Help! My ads aren't working: A guide to troubleshooting poor performing meta ads

Hello and welcome to Metta ads under the hood, the podcast where we explore what drives high-performing Facebook and Instagram ads. I'm your host, Megan Winter, and with over a decade of digital marketing experience, mentoring hundreds of business owners at the Facebook ads academy and running my own ads agency, I am here to lift the hood on Facebook and Instagram ads. Each week I break down the mechanics of Metta ads, unpack real campaigns, and share how I use ads to drive results and how you can do the same. Ready to take a look under the hood? Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the show. Now today I am going to try and simplify my answer to the question, "Help! My ads aren't working, what do I do?" Now, of course, there is no simple answer to this. There is a multi-faceted approach that we need to kind of hover above zoom out and then zoom in and zoom out and zoom in. And so I'm going to go through the process that I do with the students who are in my program. And also what we do within my agency, where we run people's ads for them, kind of the process as to how we would identify what the problem is, and then what you can do about it. So maybe get a note pad and a pen for this one, I'm going to mention lots of metrics to measure what they mean and what you can do. If your metrics are showing you that there's a problem somewhere along the way, so the first thing that we need to do, or the first question I guess that I would ask a student, who came to me and said, "My ads aren't working." I would first ask them, "What role are the ads playing in your customers buying journey?" So people go from becoming aware that you exist through to becoming interested in what you have to offer, educating themselves about that as to whether it's the right choice or not, making a decision whether to buy or not, and then buying, telling their friends, good or bad, and coming back and buying again. So that is kind of the purchase journey that people have. Now, if you look at my business, for example, so I have recently run a free webinar where I wanted people to come to my free webinar, I then taught some really valuable free information and at the end of that had an offer to come and learn from me. So I'm not going to use ads to sell people into my program, like into my high ticket program. I'm not going to put an ad in front of somebody and say, "Come and purchase my program." I am going to use ads to get people into my free webinar. So that's the first thing. We need to know what role or what are we trying to do here? What are your ads actually trying to do? If you sell an e-commerce product, it may be that your answer is, "Well, I want sales." Okay. But do you have an audience of people who already know, like, and trust you, or are you trying to build that up? Are you trying to launch a new product? Are you trying to get people to go from a one-time purchase to a subscription? Like you need to know what the ads are there to do. I always say that ads are like a employee, a really well-behaved, well-trained, not so much well-behaved, but well-trained employee who wants to please. So we need to make sure that we're telling the employee, "Here's your job," because if we don't tell it, "Here's your job," or if we give it some other job, it's going to go and do that, or it's going to make its best guess. So we need to be really clear on that. The other thing is that we need to understand what our acceptable cost per acquisition is. This is probably the question that I ask the most, that people don't have an answer to, and it blows my mind. If you're running ads, if you are spending any money on ads, you need to know what you are willing to pay for somebody to come into your business. So whether that's cost per lead, so in my case, I want people to come to my free website, and I'm willing to pay for somebody to come into my business, and I'm willing to usually pay around $5 per lead. If I can get it lower than that, then I know, because all of my conversion rates throughout the process, so people registered to come to my webinar, they then, I've got a certain show-up rate, I then have a certain conversion rate, I then have a certain replay rate, like I know all of those numbers. I usually get about a $3 cost per lead, but I'm happy to scale anything that's below a 5. I know that I'm very clear on that, so you need to know what your acceptable cost per acquisition is. Now, if you, I'm going to give you a couple of examples here with some of our clients and students, so we've got a client who sells coffee on a subscription model. Now, the cost per acquisition in this case is the first purchase of somebody coming in and trying the coffee. Now, we know that they are then going to go on, there's a certain percentage of those people who are going to go on to become subscribers, therefore the lifetime value of that customer is pretty high, so we know that we're willing to spend a certain amount to acquire somebody into the business. If you are selling something that people only buy one off, then you know, maybe think about ways that you could actually sell to your existing audience again and again, because it's easiest to sell to people who are already in your world, but let's just say you are selling something that people really don't need to buy. A lot of it's not a consumable, it's maybe a higher ticket price, your cost per acquisition is probably going to be factored into that one purchase, like your lifetime value is going to be that one purchase, if, like I said, if I was you, and that was my business, I would look at ways to