I’ve Spent Over $250,000 On Meta Ads - Here Are 5 Important Lessons For You!
Lessons From My Successes And Failures Using Meta Ads
It’s because I love bears
Over the past 10 years, I’ve gone through hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad spend on Facebook & Instagram Ads, now referred to as Meta Ads.
It’s 2023, and we’re living in the future, yet not much has changed regarding the core principles to make a successful ad.
There have been failures, and there have been successes.
In fact, some got a ROAS (return on ad spend) as high as 12x. That means for every $1 in marketing I spent, we sold $12 worth of products.
Meta considers 3-4x as a high ROAS in comparison.
While most of my marketing was done for nightclubs, festivals and restaurants - I have also run campaigns for clothing companies, artists, political campaigns and blogs. What I’m getting at is, I’ve learnt a lot, and I want to share that with you.
It’s not difficult, but it does take patience.
Here are 5 things you should know about running successful Meta ads:
1. Trial And Error
The thing about Meta ads is that when you think you have a formula that works, it might not next time.
It’s important to always run trial ads before dumping the budget on what you suspect will work.
What does that mean?
Put your ad up with a small budget, and if you see the CPR (cost per result) you want, then start adding more money to your campaign.
Simple.
And if it’s not working, change your ad up, try again, and keep trying until it works.
If after trying a few times, it’s still not working, it might be your product, or your landing page that is the issue.
2. Copywriting
Your copywriting has a massive impact on the success of your ad.
For example, I had a campaign where I tested different copy against each other, and the variance for a link click went from $0.12 to $1.20.
That’s a 10x difference!
If your headlines, primary text and description are not perfect, it will be the difference between you making money on ads, and losing money.
In general, you want your writing to try to lead your customer to match the goal of the ad.
Do you want them to engage by commenting, reading an article, or purchasing a product? Your copywriting needs to lead them to do that.
I recommend checking out Sam Parr’s course “Copy That” if you want to learn to copywrite. After doing this course I saw a massive improvement in my ads.
3. A/B Test
What is A/B testing?
It’s when you test factors from an ad against each other.
For example, perhaps you are advertising the same product, but one is targeting females aged 25-45, and the other is targeting females 45-65. In this case, you are A/S testing the factor of age against each other to see which age group is more efficient.
This can be done with many different factors.
Here are some of the factors I test against each other:
Text (primary & headlines)
Demographic (location, interests, etc)
Placement (Facebook vs Instagram, where on those platforms)
Video vs Graphic and text overlap or not
You should always be A/B testing and adjusting as the ad goes, but make sure to allow the ad to run long enough to see the results of what you’re testing. Often the ad may start badly and then flip quickly.
Give Meta the time to run the ad for a couple of days at a lower budget.
4. High-Quality Content
If you are posting pictures of videos that were taken with a potato instead of a phone, you will not get good results.
You must always post high-quality content.
However, keep in mind that sometimes organic-looking content works better than staged content.
What do I mean by that?
A video of someone filming themselves giving a review of your product will almost always perform better than your high-production commercial. That’s because people don’t want to feel like they’re being advertised to.
Make it feel real.
With that being said, make sure it doesn’t hurt your eyes to look at, and you can clearly understand the audio.
Facebook will prioritize high resolution over your Motorola Razor’s pictures.
5. Funnel And Retarget
Depending on what marketers you talk to, each will have a different funnel they like to use. However, they will all recommend retargeting those who were interested in your content.
People are unlikely to buy your content the first time they see it. The rule is, people must see your ad 7 times before they actually purchase! Yes, 7 times.
You can use retargeting ads to target those who have already visited your site, and showed interest in certain products.
Always do this. Always, always, always.
As for funnels, it depends on your product,
but the basic funnel I use goes like this:
Target with a video that gains general awareness
Retarget those who watched the video for a minimum amount of time, with a new video that gains engagement
Retarget those who watched the 2nd video for a minimum amount of time with a video review, or a deal.
When you do this, you ensure the viewers you are trying to sell on your product have already seen your brand twice before actually trying to sell them.
This is very effective on clothing. However, when selling concert tickets you very rarely need a funnel like this. You’re better off blasting awareness, and then simply retargeting those who visited your site.
Conclusion
Meta ads can be intimidating when you start using the platform, but you learn quickly. The best part is when you do learn, you’ll start to see how powerful the platform is.
I typically recommend learning Meta ads before any other platform because they are the easiest to track how they are performing, and adjust as they go.
By perfecting the 5 tips I listed above you will be well on your way to marketing successfully using Meta Ads!
If you have any tips of your own to share, please comment below!
Until next time
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