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Facebook, Instagram, Apple and Google Apps Search Ads Secrets – Make Money From Your Products
A bit about search ads first.
There are billions of Apps and products out there and it is becoming harder and harder to stand out. You don’t want to spend countless of hours developing your dream app or products just to have close to zero sale per month.
This blog is an aggregate of the best secrets of Apple and Google Apps search ads for successful App developers.
This blog also includes tips and tricks for successful Google Search Ads, Facebook Search Ads and Instagram Search Ads for any product.

Apple Search Ads uses a Cost-Per-Tap (CPT) model, meaning that advertisers need to pay Apple every time someone “taps” on a Search Ad listing after performing a keyword search. While on other traditional mobile ad networks such as Google UAC or Facebook Ads, the advertiser usually pays per app install (Cost-Per Install model, or CPI) after a user saw or interacted with an ad.
Apple offers 2 types of search ads – basic and advanced. Which one should you choose?
I guess it depends upon the type of app and installs you want. Basic is CPI based vs Advanced is CPT based. This might make you think that Basic is better because you only pay when you get an install BUT that’s not the best way of looking at it. Basic has a much higher cost per install CPI than the cost per tap CPT you have from the advanced one. So unless your user either buys an IAP or paid app which makes more money than the CPI you paid to acquire that user, you might lose money.
Also, advanced lets your focus on specific keywords whereas Basic is mostly Apple’s own hidden algorithm showing your ads. Focusing on specific keywords is important because you don’t just want user to download the app, you want them to open and use it too. Since we don’t know how Apple will show your ad for basic, you have no clue whether your app is getting perfectly targeted.
So you may or may not be paying more money for the install using Basic vs Advanced as advanced can get you a lot more impressions of the ad (and more downloads if your metadata is on point).
Apple Search Ads is an intent-based channel
This is important in the post-IDFA era because Apple looks at the context of a particular search to target ads based on keywords. By its very nature, ASA does not rely on IDs to target individuals. Attribution models already have an advantage over other channels that rely on IDs for individual behavioural targeting.
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With Apple Search Ads, you can tap into user intent signals that match your offerings and attract higher-quality users. That’s why Apple claims such impressive performance numbers, such as 50 percent average conversion rates and 65 percent download rates.
A bit about search ads first.
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I personally would never run Basic for a free app (even if it has IAP) as the CPI is very high and unless I have a high conversion rate for the IAP, I would be losing money. For a paid app, it might work well though.
I have mostly tested Advanced. I did run Basic but the CPI was way too high so I stopped it. For advanced, I would advice:
AI Jobs and Career
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Start small but not too small. Like don’t set a daily budget of under $5 or over $20. Start with lets say $10 and keep it like that for 1-2 weeks and see how it works. Adjust the keywords in the search ad, adjust your screenshots, icon and other metadata to make it look more attractive if you notice people are clicking on the ad but not tapping the download button etc.
Before running search ads, make sure you have your freemium app monetization and DAU (active users) absolutely down. Like if you only have banner ads in the app and no way for user to buy the in app purchase, don’t bother with search ads yet if your cost per acquisition is too high. For example if your CPA is $2 in an extremely competitive app category, and you spend $2 to acquire a new user or you waste $2 on a user who taps on the ad but doesn’t hit download. You may never make your money back from your ads in the app. Banner ads aren’t even worth it imo unless you have thousands of active users. They hardly make a few pennies per 1000 impressions. Interstitial ads are better and make more money and Rewarded ads are even better. But still, you need to look at numbers to see whether you are at least breaking even.
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Apple and Google gives you $100 credit for free to try it out, so use that to test it out and look at numbers, make changes etc.
Set the search ad settings correctly. There is an option for targeting audience – whom would you like to see your ad and options are “People who already have your app“, “People who don’t have your app” etc. Of course you don’t want to select the first option because they already have your app. You want to acquire new users. You can also choose the age of the audience. So for example, if you have an app which you is meant for people who own houses, you don’t want to target people under 25 or even 30 years old because most of them won’t own houses.
If you are getting taps (you spend money per tap) but not conversions (downloads), that means people are finding something on your app store page which they don’t like. This could be bad or missing reviews, bad screenshots, bad metadata etc. So get honest opinion from non-friends to see what they think of your app store page.
