The Three Things Most Business Owners Get Wrong When Running Meta™ Ads

In this episode of Abundant Funnels, Jayne breaks down the three simple but costly mistakes she sees coaches, consultants and course creators making with their Meta™ Ads over and over again. These are not technical issues. They are fundamental decisions that quietly drain budget and make campaigns feel harder than they need to be.

Jayne explains why choosing the wrong campaign objective can send Meta™ in completely the wrong direction, why obsessing over targeting is rarely where your results are won in 2026, and why stronger creative testing matters so much more than endless tiny tweaks. She also talks about how to tell whether your ad is really the problem, or whether the drop-off is happening on your landing page after the click.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why objective choice matters more than most people realise.
• The difference between optimising for clicks and optimising for leads.
• Why detailed targeting and lookalikes are no longer the main levers they once were.
• How your ad copy and creative now do more of the targeting work.
• Why bold testing is usually more effective than small tweaks.
• How to check whether your landing page is causing a high cost per lead.
• What foundations matter most when you want Meta™ Ads to convert better.

Connect with Jayne:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/webonize

Website: https://webonize.com.au/

FREE Resource - The Facebook™ Ads
$3 Lead Formula: https://learn.webonize.com.au/leadformula

Join Abundant Ads Academy: https://courses.webonize.com.au/abundantadsacademy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm Jane Day and welcome to Abundant Funnels. I help coaches, course creators, and online experts get high-quality leads and consistent sales without relying on guesswork, constant content creation, or$10 leads. In fact, I'm known for getting some of the best cost per lead results for quality buyers in the industry. This show is where we break down the ad strategy, the funnel, and the numbers so you can grow your revenue and buy back your time in a way that's actually sustainable. Let's get started. Hi there and welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 20. It has been an absolute honour to bring these episodes to you, and it is amazing to receive such wonderful feedback from those of you that have been listening in. I'm always open to suggestions, so if there is anything in particular you would like me to cover in any upcoming episodes, then please let me know. In this episode, I want to talk about the mistakes I see coaches, consultants, and course creators making with their meta ads over and over again. And I'm not talking about complicated technical mistakes. I'm talking about the fundamentals, the things that quietly drain your budget and make it look like your ads don't work. When actually the fix is closer than you think. So let's get into it. The first mistake is not choosing the right campaign objective. This one matters more than people realize because Meta is always trying to give you the result you ask for. That's how it works. You tell it what you want and it goes out and finds the people most likely to do that thing. So if you want leads, people opting into your list, you need to be running a leads campaign or a conversion campaign optimized for that opt-in event. If you set your objective to traffic or website clicks instead, Meta will go and find people who are likely to click, not people who are likely to hand over their name and email address, just people who click things. Those are not the same people. I see this come up with podcast and blog content too. If you want people to go and read a blog post or listen to a podcast episode, don't run an engagement campaign for it. That's going to optimize for likes and comments on the ad itself, not for people clicking through to your content. Get your objective right first. It sounds basic I know, but it is one of the most common and costly errors I come across. The second mistake, and this is a big one right now, is spending too much time and energy worrying about your targeting options. I want to be really direct about this. Obsessing over detailed targeting interests and lookalike audiences is largely a waste of your time in 2026. Meta almost always expands beyond whatever interests or audiences you enter. The detailed targeting you select has become more of a suggestion than a strict boundary. So what is actually doing your targeting now? And if you've been listening to my podcast, you probably know the answer to this. It's your creative and your ad copy. The words you'll use, the hook you lead with, the pain point you speak to, the person you're clearly writing for. That is what signals to Meta who should see your ads. When your ad copy is specific and clear about who it's for, two things happen. The right people self-select and take action, and Meta learns from that and gets better and better at finding more of the same people. So instead of spending an hour in the ad set tweaking interests, spend that hour on your ad. Make your messaging sharper, make it clearer who it's for and what they're going to get. That is where your results live. Now if you genuinely need to restrict your targeting for a specific reason, there is a way to do that using value rules. But I'd only recommend going down that path if there's a real reason to exclude certain audiences, not just as a default habit. The third mistake is a combination of two things that are connected. The first part is not testing enough. When ads aren't performing, the temptation is to tweak small things. Adjust a word here, change a button colour there, rather than making a meaningful creative change. But in my experience, if an ad isn't getting results, a small tweak rarely saves it. What you need to do is try a completely different direction, new creative format, new angle, different pain points, a fresh way into the conversation. There is no magic campaign structure that will rescue weak creative. The secret to better ad results is being genuinely willing to test and to keep testing a lot. Your ads can always be better. And that means they're always the first place to look when you want to improve your results. But, and this is the second part, before you assume your ads are the problem, make sure the problem actually is the ads. Here's what I mean. Say you're running a lead generation campaign and sending people to an opt-in page on your website. Your cost per lead looks terrible. This instinct is to blame the ad. But what if the ad is actually doing its job? People are clicking through and the drop-off is happening on the landing page. If your opt-in page isn't converting, that's going to make your ad costs look bad, even when the ad itself is fine. So check both sides. Look at your click-through rate from the ad. Then look at what's happening on the page after the click. If people are arriving but not opting in, fix a landing page first. Even a modest improvement in your opt-in conversion rate, say going from 20% to 30%, can make a very significant difference to your overall cost per lead in your ads. The ad and the landing page work together. So to bring it all together, the three things that most advertisers get wrong with meta ads are choosing the wrong objective, obsessing over targeting instead of focusing on their creative and messaging, and not testing boldly enough, while also making sure they're looking in the right place when results aren't where they want them to be. There is no magic to running ads. There never has been.