In order to run a Facebook ad campaign that is set up for success, there are a few items I’d recommend checking off of your list first.

For a printable version of this checklist, you can scroll to the bottom to signup to have the PDF emailed to you.

1. Your pixel is installed and working.

Your pixel is a smart tool to have in your strategic marketer pocket. When you’re running a FB Ad campaign, you want to make sure your pixel is installed and firing on all cylinders. By that, I mean you want to make sure that everything a visitor will touch, it’s pixeled, even if it’s on a third party site (like LeadPages or ClickFunnels.)

2. Your landing pages is designed and up to date.

Where are people going when they click on your ad? We want to send them somewhere other than your website homepage or your Facebook page.

3. Your thank you page is designed and up to date.

What happens after they sign up to receive the thing you’re advertising? Too often, the thank you page becomes an afterthought or is a very generic piece to your customer’s buying journey (or sales funnel). It should let the visitor know what to expect next, and redirect them to your best pieces of content so that they’re encouraged to continue getting to know you.

4. Your email sequence is ready to go out.

How do you plan on delivering “your thing”? This is your first introduction to your new subscriber, so this is a perfect opportunity to “make it good”. You want to introduce yourself, deliver what you said you would, the follow up with a sequence to make sure they’ve opened the deliverable, and that they are being motiated and encouraged towards your goal (see #7!)

5. You’ve created UTM links.

Ah, yes, UTM links. Creating a UTM URL assumes that you have Google Analytics installed and that you understand the basics of using it. You can watch a video about that here: Creating UTM URLS.

6. You know or can predict your organic stats.

This comment is a little controversial in that many people use Facebook ads to test out new offers. And that’s fine.. BUT in this scenario, you have to enter in with the mindset that you can either invest time OR money into growing your business. If you’re going to invest TIME, that means creating an offer and promoting it organically. It will take longer to track statistics, but it’s free. OR you can invest money and figure out the conversion rates and test the pieces (like your offer, you landing page, sales page, etc.)

7. You have a strong understanding of your campaign goals.

I suggest you NEVER run an ad unless you have a very clear goal of how this pays off in the long run. That’s why I’m so anti-one-off campaigns like randomly boosting something OR running a like campaign. There are scenarios when putting money behind an existing post OR running a campaign for page likes, but ONLY when you understand how this plays into your business goals. Otherwise you may as well set your money on fire.

8. You know your budget.
This goes back to #7. IF you know your goals, and you know how this pays off in the long run, it’s easier to set a budget.
It also goes back to #6. If you know your stats, it’s easier to get to #9.

9. You understand your break even points.

At what level do your ads need to convert in order to pay for themselves? There are ways to calculate at what level your campaign is a “success” or a “bust”. There are times that even if your leads are converting at $20/lead, they could still pay for themselves based on your lifetime customer value.

How did you do on your checklist? Did you mark them all off? Great! Then you’re ready to run FB ads!

I’ve had clients ask “So… how did we do? Was this campaign successful or not?”

That’s a bit like asking “How long is a string?”

When people are asking about the success of failure of their ad campaign, they’re generally focusing on these stats alone:

• CTR (Click Through Rate)
• Clicks
• CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions)
• CPC (Cost Per Click)
• Reach
• Impressions

While watching the stats can give you an idea of the general performance of the ad within the Facebook platform, there’s a lot that can happen outside of the advertising alone that may help you judge the success or failure of your campaign.

Before you even start a campaign, you should have an understanding of your goals.

For most of the clients I work with, their ultimate goal is one of the following:

• Sell consulting, coaching or freelancing services
• Sell an info product like an ebook or course
• Sell out an event like a paid training, master class or group program
• Gain signups for an online summit or other event

Even if you don’t reach your immediate goals, it’s been shown that a person needs seven “touch points” before their willing to invest and trust you.

If someone likes your Facebook page because of an ad, but doesn’t immediately purchase “your thing”, that doesn’t mean they never will. If they purchase something you offer in two years from now, it’s obviously more difficult to trace that back to your Facebook ad..

The point being, trust that Facebook ads can play a role on the “long-game” of growing your business.

There are many entrance points to most customer experience journeys, and Facebook ads are a great investment in learning about your audiences. They might see an ad, then Google your website and sign up for your email list independently versus through the ad.

The point being, track your metrics and understand your lifetime customer value or LTV.

I recommend HubSpot’s calculator here.

As online entrepreneurs, we’re used to high learning curves and dusting ourselves off when things haven’t gone perfectly.

Sinking money in to a Facebook ad campaign that didn’t offer an ideal return can certainly sting. But trust me, it has happened to the best of us.

Here are some of the reasons your campaign may have failed and what you can do next time.

Start your campaign off right.