Search ads for paid apps OR apps with in app purchases is different than search ads for free apps. You should make sure your paid app OR IAP is priced right so that you can at least break even and preferably make a profit for every cost per acquiring the customer. For example – if your cost per acquisition is $5 (this can be pretty high for paid apps as a lot of people will often click and ad but then decide not to download the app maybe because of the pricing or some other metadata) and you have priced your app at $2.99, you are just burning money. Be intelligent.
Using keywords of other app names in same category might work for you. But I won’t suggest setting keywords for trademarked apps OR of popular apps which have nothing to do with your app category. This can get you called out for IP/Copyright/Trademark violation. This also won’t convert well because when people are search for a specific app (let’s say Facebook) and your calculator app shows up in the ad, no body is going to click on it as the user obviously is only looking to download Facebook.
I personally don’t like running ads in developing countries as – Admob pays very little in those countries, people don’t buy IAP much, people don’t buy paid apps much.
Don’t bid for keywords which have high competition OR very high CPT. Companies with deep pockets will kill you.
I am not a fan of the option “Search Match” (Automatically match my ad to relevant searches) which Apple gives you. I always disable that option.
Search ads are good if you can afford it and if you have an app which fits the profile. It may or may not work for every app. Always look at numbers.
I’m guessing search ads are the ads you see in the App Store when you are searching for specific apps?
Yes, search ads are for the app store search. So if someone searches for a keyword which you have targeted your ad towards and you win the bidding battle for the ad space for the same keyword against someone else, your app’s ad gets shown.
Is there an average price per click that you pay?
Yes, Apple search ads are CPT based. Cost per tap. So if someone taps your ad, you pay what you won the bid for against some other person’s ads bid. For example – If you bid for a keyword “car” and you have set the maximum CPT at $0.20 and Bob who is also an app developer and is running ads and has set his “car” keyword at a CPT of $0.10, you will pay $0.11 because that’s what it took to win. Of course there are more factors – level of competition for that keyword, higher levels of CPT being bid by others etc which can drive the average CPT higher for you. That’s why you get to set the maximum you are willing to pay per keyword.
How many people searching for apps, see my game as an ad, and click on it per day for $10?
There is no general range of how many people might. You can use the maximum CPT to control the amount you spend per tap and you can also set an optional CPA (cost per acquisition) to ensure you don’t run at a loss. However, the first 2 weeks should usually be experimental and test it out with low budgets.
A very important thing to remember – you pay per tap – NOT per download. So if someone taps your ad and notices your screenshots look like crap and doesn’t download your app, you just lost money. This is why you need the metadata to be perfect and use the CPA field after 2 weeks to make sure you don’t run at loss.
Along with that, do you only pay for clicks? Do you pay more if they download your app after the click?
Yes you pay per click (tap to be technically correct). You don’t pay more if they download.
I’m assuming you are constantly tracking How many active users you have and how much revenue you are generally getting to be able to ball-park any change in these numbers based off your ads being displayed.
Yes, I always monitor my ad spend and compare it to how many downloads I got (if this is for a paid app) or how many people bought the IAP and how much revenue I am making per day via Admob. I do this every morning. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to let me track how many of those ad conversions converted into buying the in app purchase. So this throws me off a bit.
So, your CPA. Is this your cost for running the ads per download?
Regarding CPA. They let you set an optional CPA goal when running your ad campaign. Determining it is a bit of work. Like when I am starting out, I don’t have any numbers to look at, so I leave the CPA blank or set it as the same price as my IAP or paid app price. Basically I don’t want the cost per acquisition to exceed the IAP or paid app price because that would mean I am burning money and running at a loss instead of profit. However after running the campaign for 1-2 weeks and looking at the numbers for each day, I can guess a better CPA and if I think I definitely don’t want to exceed a certain number because it would make me lose money instead of break even/profit, I will set it. You don’t want to set the CPA too low – at least initially because then you won’t even get any impressions of your ads. For example: Looking at one of my ad campaigns right now, I have default CPT of $0.10 (cost per tap as you pay every time someone taps your ad – doesn’t matter whether they download or not). They let you set CPT on a per keyword basis too which overrides the default CPT. NOTE that CPT is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the tap. This means that if you are at a battle with someone else who also wants the same ad space, you can win the battle if your CPT is even a cent higher. You only pay whatever amount it takes to win the battle, not the highest one which you have set your CPT at. So often, your Average CPT will be lesser than what you set it at which is good. So for this campaign, my default CPT is $0.10 and I have a few keywords with custom CPT of $0.20. After looking at my numbers for the past few weeks, I see that for most of my keywords, I have Average CPT of $0.15, $0.16, $0.19 and average CPA of $0.15, $0.33, $0.29. So if I want, after testing it for couple weeks, I can lower the CPA to $0.50 so that I never run it at a loss.
