads correctly. Ads that look like ads usually are like graphics or flyer type looking things. A lot of times they'll have a business logo on them instead of a person. They'll have a lot of text on the photo. I feel like you have to know what I'm talking about. It's just screaming ad, the way we do ads in my corner of the world is we create ads that don't look like ads. So think literally just a selfie doesn't look like an ad. It looks like something that would already pop up on someone's feed. And if we're saying the right thing in the copy part of the ad, which is like the caption or the text, we're drawing in the right people, or a reel, a simple video. With text on top, that looks like something that commonly pops up in people's feeds as well. If your, you or your agency is still using a Z graphics, you are not harnessing the power of meta ads correctly. Okay? The next very common mistake, the third very common mistake I see is that we're not testing enough different things. So another beauty of meta ads is that you can try a bunch of different things without actually spending more money. So you can say, my budget is$20 a day and here's four different things to try. Let's try this reel that speaks to pain 0.1. Let's try another reel that speaks to pain 0.2. Let's try a photo that speaks to pain 0.1, and then let's try a carousel that speaks to pain 0.2. Okay. For example, I just got off a call with a woman who owns an acupuncture clinic. Very successful acupuncture studio clinic, and their bread and butter is helping women struggling with infertility. So she was describing how there's a lot of times two different types of women who come in seeking acupuncture to help with their infertility. The woman who's just been trying quietly at home for a year, they haven't really gone the IVF route yet, and they're desperately trying to get pregnant naturally. And they've discovered that acupuncture is a way that they could possibly do that. Then there is group two, which are the women who went quicker to the IVF route and now they want to improve their chances of IVF working. And people recommended acupuncture for that. So we have different. Types of people that we have to write our ads to. People who haven't gone the IVF route yet. people who are wanting to figure this out without going the IVF route. People who want to improve their chances of IVF working. Okay, so we're gonna do a reel for each of those people. We're gonna do maybe a carousel for each of those people. And then we're gonna pick some photos of the owner, of the company, of her staff doing acupuncture of their space, and we're also going to come up with several different angles on top of that to pair with those photos. Okay? You don't have to test a hundred different things, but at least test three different things. If you're a wedding photographer, think about what types of problems are people having, or what types of things are they looking for in a wedding photographer? Are they looking for the ultimate experience and to have somebody they're comfortable with following them around all day on their wedding? Okay. We're gonna write an ad about why you're the best person to create that experience with. Are they just looking for a certain type of photo, classic photos that they can show their grandkids someday? What's right and add to that? Are they looking for someone who can give them a lot of direction because they're really worried about their own? Photogenic, if that's a word. And being directed, I'm not sure, I'm not a wedding photographer, but think about those things and write ads for those different things and test what's getting the most engagement and response. Okay? Struggle number four is they're not tracking results. Or maybe they don't know how to track their results. So when it comes to results, and when I ask somebody, how did your ads do? And they tell me, I don't know. What I know off the bat is that they don't know what to expect from their ads. Okay? From any marketing perspective at all, the expectation should be the absolute end goal, which is book more clients. So if you ran ads for months and you didn't book any new clients, it did not work. If you ran ads for months and booked several new clients, they probably did pretty well then, especially if you made money on the back end of those ads. Okay, so I wanna talk about expectations, but. The big point here is that they're not tracking results. So I recently audited an account and I saw they were running Messenger ads. It is for a beauty business. She has some different offers, front end offers for people to come in the door with. Alls the person has, all the person on the other side has to do is click send message, they can get them booked. I saw she brought in like 72. New messages. So I asked how many of those people actually booked an appointment she did not know. Okay. So that's huge because if it's a$200 entry level offer, I'm gonna do some math on my phone here. And she had 72 messages and 20% of them came in. That would be about 14 new clients. Times that by 200, it's about$2,800 in revenue. I don't remember how much she spent. Probably a couple hundred bucks. Okay? We can do different math like that to see if it's working, because here's the deal with advertising front end offers. The point is not always to make a ton of money back. It depends on your business model, right on the front end, but to bring new clients in, to get visibility, to gain momentum, to then make recurring revenue month after month or every couple months on the backend. But we have to know our numbers. We have to track our results to know if things are working or not, because if they're not working, we know we can turn them off. If they are working, we know we can keep them on, right? So you have to get creative in how you're going to track, because for local businesses, it is a lot harder to track, and it's never gonna be a hundred percent accurate. You have to just get. Generalizations, right? Sometimes that means coming up with an offer that's only for meta ads. Sometimes it means asking people as early on as you can where they found you, not gonna be a hundred percent accurate, but we're gonna get, we're closer than if we're not tracking at all. So this