I’m a huge believer in ad testing. But this can get tricky when you’re just getting started in advertising your business. If your budget is small and you’re testing, your ad budget might be “too small” to gain any social proof traction. You need about 10,000 impressions to evaluate which ads work and which don’t, so if you are working with a tiny budget, it can take a while to hit that threshold. If you’re serving the same target audience many different versions of the ad, your ads likely aren’t gathering the likes and shares that they might if you test one ad at a time.

In order to start your campaign off right, you can start with a much higher daily budget and taper off once you’ve figured out which ads are working. You can also set up your ad with a campaign budget versus daily budget and slowly increase your audience targeting.

Get Relevant.

You’ve probably heard of Facebook ads relevance score. If you haven’t, the Facebook relevancy score is a 1-10 number that shows how relevant your ad is to your target audience.

And having a low relevance score can cost you A LOT. AdEspresso recently published a test where they ran an ad with a relevance score of 2.9 points versus one with a relevance score of 8.0 points. The ad with the 2.9 score ran on an average of $0.142 per website click while the ad with the 8.0 score was at a cost per click of $0.03.

That’s a 473% difference! If you’re working with a small budget, that’s a HUGE difference in the amount of click throughs you’ll get.

The Ad Fatigue Struggle is Real

We like to think that everyone loves us and wants to see our ads… but the truth is people get sick of seeing them grace their newsfeed.

Ad fatigue is the symptom of people seeing your ads for multiple times. A high ad frequency means that the same user has seen a particular ad for already 5 or 10 times.

If someone has seen your ad three times or more and hasn’t clicked on it, odds are that they’re just. not. interested. Because of the high frequency of seeing the ads without taking action on it, your costs per action on your ad increase something fierce when your ad frequency increase above 3. Keep an eye on your audiences and the delivery frequency. If you notice your prices increasing and your click throughs dropping, this is a sign that now is a good time to switch up your advertising.

Make Sure You’re Optimizing Your Ads

If you’re running a great ad in the same campaign as a terrible ad, your overall spend and success is going to be somewhere in the middle.

You want to make sure you’re pausing your crappy & expensive ads and letting your best ads continue. You can also duplicate your best ads and make adjustments to the audience, headline, creative or ad copy.

You want to make sure you’re frequently checking in on your ad campaigns to get rid the low-performers and give the high-performers a boost.

Don’t Adjust Too Much Too Quickly

According to Facebook: “It takes our ad delivery system 24 hours to adjust the performance level for your ad. It can take longer when you edit your ad frequently. To fix it, let your ad run for at least 24 hours before you edit it again. “

If you’re jumping in to your campaign day after day to tweak campaigns and make adjustments, you’re not giving Facebook a chance to adjust and optimize the last changes you made. You only want to make an adjustment once every 24 hours, then let your campaign settle in before making more changes.

Too Much Text on Your Ad

If your ad is showing too much text (20% or more), you’ll likely be paying higher rates for its delivery.  If you need to include text, frequently check whether your ad’s being delivered at a normal rate. You may also receive a notification in your ad account from Facebook that your ad may be costing “too much” because of it’s high amount of text.

There are many more reasons that might  affect your Facebook ad campaign’s success.

If your last campaign was a flop, comb through the statistics and insights to see where you might improve next time.

Some insights and areas to focus on include:

• CTR
• Relevancy Scores
• Frequency
• Landing Page Conversion Rates
• Negativity Score

I’d love to hear what other mistakes and problems you’re experiencing with Facebook ads –  I’ll do my best to help you!

Have you been thinking about running ads for your business? Here are some important key factors to show you whether or not you’re ready to run ads.