actually increase the lifetime value, but I'm just using that as an example. Now, the other thing that you need to look at and be aware of is your MER, so your marketing efficiency ratio. Now, that just means how much of your overall revenue are you willing to spend on marketing activities? And that includes meta ads, that includes Google ads, if you're running them, it's any kind of expense that goes into your marketing, your outgoing for your marketing, not your fixed costs, but your ad spend influences if you're using them, anything like that. So some people will have a 2% MER, meaning for every $100 revenue they make, they want to spend 2% on all of their marketing outgoings. Some people will have 20%, especially if they're in a growth phase. So most people kind of sit around about a 10%, but you will know your number, hopefully you'll know what is acceptable for you, based on your growth profit margin, your overheads, your lifetime value, all of those things. So work out what your acceptable cost per acquisition is and your marketing efficiency ratio. So that's the first thing that I ask, because a lot of people go, "Help, my ads aren't working." They're getting a $20 cost per acquisition. And when we actually break it down, those people are going on to spend $200 in their business. So their row ads looks crap, but their overall business metrics look great. And I know which number I am looking at, I am not looking at the dashboard on matter, I am looking at what's actually happening in your business. So money in, money out, is the accountant happy? What's next? That's really what we need to look at. So we want to get clear on those three or four things. So what role do ads play in our customer buying journey? What is our acceptable cost per acquisition? What is our goal, M-E-R, marketing efficiency ratio? And what is the lifetime value of our clients, which kind of plays into, you know, what is our acceptable cost per acquisition? Then we want to make sure that we don't do a few things. So I see people freak out and either stop their spending altogether. And if you are not sure, then maybe it is actually a good idea to turn off or pause your ads until you're actually sure, because if you're doing something without actually having the knowledge to understand what it is and if you're losing money, then sure, pause, but really don't freak out, sort of look at the data because the data will often tell you where the problem is. And the problem sometimes is just one little thing that you need to tweak and, you know, off you go. So we don't want to just freak out and stop, but we also don't want to spend more. So there's this thing going around at the moment where people are saying, like, coaches and consultants are saying, you just need to spend more. That is, to me, that is ridiculous. That is the most confusing pieces of advice that I have heard. And here's why, because if you are spending more, you're telling the machine that you're happy with the result that you're getting. So the machine is going to learn in that direction. So if you are getting a cost per acquisition that you are not happy with, or maybe even no results at all, and you're spending more, you're telling the machine, happy days, we are good to go in this direction off we go. If you think about it like an autopilot, it will go in that direction even more. You want to have enough data to analyze, so you do need to spend a certain amount. You need to spend enough so that for the amount of creatives that you have, you are getting enough data to analyze. Like if you're spending $5 a day, and you have 50 pieces of creative in there, if you do the math, like let's just say your CPM is $20, so that means that it costs you $20 to reach a thousand people and you're spending $5, so you can kind of do the math on that, and you have 50 pieces of creative. There's no way that you're going to test those pieces of creative. So you do need, you know, kind of enough. And as a blanket rule, I say, you know, start with anywhere between sort of 50 to $100 a day, it's going to give you enough data, especially if you know how to analyze it, but it's not going to run away and kind of give you too much of the wrong stuff because you can kind of keep a handle on that. You can look at it after a couple of days, up to a week, and you can see what's actually happening. So we want to spend enough, but we don't want to just keep spending more. Like I've had a client come to me after being in a large training program, and they told her to keep spending more. She spent $10,000, $10,000 on ads that were not working, and their only advice was spend more. Like that makes no sense to me, so don't just blindly spend more. Don't get on the content hamster wheel. So again, there's this kind of blanket feedback, like, well, you just need more creative, you need to test some more creative without actually diving into the data of what your ads are telling you. So don't just get on the content hamster wheel for the sake of it. Yes, you may need some more creative, you may need to test some more creative and I'll get into how to tell that in the next little section of this pod, but don't just get on it for the sake of it. And the other thing that I will say because I have heard this a lot is that people are comparing their results to people who are maybe like five years ahead of you and maybe they're spending like five times more than you or more, or they have a really established, well-known brand. So of course they're going to have to spend less on ads because people already have this element of affinity with that brand, like they know like and trust the brand. So don't compare