Hey guys, I’m back with an exciting update.
Last we talked, I was dealing with an ad campaign that wasn’t doing so hot. Since then, a few things have happened. First of all, my wife and I welcomed our third child. So, that’s a pretty big deal. But secondly, I have a new hot tip for you guys based on an ad that I worked on during our post-birth hospital stay.
The backstory is that I am helping a friend out with advertising for a new product he is launching. When I started messing around with it, it was the worst performing ad campaign I had my hands on. So I knew we needed to do something, but I wasn’t exactly sure what needed to be done.
I decided to start messing around with the audience for the campaign. I basically created a look alike audience based on the audience for my book, The Going Pro Manifesto. I figured if those people were interested in that content, they might be interested in this product as well.
Then I just sat and started observing. I made note of what platforms the ad was working on, who seemed to be engaging with the ads, etc. I was able to hone in on exactly who was interacting with the campaign and narrow down my audience based on that information.
48 hours later, that ad campaign was sitting as the BEST ad campaign I have my hands on. From worst to best in just two days. And I did it all from a hospital room while managing newborn life. It was that easy.
The lesson from all this is that it is CRITICAL to always be testing your ad campaigns. Just because your product isn’t selling doesn’t mean it’s a crap product. It might just be a crap audience. You wouldn’t know that unless you keep testing and tweaking that audience.
Keep keeping on, friends. One little tweak can make all the difference. I’ll be back soon- hopefully a little more rested than I currently am.
We went from spending a couple hundred bucks a day at about 50% ROI, 50% return on ad spend, to two to one return on ad spend over the last five days. And we’ve scaled from a couple hundred dollars a day to $2,000 a day in spend in five days.
Hey, everybody, what’s going on? It’s Brian. I am finally back from the hospital. My wife and I had baby number three on November 1st, so five days old. Things are going pretty well so far. We actually got some sleep last night. And so I know the last episode I was talking to you guys about are some of our Facebook ad campaigns. We were testing out a couple ads that were not working and I was kind of explaining why.
There’s some other things that I started to figure out actually from the hospital. So there was, any of you have kids you know, there were a couple of hours in there where basically nothing was going on. Everybody’s asleep and I’m on my phone. Just kind of checking out some of our campaigns, seeing how they’re going. And I’ve been helping a friend of mine with a brand new product that he’s rolling out there and he’s selling this product online is his sales mechanism that he’s using. He’s driving ads into a webinar and then use the SamCart on the back end to close the sale. And so he’s selling an online course in the business space and I was helping him with some of his ads. So we got some of his ads set up.
If any of you have gone through my Facebook Ads Academy course, you know how I set them up. I basically set up one big campaign that has a couple ad sets inside of each campaign. Each ad set is targeting a different audience so that I can test which audience is going to respond well to this offer, so that’s what I did. We set up a quick campaign, a small little kind of test budget. Again, for those of you that are curious what my test budget is, I go over it in that course. But essentially my budget is two to four times the price of the product. So if you’re selling a thousand dollar product, sorry to say, but you need a test budget of like two to 4,000 bucks minimum. If you’re selling a $10 product, you need a test budget of 20 to 40 bucks, two to four times the price is kind of my rule of thumb.
So we went out there and we spent a couple hundred bucks on this thing and sales were really, really slow. And I said, “Look, this doesn’t make sense. I’m not sure why these audiences aren’t working. I know the ads are good. I know that the page that we’re sending everyone to was good. It should sell. The price is good. So let’s just keep letting it run.” And we were only making back about 50% of what we were spending, which is okay, it’s a good start. You should make up a lot, all that lost ground over the next couple weeks or months if you continue to sell these folks that are now in your audience, but it’s not what we wanted. So I go and I’m trying to tweak some things I’m noticing some placements aren’t doing very well. Facebook’s showing our ads a lot on Instagram in the feed and a bunch of different audience network placements and those aren’t working very well. The feeds were working pretty well for us, both on Facebook and Instagram, so we narrowed it down to those.
And I started whittling out audiences that were really not doing well. This product is in the marketing entrepreneurship space. So we were targeting your usual suspects, whether it’s a Marie Forleo or Lewis Howes or a Shopify or Tim Ferriss, kind of big thought leader, author types. So anyone that was a fan, we thought they’d be a good audience. And so far it was proving not to be the case, at least not as high converting as we had hoped.
So one of the things I did, I went and grabbed an old lookalike audience that I own. It’s part of my ad account. We uploaded a list of a bunch of people who bought one of my older books with the book is The Going Pro Manifesto. It’s a little free plus shipping book. So anyone who buys it spends six, seven bucks. And this book is all about how to start a business. So anyone who bought it I thought would probably be a good prospect possibly. So we uploaded it, created a lookalike audience. If you don’t know what that is, you essentially can upload a CSV of a bunch of people into Facebook, and they’ll create an audience of people that look like that type of person. So that’s what we did and that look like he’s always been a good one for us on the SamCart side. And so I said, “Hey, look, I’ll just let you use this lookalike for now. Let’s see if that works.”
And guess what happened? We went from spending a couple of hundred bucks a day at about 50% ROI, 50% return on ad spend, to two to one return on ad spend over the last five days. And we’ve scaled from a couple hundred dollars a day to $2,000 a day in spend in five days. And that’s five days… Like three of those days I was in the hospital with a new baby. So this is not something that took me a ton of time. I pulled out my phone, pulled up my iPad and swapped out some winning ad sets, put in a new one and boom. All of a sudden, it was crushing.