1. You have something to sell.
   Now, bear with me. It might seem like I’m being snarky or sarcastic, but this is serious. I would encourage you to never boost a post with the intention to simply bring awareness to your brand or offer something for free without keeping the larger picture in mind. What are you going to do to make those ad charges worth it? You want to have a clear idea regarding your return on investment, or ROI.That’s like going to the grocery store and loading up your cart with ingredients, checking out, and then dropping off your full cart in the corral, full of your newly purchased groceries. Not only did it take a ton of time to fill the cart, but you just wasted a bunch of money by not making use of the ingredients.Don’t waste food.Or leads. Know your recipes (or plan your “customer experience journey” from stranger to sale) before spending your hard earned dough.
2. You’re clear on your messaging.
   When you’re starting out in business, you can either spend a ton of time learning through experience OR a ton of time investing in a team to get you there faster.I personally recommend putting in the experience first, then hiring the team.When you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, it’s important that the journey from optin to sale is one seamless experience. The messaging needs to suit your ideal client in order to encourage them to keep taking the next step towards hiring you. If you’re not 100% clear on identifying your people or their pain points, the steps can get muddy. If you’re not sure how to talk to them, you might find yourself in the middle of an ad campaign that’s not performing as well as you’d hope.I recommend being clear on your messaging and testing things out organically first, before putting down the ad spend out.
3. You’ve got your funnel pieces in place.Do you have a landing page for your conversions to go?
   Does that page have a call to action to get folks on your email list?
   Do you have a thank you page explaining what they can expect next after opting in to your list?
   Do you have your email list ready to educate and nurture your new leads?
4. You’re comfortable with “investing” money in your business.Facebook ads aren’t guaranteed to knock it out of the park 72 hours in. And unfortunately, you need to be comfortable with spending a certain amount to test your audience and gather data about your advertising insights. It can take some time to adjust the targeting, the ad copy, and the ad creative before you’re getting leads at optimal prices. That can be a little scary when you’re emotionally invested in every dollar that’s being spent.If you were buying a billboard on a major highway and you saw every car that drove by without ever glancing at your billboard, those stats might feel terrifying too. The advantage with Facebook ads, though, is that you know your billboard is being shown to only people who are likely to be interested in your offer. That being said, only 3% of people are willing to buy something at any given moment.It’s up to you to pique interest and continue with top of mind awareness and nurturing sequences to educate and make darn sure you’re the one that comes to mind when they’re read.
5. Determine What Your Successful ROI Looks Like There are many elements that go into determining successful ROI. What that looks like for your business might look very different for someone else.There are basically four types of businesses I work with when it comes to Facebook ads.These business include those who are selling:
   →1:1 services like coaching, freelancing or consulting
   →Info products like courses or ebooks
   →One to many services like group programs or paid masterminds
   →Live to virtual events like online summits or masterclassesAnd each of these will have a very different return on investment. Each industry has varying levels of competition, so CPA (or cost per acquisition) may vary from $2-7 per lead (or more…). However, if you get four people on your list for $25 and one of those people signs up for a $2000 paid mastermind, you’ve definitely gotten a return on your investment.On that same note, if you’ve spent $25 for four new emails on your list and one of those people buys a $17 ebook… that is NOT a good return.

   You need to track and know what a good ROI looks like for your business.

Do you feel ready? What steps do you need to complete to get your business prepared to run ads? I’d love to hear in the comments.

One of the most common places that online business owners get stuck is properly surveying their audience. Too many times, they start designing programs and offers based on assumptions made about their audience and neglect to ask what they *actually* want.

Of course, there’s no perfect formula or hidden secrets to connecting with your audience, but it is paramount that you understand them before trying to sell to them. That’s one of the biggest reasons I recommend surveying your audience BEFORE creating our building out any sales funnels or running Facebook ads.

People completely underestimate the power of surveying because it can feel really scary to think that people would actually answer us, right? We might think we already know everything about our audiences. If we aren’t positive that we are actively going to solve their problem and speak to their pain points directly, how can we expect that they’ll be willing to pay us for our offer? I’ve seen this happen a lot over the years in my digital strategy business.

I recommend that you start out by asking 10-15 people the following questions, either via email, survey, Facebook messenger or even a virtual coffee date. If you don’t have an audience yet, go ahead and reach out within another Facebook group.

This will help you in ALL areas of your sales funnel creation, but especially in crafting your messaging, your offer and even an ideal opt in.

The Eight Most Important Questions Include:

What’s your biggest challenge/problem when it comes to _________?

What are your goals for your ________?

What do you hope to accomplish with reaching your goals for your __________?

How would you feel if this problem was gone?

What have you tried that didn’t work? How did you feel about it?

What is your #1 goal in your business right now? Why?

What do you have to do to reach that goal?

By asking these questions, you’ll get insight into how to craft a sales funnel and Facebook ad campaign that will best serve your clients with your unique set of skills.

Your Next Steps

Once you “get them”, and you’re comfortable and passionate about the way you’re communicating, people will feel that. The point of any sales funnel is to take gradual steps from stranger to a warmed-up lead. We want to focus on building your credibility to the point where your audience feels safe and ready to buy.

What questions do you have about surveying your audience? Has this worked for you? What are some of your favorite questions to ask in market research?

I’m admittedly super nerdy when it comes to consuming as much content as I can about marketing, business and self-development, and I recently finished reading a book all about persuasion marketing as it relates to neuromarketing — basically the things that light up our brains and make us want to say “YES!” to a sales offer.

We all have parallel triggers that make us want to buy things, #becausescience.

But what I found even more interesting, is how oddly similar the persuasion marketing techniques and tactics lined up with the strategies mentioned in the classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” written by Dale Carnegie and originally published waaay back in 1936.

The sales mediums have changed, but strategies haven’t.

I work on these “strategies” and “tactics” with my business coaching clients, but I hate to even call them “strategies and tactics” because that can feel manipulative and disingenuous.

They are the things that make people LIKE us. They are the ways that we can show up and let people know that they can TRUST us. Because we want to buy from people that we know, like and trust, right?