where you are with where other people are, like they might be five to 10 steps ahead of you, and that's fine. You can look towards that for inspiration, but don't look at that as if you're failing. Go back to what is your acceptable cost per acquisition? If you are in a growth phase and you're really building up your brand, you know that you're probably not going to be able to draw a huge profit like some of these other businesses are and you can work towards that. But I would just say get away from that comparison thing. Okay, so now we actually understand where we are, what it we want our ads to do, we're not just blindly spending more, we're not blindly getting on the content hamster wheel. And we are not comparing ourselves to anyone really. We really understand our data. Then we open up our dashboard and this is where we drill down into what the data is actually telling us. Now the data will always tell a story. It will always tell us what is going on. The data is not emotional. Business owners are very emotional. So it's kind of hard to look at this without bringing emotion into it. But if you can, and this is where I actually really recommend like doing it with someone else, that's why people love coming into my program because they have a space where they have others who are not emotionally attached to their business. And we can like really start to analyze the data together. So what you want to do is look at your numbers first from a campaign level. So if you are running a sales campaign or a leads campaign, best practice really now is to just have one campaign per objective. So if you're running leads, have one lead campaign. Don't have multiple campaigns for the same objective. So look at it at a campaign level. And what we want to do is we want to look at the starts that we know to be correct in our meta ads dashboard. Now this is our click through rate. Our CPM, our cost per thousand impressions, our click through rate and our frequency and our tracked conversion rate from link clicks to tracked purchases. So let's run through those. So if we look at our click through rate, that will tell us how engaging our ads are. So if we're getting a 1% or more click through rate, that tells us that our ads are fairly engaging. They're doing a good job of getting people to stop their scroll, to click on the ad to move away from the platform onto your website. So your click through rate will tell you if it's your creative or not. Now your CPM, so your cost per thousand impressions, tells you how much the machine is charging you to reach a thousand people. Now if you are in say fashion or beauty or lifestyle, you are maybe going to get charged a little bit more because there's just so much competition in that space. And if you think about the way that meta works is it's an auction, it's supply and demand. The supply is how many eyeballs it has to put your message in front of and then the demand is how many other brands are trying to get that spot in front of those eyeballs. So you want to look at your CPMs. Now I'm not going to give you an acceptable kind of CPM because they do range literally anywhere from sort of $5 to $50. If I had to give you some kind of like, yep, this is good kind of aim for around 20 to 30, but honestly, every industry is different. And even if you can get a benchmark for yourself, then you can constantly try and get better and better on that like on your own benchmark. Now the cost per thousand impressions and the click through rate combined, give us our cost per click. Now when I'm saying cost per click and click through rate, I'm meaning on the link. So click through rate on the link and cost per click on the link, not just overall. So if you think about these three numbers as like three dials, if you make the cost per thousand impressions come down, but you don't change your click through rate, then your cost per click is going to be lower. And vice versa, if your click through rate comes down but your CPM doesn't change, well then your cost per click is going to be more. They're kind of like three dials that all play together and they're very interconnected. So if one goes up, the other one goes down, if one goes down, one goes up. And so they have this relationship where they do really impact each other. So we want to be aware of that. I kind of aim for around a $1 cost per click, but you know, we've got some clients who have just based on these three metrics here. We've got one client who has a 0.5% click through rate. So we usually aim for a one. They've got a 0.5, but we are happy with that because they are getting a 5% conversion on the website. So all of these metrics do need to interact with everything else. So you may be getting a really high cost per 1,000 impressions, but you're also getting a high click through rate. So therefore, you know, it's okay. So this is where we really need to understand how it all works together. There is no black and white right or wrong. When it comes to these metrics, it's more about how does it fit into your overall results. I also look at frequency on the dashboard. Now frequency just tells us how much the attention is being cycled through. So if you think of, you know, your frequency of one, that is if your audience had seen your ad once each, but if you've got a frequency of two, that means that some people have seen your ad once and some people have maybe seen your ad three times. So it's kind of starting to act more like a funnel when your frequency is going up. And there is again, there's no right or wrong when it comes to frequency. It's more just an understanding of how the machine is recycling attention. So that's what's