isn't an all or nothing thing. Sometimes we just have to get creative with what we're gonna put in place to try and track. How many new clients are coming in from Meta ads specifically and only you are gonna be the best person to come up with ideas for that. You can also head to Claude or chat Chi PT and ask for ideas, and you gotta just try stuff. That's how it works. Okay. Let's do a quick note on expectations before we move into the most successful people I see. Sometimes people's expectations are way off and it goes both ways, right? Some people think it's crazy when they start getting leads in clients within the first week of running ads, and then some people think it's crazy that they haven't booked 10 new clients in their first week of running ads. So we gotta balance the expectations. And for me, if I make more money than I spend, that's all I care about as number one. That's my expectation. Make more money than I spend over a set amount of time. I would say you, you should definitely be making money back after two months of consistently running ads. You should have made more than you've spent in the past two months. The only thing is that it is a balancing act. You should be getting leads right away when you launch your ads and that data and what's happening with those leads can help you clean up. The actual end result, right? So ads are always gonna help get you traction and then you have to use that traction, that momentum, that data to optimize. But you have to get started for it. To start. I, so I have one client. She is a behavioral therapist for kids with autism. And she was like booking new clients right away. And I remember she's I did not expect this to work this fast. Of course, that's my favorite type of client'cause we get to surprise and delight them. I have another who was booking in new clients for music lessons and he spent$5 a day for two weeks and he booked two new clients that were going to spend$200 a month. So he made money on the front end and he is gonna make much more. Over the next couple months, as long as they stayed. And he expressed to me that it didn't work as well as he thought it did. So that just reminded me that people's expectations are all over the board. Because for me spending$5 a day for two weeks and booking$400 worth of clients just for that month, let alone the next couple months. Was amazing results. Okay, let's talk about the top five things I see in all of these accounts I've audited that have made people successful. The very first one is a technical behind the scenes strategy that's I'm seeing work lately a lot, which is meta lead form ads. So actually when I started my program, the meta lead formats were my least favorite type of ad, but they have switched, they've become my favorite type of ad, which goes back to the importance of always testing, trying new things, and honestly being connected to somebody who sees the trends and the strategies that are working well. Because as soon as I see it, all of my clients get to know about it too. I have a client named Craig, who's a personal trainer, and he came into my program. He got his first round of ads up, but I was really trying to push him to get the lead form ads up, and I helped him map out what to say, how to structure his reels. How to set up the form step by step, exactly what settings to use in his ad manager, and he crushed it. Because here's the thing, I think he brought in like 10 leads over a two week period, but he signed. Like three new clients at once and he's a high ticket personal trainer that goes to people's homes and keeps them accountable, gives'em nutrition plans, all of these things. And he put in our Slack channel that he ran his lead form ad for seven days, generated 10 qualified leads. From those 10 leads, booked four consult calls. Enclosed three of the consult calls. He said he's never had more than one client start in a week, let alone three, and it feels like he has a system that works. He spent$150 in ad spend over those seven days, and his three new clients is coming out to$3,600 a month in recurring revenue. He said this is a huge shift from relying solely on word of mouth and referrals over the years and a major relief, and gives him the confidence that he can replicate and scale these results and potentially grow the business beyond just himself, which has always been one of the goals of his. He just didn't know how to consistently bring in new leads in a way that would make sense to bring on more personal trainers. So he's had major success with lead form ads. My client, Danielle, owns a cleaning company, has had major success with lead form ads. She is now scaling her business to hire more cleaners. She's starting a new location all through meta lead form ads. Of course, there's a lot more that goes into a successful lead form ad. It is not just about slapping up a form. They have other things working for them really well, like good, creative, good copy, a good offer, consistency, all these other things that I'm gonna talk about for my next point. And that's success. Number two is testing three plus ads at a time that speak to all different people. So I got ahead of myself and touched on this in the struggles with the people who aren't testing anything, But it just brings the idea home that the people who are having the most success are trying different things all at once. And when I say testing different things, the best place you can start with testing is just creating content for those different types of people. So I actually have another personal training client. His name's David and. His ads took a minute to get converting. He would get leads. They were pretty expensive. They weren't quality and we really had to do some finagling and testing and going back to basics, and I asked him, what kinds of things do people hire you for? He said, A main one is accountability. People need accountability. The second one is privacy. People just want to work out in the privacy of their own home. They don't want to go to a gym in public. Another one is just the convenience piece, and then the fourth reason that people might do it is because they want real results that are tailored to them. They're not trying to follow some generic diet or