Facebook Ads Not Working? 4 Places You Can Look to Get Better Results

How do you make Facebook ads work for you so that you can find your people for your online courses, coaching programs, or events?

Maybe you’ve tried to run ads and they didn’t work…

Or you had an ad that was working and then all of the sudden it tanked…

Or you thought about running Facebook ads in the past and didn’t know where to start…

If you’ve tried Facebook ads and have resigned to the fact that maybe they just aren’t working for you, as of this quarter, there are 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook. It’s likely that your people are here.

Getting people to see your content is easy on Facebook. Getting people to take action on your content takes focus.

I want to share four places that you can focus to improve your ads so that you can get better results.

First, Facebook is an auction site for attention.

When you are running Facebook ads to your offer, you are bidding for the attention of your ideal clients. To improve your ads, you have to pay attention to how you grab attention.  Let’s look at four elements of your ads you can review and refine to get better results.

#1: Audience

The first factor that we can play with to get attention is our audience. Getting really clear on who your audience is is really critical when it comes to placing a Facebook ad.

Facebook allows you to laser in on the details that define your audience. You can target your ads based on user location, age, gender, relationship status, education and interests.

Understanding what your audience is interested in can help you get in front of the right audience.

Instead of saying, “Hey, Facebook, show my ad to the billions of people that are on Facebook today”, try going narrower.

Instead, you can identify that your audience is

• Women
• Between the ages of 35-55
• Health conscious
• Consume supplements and green powders
• Practice yoga and meditation
• Etc.

When you know specifics about your audience, you can give that information to Facebook and Facebook will show your ad only to those people who share those interests.

#2: The Copy

When your audience sees the ad copy come in through their Facebook or Instagram feed, that ad copy needs to speak directly to their interests.

Connect with your audience and speak to their pain points.  

Think about creating ad copy that speaks directly to your audience:

“Hey, business coaches! Are you tired of working one-one and desperately want to create leverage in your business that allows you to grow your business with less of you required?”

When they click on the ad and go to your opt-in page, the copy should be aligned. Your audience is expecting to land on a page that is similar in focus to the ad.

You can easily test multiple versions of your copy. You can write an ad and modify it easily for different audiences. Let’s say you are running an ad for a leadership development webinar. One ad might speak to first time managers. Another ad might speak to someone who is responsible for training new managers. Small modifications in your copy can adapt the ad for each audience.

#3: The Image

Imagine your ideal client scrolling on her iPad or laptop while watching TV on their couch at night. Or maybe they’re drinking their coffee in the morning and checking in on social media before they start their day.

The image you create has to stop them in their tracks. Most of our clients are running ads to a free webinar that leads into their online course or high ticket coaching offer. In testing over a million dollars in Facebook ads, I can tell you that the image that usually outperforms all other images is the face of the person leading the training.

For example, your face on a webinar invitation ad is going to likely outperform something that’s more generic, like a picture of a notebook and pens or something that you might see in your feed.

I encourage you to test as many variations for your ad images as possible. If you are leading a webinar or training or offering a discovery call, make sure you include in your testing an image of your face.

Image ideas to test:

• Image with your face on it
• Image with the tools in your program
• Images of you working with clients
• Images of clients

It’s so easy to test variations of your ads. If you aren’t sure what is going to work, start a quick test and run it for a day or two. You can quickly figure out what works best with a small investment in ads.

#4: Set-Up

When you set your ads up in Facebook Ad Manager, you will be asked to decide:

• What is your ad objective?

This is Facebook asking you, “What are you trying to accomplish with this ad?”

Being really clear on what you’re trying to accomplish with the ad is how you inform Facebook to go find people that will actually do the thing that you want them to do.

For example, if you’re running an ad for your webinar that you’re leading, you want to pick “website conversions” as your ads objective. In doing this, you are telling Facebook that you want somebody who’s actually going to sign up for my webinar. If you choose “engagement”, you are telling Facebook you want someone to see like or share a post. These are two different outcomes.

The more clear you are about who you want to reach and what you want them to do, the better your results will be. Click To Tweet

Summary

The number one thing that I want you to walk away from this conversation with is this – this is all about experimenting.

You have to test different combinations of your audience, the copy you’re putting out, the image that you’re creating and how you’re setting up the ad. When you test, you can find out what’s going to work because I can promise you that your people are there.

It’s about figuring out the right formula to get in front of your ideal people every day. We are generating thousands of leads on Facebook every month.

They’re there. You have to really adopt this mindset of experimenting to dig in and find the right formula that grabs the attention of your audience.

I’m sharing this because I want to make sure you  don’t give up before you find that right formula. You can test for as little as $5 a day, $10 a day, and quickly begin to see what works for your audience.

Let me know what questions are showing up for you! You can share it in the comments below and I’ll definitely circle back.