happening on the dashboard. Now notice how I haven't mentioned rowers and I'm not going to mention rowers. I'm going to look at a few other metrics which are actually on your source of truth, meaning your website, platform, your Kajabi, your Shopify, your WooCommerce, whatever you use, your ThriveCart. We want to have a look at your conversion rate. So what is that traffic converting at? We want to look at your average order value. We want to look at your repeat customer rate. Now average order value obviously will tell us what people are spending on your site. So you might actually have an awesome cost per acquisition. Your conversion rate is really great, but they're only spending 10 dollars. So you're actually losing money, like if you can bundle it up or, you know, you want to increase your average order value. So again, all of these numbers work together. Now there is a custom metric that I like to set up in the Meta Ads dashboard and that is the conversion rate of the link click to track purchase. So this is where you add a custom metric, you go, "I want to put in a formula where I want to see the percentage of how many people clicked on a link and went on to become a tracked purchase within Meta." So that'll give you the conversion rate of each ad or of each campaign or of each ad set whatever level you're looking at it. But that is a really great way to see if your ads one are average compared to your website and two, if Meta is actually tracking correctly because we know that Meta is not always tracking everything and it's sometimes, you know, it depending on how you've got it set up, depending on your structure. If you do have a subscription model, Meta's only going to track the first purchase. So, you know, we need to kind of understand how your ads are going from ad to website and then what people are doing on your website. So once we've had a look at those numbers, now if you've identified that people are not clicking so people aren't stopping on your ads and they're not clicking on your ads so you have a bad click through rate, then you can kind of identify that it is your creative. If you've got a really high CPM, it could be your creative and it could be the platform, it could be the audience that you're in, it could be, you know, the CPM has a variety of factors. Your cost per click again is kind of dictated by those two things. So if you've identified that it is your creative, we want to double-click into that and I'll get into that in one second. I also just want to kind of give you the other option so it could be your creative or it could be your website. I mean there's lots and lots of other things and I'm going to give you another example of when it's neither of those two things and both of those two things but really it's kind of either your creative or your website that is letting you down. It's one of those two things usually. So if we've identified that people aren't clicking on our ads, it's our creative, we can kind of double-click into that and we can look at why. The first thing that I love to do if I've identified that it's a creative is I like to look at the thumb stop rate of the videos. So if you have videos you can actually look at how many people are spending more than three seconds on your ads and if you have a low thumb stop rate so I kind of look at you know anywhere around 30% as being good. If you've got a 30% or lower thumb stop rate and you know that those videos really should be generating clicks, they're like really engaging their compelling, they're clear, they show your irresistible offer but nobody is clicking on them, maybe nobody's getting past the first three seconds and so if we look at the thumb stop rate that can tell us that and then we just simply change the first three seconds because if you've got an ad where people aren't getting past the first three seconds it does not measure how good the rest of your video is. So that's one thing. The other thing that I do is kind of put my marketer's hatch on. So now that we've looked at all the data, we've kind of got our scientists hat on, we now want to put our marketers hat on and we want to look at our creative as our customer and this is where I like to get the help of other people so do a secret shop or get someone who doesn't know what you sell who's not looking at your product every single day like you are and show them the ads and go do you know what this ad is for? Like is it clear? Is it compelling because sometimes when we're so close to our brand and we look at it all the time we can make an ad that is kind of for like step four but actually we need to make ads for people who are at step one. So really make sure is it clear? Is it compelling? Sometimes ads that are actually quite I would say basic they're shot on a home like on your iPhone rather than like being really beautifully produced if they are clear and compelling they will outperform something that is super polished but isn't clear and is a little bit confusing so you want to make sure yeah this is very clear. We also want to test different angles we want to test different types of creative so you might have you know all videos in your dashboard or in your creative mix is there other angles that you can test or can you make some of those winning angles into different formats so you might have all videos can you create some carousels can you create some image assets if you've got you know all the same headlines but you've got different videos or different pieces of visual creatives can you test some different headlines can you test some different angles and when I say angles I mean like your problem solution the reason why somebody would