And so what’s the lesson here? The lesson here is not that all you need is a lookalike audience of your buyers and you’ll be set, you’ll be gold. Like I don’t know if that’s going to work for you. It might, it might not. I’ve seen some weird stuff on Facebook where audiences that you think will work don’t, and audiences that you think won’t do. And so the lesson here is just to test, to constantly swap out audiences in that one audience compared to another might radically be different when it comes to performance. So what that means is if your ads are underperforming, if one’s buying your product, the chances of it being your fault, it’s like 50/50.
My point is, I’m trying to think of the best way to say this, that just because people aren’t buying your product doesn’t mean your product is a failure. It doesn’t mean that your sales page is crap. It doesn’t mean that your ad is crap. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong. Sometimes it does, but it doesn’t always. You can take a winning product to a crappy audience and no one’s going to buy it. Period. You can take a great product that is not selling, or a failing product that is not selling, and just change the audience that you’re now putting this product in front of and all of a sudden it’s the hottest product you’ve ever seen.
This went from, in the matter of 48 hours, the worst running campaign that I have my hands on at the moment to the best converting campaign that I had my hands on at the moment. The worst to the best and the only, literally, the only thing I changed was one little setting inside of Facebook for who the ad is being shown to. And those audiences are very similar. Like this lookalike audience was built off of people I got from the other audiences I was targeting in the beginning. Does that make sense? So anyway, it’s just, it was such a big aha for me. I had to get this out guys, even though not sleeping a whole lot on these couple of days, and not even going into the office here probably for at least a couple of weeks, but wanting to get this out to you guys.
So because any of you who are running ads right now, keep testing audiences. Any of you who are struggling, who have tried ads in the past, know that you could be one small little audience away. So take your leads, upload them to Facebook, create a lookalike, create a lookalike of your fans, create a lookalike of people who have visited your site or visited your SamCart page or have bought from you in the past or have bought product A and product B. There’s a thousand different ways you can target on Facebook though and try no targeting. Go try different audiences you wouldn’t have thought in the past. Split it up by age, just keep trying things until something hits, and then double down on that.
And, again, the lesson here is you can take what seems like a winning product and you can kill it by offering it to the wrong person. I imagine you are selling Super Bowl tickets and you had tickets. And I’m a, if you want to call me a Redskins fan, I could care less about football these days because I think there’s issues with the NFL, but that’s in for another topic. Let’s assume that I’m a Redskins fan right now and you brought me Super Bowl tickets. Let’s say somehow the Redskins made to the Super Bowl, which will probably never happen in my lifetime, that let’s say they made it this year and you had tickets. Well, you could probably convince me to buy those tickets for a couple thousand bucks. Easy, easy. So you have a product, the product is are these Superbowl tickets, and you’re going to easily get a couple thousand dollars from me. I’m the right audience. I’m a fan of the team playing in the Super Bowl with the financial means to pay you for the tickets and get to wherever the Super Bowl is. I’m the perfect person.
But you take that product, which Super Bowl tickets is a pretty damn good product, right? It should be pretty easy to sell. You’d go over to Europe and offer it to anyone on the street. No one’s going to give you crap for that ticket. Like number one, there’s probably no Redskins fans over there. Even if there was one, they’re probably not going to fly all the way over here most likely. So you’re not going to get the same thing you’re going to get from me. Not to mention probably 99% of people in Europe don’t even understand what football is. If you ever watched those NFL games are there, I don’t think they understand what’s happening on the field.
That’s the difference between you take the same product, the Super Bowl ticket, and you offer it to me versus anyone outside of the U.S., you’re probably not going to get anything for that product. So audience matters. It’s more important than almost anything. Assuming that your sales pitch is halfway decent, that you have a product that is going to actually help someone that people actually want. The trick is finding them.
And the way you find them is you continue to test new audiences, and this applies to pay traffic or free traffic. If you’re not having any luck with podcasting, maybe your audience is not listening to podcasts. If you’re a dog trainer, maybe people that own dogs don’t listen to podcasts. I mean that could be a thing. Who knows? I don’t understand that market. I don’t know where they hang out. And you should find out where they hang out. There are niches that Instagram is absolute trash when it comes to trying to sell products. It’ll never work for certain niches because those people are not on Instagram or the people in that audience that are on Instagram are the ones that are broken, will never buy anything. But then there’s some niches, some markets, where Instagram is everything. It’s the gold mine. It’s where all of your sales are going to come from.
It matters what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to. There’s so many factors. So unless you have a really good gut instinct on where those people are, the answers to continue to test different types of people test different mediums, different platforms. Test what devices, your ads or your, your content is being displayed on. All of those things matter in a tiny little tweak that you never would’ve guessed could literally be the difference. Yeah, I mean it could be $1 million difference. I mean, you think this in this case with my buddy before three days ago, four days ago. When do I made this tweak? His business was dead in the water. I mean it was surviving because we were spending money, a couple hundred dollars a day, investing in this business to find out if it will work or not. And if it would have kept going the way it was going, we would have abandoned that idea and tried to rebuild it from scratch or start to fix a bunch of different things in that marketing campaign. Instead, we made one little tweak and now, all of a sudden, this business that didn’t exist a week ago that made its first sale a couple of days ago is doing $2,500 to $3,000 a day.
I mean, hopefully you grasp that. Nothing changed in the entire marketing funnel marketing campaign except who the ad was being shown to. That was it. That’s the difference between a business that is about to go out of business and a seven-figure business right there. So go test something this week. If you’re running ads to test something, if you’ve tried ads before and they failed, go try another audience.
If you’re looking for an easy way to launch your business online and start making sales or as simple way to get fast cash out of your already established business and check out how I’m making $1,729 per day with a simple one-page website, I break it all down over at 1pagefunnel.com that’s the number one pagefunnel dot com. [/expand]
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