personal training plan. They want that one-to-one attention. Okay? We're gonna write ads for those four different people. When it comes to the visuals, he just had photos of himself, videos of himself training people, videos of him training himself, videos of him, like creating a nutrition plan, different behind the scenes things, even if he had to set it all up. And make it look like he was personal training somebody or make it look like he's working out. It doesn't matter. It's just that the visual helps people connect to the actual person that they're going to be buying from. Testing those things is really what took it over the edge for him, and now he is beyond busy as well and looking to hire more personal trainers since he has this consistent lead generation tool. The third thing I see in all successful accounts is that they're advertising a very clear offer. A lot of times when I say offer people fuse it with like promotion or sale of some sort, and that's not what I mean. An offer is what you're telling somebody. You will give them in exchange for what they need to give you, which is a price. So we have to get creative and strategic with that front end offer. A lot of times it might look like a free call, a free quote, free consult. Maybe it is. If you come in and visit my store and buy something, you get an added gift. If you say you saw this from a Facebook ad. Or we have a limited time sale happening. You need to talk about this in your ads. Otherwise, people don't always know what they're signing up for so they don't sign up. So with Craig's example, yes, he does free consult calls, but he said, Hey, this is who I help. This is how I help them. Many of the people that I work with have tried this, and this before, and it just doesn't work for them because of this, and this. But I've got you covered because when you do personal training with me, I will come to your home. I will create you a personalized nutrition plan and all the different features. It all starts with a free consult. Fill out the information, let's hop on a call, make sure we're the right fit. Okay, so he's talking about his offer. That people will want, that we want people to buy after opting in for the ad, but then also making it a lower barrier to entry by offering that free call at the start. So you have to be clear on what you offer people, and you have to be able to explain it clearly. That's how you create ads that convert. The last one is honestly the least sexy of them all, but it's that they're consistent and steady. I don't even mean that you have to be running ads all the time, but what I talked about at the top of this podcast where even if you set ads down for a little bit, you always come back and you don't set them and forget them. Unfortunately, now they do work a lot harder and a lot faster than other marketing tools, and they do require more. They do allow for more hands off than, say, organic posting and blogging and all these things, but you do have to understand what's happening behind the scenes in order to optimize so you can't completely turn things off and just shut your brain off and expect them to just completely grow your business. So people who are committed to learning advertising, to growing their business, even if it doesn't always look the prettiest like me with my inconsistent podcast episodes are the ones who are winning. Now, like I said, we have the privilege of seeing what's working and what's not across so many different ad accounts because of the way I support Hometown Advantage members and our done for you members and our done for you clients. We actually have two ways you can work for us in the done for you capacity. One is we can take over full management of your ads. Do all of this for you, think strategically for you. We create your campaigns. We create new campaigns every month or so. We run the full system, visibility ads, lead gen ads, retargeting ads for you. We consistently switch them out. We create high quality content between reels and your copy, and we report on your results back to you once a week and tell you what we're thinking based on those results, and then we go ahead and make the changes for you. So we are your full strategic advertising team. Working with you as the main person responsible for your ad account. We are taking new clients for April and may start dates, so please reach out to me if you are interested in done for you management. We can chat through email, chat and dms or you can book a call and we can talk face to face. We also are doing seven day launch intensives. So you come in on a Monday, we meet, we talk about your offer. We prep a strategy for you, and then me and my team write your ads for one campaign, your lead generation campaign. Create your reels, create your carousels, and we launch them in ads manager for you, and then you manage them from there. We also keep a private Slack channel open for a month after we launch your ads, in case you have questions in case you wanna report back on your results, and we can give you consulting and advice and ideas on things to try and change. Based on how the ads we launch for you are doing, this is a great alternative to done for you monthly ad management because our ad management is a higher price and it's a three month commitment versus the one time seven day intensive price, which is$1,900 just one time. And we can split that up into a two month payment plan if we have enough time before your intensive is booked. Also, if you are a hometown advantage student listening to this, you get$400 off the price, making an intensive$1,500 for you instead of the 1900. We have a couple openings left for April, but these do go fast and several for me. So I'm gonna put the link in the show notes, links to everything are also on my website, nicole eldridge media.com, and in the link in my bio on Instagram, which is Nicole Eldridge ads. Please reach out with any questions. Make sure you get in and get booked for either. A call for done for you ads management or your intensive to make sure that we still have space.'cause I'm gonna start pushing these for the next couple weeks and like I said, they go quick. Once I do that, I am so happy to be back and I will see you on the next one.