be buying from you is it very clear as to what problem you solve and why your product is the best solution so kind of go through and look at your creative through the lens of a marketer and go oh I'm talking about the same thing in every single ad maybe I need to try some different angles with my creative keeping in mind as well that some people might need to see your ads a few different times and so you don't want to just be saying the same thing over and over and over you want to have some testimonials in there you want to have some user generated content you want to have some founder led content you want to have some product only content like you'd need to have a mix because the machine now operates like a funnel even though you only set up one campaign so that's the creative in a nutshell if you've identified that it is your website so let's say your conversion rate is low you know people are clicking through so your ads are doing their job but your conversion rate is low there's a few things that we can double click into here and have a look so we can have a look at the time on site now you might need to have a look at your google analytics for this how long are people spending on that page that you're sending people to if it's like one second or you know you're very small amount of time maybe it's not clear maybe it's the wrong audience like there's a lot of you know you can kind of tell a lot by how long people are on your website you also want to have a look at how many people are adding to cart you actually may be doing a great job of selling it on the website they're adding to cart but then I've actually seen it in several cases where the cart itself was broken or there was some kind of variant that was not clear and people were finding it hard to order and what do people do when it's hard they leave and they very rarely come back so want to make it as simple as possible you also want to make sure that you're reviewing all of your email sequences so your flows that are set up so if somebody you know in my case they've attended my webinar I send them lots of emails like not too many but you know a few emails to remind them of the offer to like see if they've got any questions just really add lots of value there if you've selling a product if somebody's adding to cart but they're not purchasing make sure they have an abandoned cart email sequence if somebody has purchased from you once and you sell a subscription really make sure that you are giving them a nurture sequence on the back of that now there's another test that I love and this is my three second test I developed this in 2017 I'm going to give it to you today you can basically pull up any piece of creative or your website and in this case you know you pull up the website that you're sending your traffic to you don't scroll you just show somebody your website without scrolling for three seconds so one two three you take it away from them and then you say what do you think this website sells who do you think this website is for if people cannot answer that then you fail the three second test and you are not ready for traffic so you need to go away and make it really clear you need to make sure that people instantly understand that they are in the right place now don't do this with your mom or your sister or somebody who knows what you sell make sure they're in your target audience but do it with somebody who doesn't know what you sell you can have either your creative not working or you can have your website not working or vice versa your creative could be working in your website's not or your website is but your creative's not or it may be one or the other up both so I have had instances where the click through which was really great people were engaging with the ads they were clicking excellent cost per click excellent cpm excellent click through rate they were getting to the landing page and nobody was buying from the ads but people were buying from organic traffic so we know the website actually is converting now what was happening in this case is that the ads were talking about one thing and the landing page was talking about something else so they were not clearly aligned even though, you know, maybe, be the headline was changed, but the video was talking about, in this case, AI, and then people were interested on that, they clicked on it, and then they were taken to a planner download. And so that mentioned nothing about AI. And so it's really important to make sure that you're both speaking the same language because they could actually both be working, but just not working together. And so it's really important that you look at everything, look at the data, put your scientists set on, but also put your marketing hat on and understand how everything works together. Now, I hope that this has been informative, I hope you're not too overwhelmed. I know there is so much data to go into, but I really just wanted to kind of introduce it to you that there is no black and white answer. Everything does communicate, interact, play together, all of the data tells a story, and then it is up to us to analyze and understand that data and work out what is next. So I hope this has been helpful, please let me know if you have any questions, and I'll see you in the next episode. This episode was brought to you by my business, Bloom Marketing, but you want someone to take the wheel and run your ads for you, or you want to learn how to run your ads yourself, we'll make sure your meta ads are driving results. You deserve meta ads that don't let you down. Come and check out Bloom Marketing, that's L-U-M-E-Marketing.com or pop a link in the show notes.