So what were the main similarities between the suggestions in the persuasion marketing book and Dale Carnegie’s?

>>Show trust to gain trust, feeling trusted releases oxytocin, and builds bonds. That’s why the “I’m trusting you with these business secrets” line works so well. Other ways to show trust include offering trial periods to your product, free strategy calls or even product samples.

>>Flattery leaves a strong and lasting impression. When you’re posting and building relationships in Facebook groups, respond to people’s comments, tag and acknowledge them using their first names and compliment them in an authentic way.

>>Learn and remember people’s names. We love the sound of our own names, don’t we? When you first see a group photo, whose face do you look for first? Your own. It’s not narcissism, it’s just human nature. Showing people you care about THEM makes them care about you. As you are working to grow your business, keep a spreadsheet (or use a customer relationship manager, or CRM, like Streak, Insightly or Cloze, to take notes about everything you learn when you talk to someone), then you have it to review before talking to them again.

>>Smile! Whenever you’re on a coffee chat, Facebook Live, or discovery call (even just audio!), make sure you’re smiling the entire time. People respond positively to those that smile, it even triggers mirror neurons that might even make them smile back at you.

Of course there were plenty more tactics, but I just wanted to share a few as they relate to our industries. They’re simple sales and marketing tips that we sometimes overlook. As someone who does FB ads I know all of the strategies related to the “FB slot machine” can seem sexier but these tried and true techniques are what build your funnel and make ads actually work for you.

Try them. It will work. You can trust me. 😉

Can you think of ways to bring these strategies into your sales funnels or Facebook ads?

The Facebook ad itself is only a teeny-tiny portion of any online advertising or other successful Facebook ad campaign.. Although it might be the first step of the campaign, it’s roughly about 10% of its success.

When clients come to me wanting to run a Facebook ad, especially in the coaching and online service-based industry, the very first thing I do is take look at the overall picture of the other 90% before hitting “Publish” on the ads.

What is the other 90%? It’s the sales funnel (which I’ll break down into nine steps for you below).

The reason most of my sales funnel clients come to me is because they’re feeling stuck and overwhelmed with the ENORMOUS amount of options available when creating a funnel. But let’s simplify it.

Any funnel setup will work, as long as it’s executed proficiently to a well-understood audience.

Focus on using your most engaging channels within your funnels.

Let me say that again.

Create your funnel in a way that feels good for you.

Are you good on video? Use it. Do you feel like you best communicate through email? Do that.

There’s no perfect formula or hidden secrets to connecting with your audience. If you’re comfortable and passionate about the way you’re communicating, people will feel that. The point of any sales funnel is to take gradual steps from stranger to a warmed-up lead. We want to focus on building your credibility to the point where your audience feels safe and ready to buy.

You might build a funnel that doesn’t work, and that’s okay. The main thing to focus on is continuing to test and modify as you move forward. (And don’t forget, action is the best education!)

Curious about the other 9 steps to a successful campaign? Well, here they are:

1. Research – This is a hugely important step! Don’t forget to survey your market, typically 10-15 people is a good fit.
2. Offer – I often start with the offer and work backwards. This helps me make sure everything is in alignment with my ultimate goal.
3. Lead Magnet – The whole purpose of your campaign is to give this away, build trust and show your expertise. It’s offering something of value in exchange for a lead. The lead can be an email address, a webinar attendance, or scheduling a free call. It must add a defined value and/or solve a pain point for a defined audience.
4. Landing Page – This is where you bring your audience, also considered a click-through. It’s important that this feels like a seamless transition (and works best with no other content or page navigation to distract them).
5. Thank You Page – This is often a seriously overlooked piece (and is usually the thing you threw together in 30 seconds, right?)!  Include information about you, about what they can expect moving forward, restate the benefits of joining, and how they can keep in touch with you (or maybe join your Facebook group?).
6. Targeting – Make sure you’ve researched your audience well enough to know how to target them. I try to stick with competitors they’ve shown interest in, but I also test this against 3rd party data offered up in the behaviors area of targeting.
7. Emails – Set up your email funnel to continually offer value and build on the budding relationship.
8. Retargeting – Continue with retargeting based on how the audience has reacted to your emails and other steps in your funnel. Have they clicked on certain offers like a webinar or video series? Keep track of that stuff.
9. Split Testing – What’s working and what’s not? When you run ads on Facebook, they work really hard to use their algorithms to continually show the higher performing ads. Shut off and rework what isn’t performing well (but don’t over-react and do it like 4 hours after starting your ad, sometimes this stuff takes time). If you’re not getting the results you’d like, get an expert to support you.

Where do you get stuck on this 10 point system? I’d love to hear, what are your biggest questions about using Facebook ads or creating a sales funnel for your business?