So if I spend 10 dollars in 1 day and 5 people downloaded the app, that would be a $2 CPA? Yes.
And I will repeat my previous statement: I always monitor my ad spend and compare it to how many downloads I got (if this is for a paid app) or how many people bought the IAP and how much revenue I am making per day via Admob. I compare and set the CPA based off of these. I do this every morning. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to let me track how many of those ad conversions converted into buying the in app purchase. So this throws me off a bit.
Have you been able to verify your numbers and whether or not you are profiting based off these ads? Why not bump your ad spending even higher?
I have made money from certain types of apps and lost money by doing stupid stuff (running ad campaigns for a free with ads app but not having an IAP to remove ads, running ad campaigns for apps with only poverty banner ads and no full screen/interstitial/rewarded video ads which at least make some money, running ad campaigns for apps with generic keywords which are very high competition and gets out-bid by much bigger players with much deeper pockets, running ads where my CPA was higher than the money I was making off of the IAP or Paid app, running ad campaigns with a keyword which was for an app not even in my category which made users tap my ad, lose money and then they won’t download, running campaign with a keyword which was trademarked etc).
Basically, be intelligent, research, start slow and experiment with the $100 credit Apple gives you.
A few people asked me about rewarded ads vs interstitial ads for monetization. This is a bit off topic but I will throw this in.
Rewarded ads have a higher eCPM than regular interstitial ads, meaning you get paid more. Of course how high depends upon the type of app, number of users, placement of ads etc. I use Admob’s rewarded ads to mostly unlock features or number of XXX item usage in the app. There are other companies which offer them too. You can read a few points here for example:
source: reddit
The high eCPM is good. What’s even better about them than regular interstitial is that they just provide a better user experience and less negative reviews. This is because the user is willingly choosing to watch an ad instead of their game getting randomly interrupted. And in return, the user gets some type of in app reward – more coins, unlock some feature etc. So this is a win win for the developer and the user.
How do you determine your CPA for an app with IAPs? (Like does iTunes Connect tell you this information?)
They let you set an optional CPA goal when running your ad campaign. Determining it is a bit of work. Like when I am starting out, I don’t have any numbers to look at, so I leave the CPA blank or set it as the same price as my IAP or paid app price. Basically I don’t want the cost per acquisition to exceed the IAP or paid app price because that would mean I am burning money and running at a loss instead of profit.
However after running the campaign for 1-2 weeks and looking at the numbers for each day, I can guess a better CPA and if I think I definitely don’t want to exceed a certain number because it would make me lose money instead of break even/profit, I will set it.
You don’t want to set the CPA too low – at least initially because then you won’t even get any impressions of your ads.
For example:
Looking at one of my ad campaigns right now, I have default CPT of $0.10 (cost per tap as you pay every time someone taps your ad – doesn’t matter whether they download or not). They let you set CPT on a per keyword basis too which overrides the default CPT. NOTE that CPT is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the tap. This means that if you are at a battle with someone else who also wants the same ad space, you can win the battle if your CPT is even a cent higher. You only pay whatever amount it takes to win the battle, not the highest one which you have set your CPT at. So often, your Average CPT will be lesser than what you set it at which is good.
So for this campaign, my default CPT is $0.10 and I have a few keywords with custom CPT of $0.20.
After looking at my numbers for the past few weeks, I see that for most of my keywords, I have Average CPT of $0.15, $0.16, $0.19 and average CPA of $0.15, $0.33, $0.29.
So if I want, after testing it for couple weeks, I can lower the CPA to $0.50 so that I never run it at a loss.
So essentially with $2,000 its possible to have 10,000+ people click on your ad? That seems like a solid conversion rate if at least 1/10th of them download the app.
Depending upon the type of app, your CPT can vary. For me most of them have been about 20 cents. So yes, 10000 taps from $2000 is a good estimate. However – these are taps – not downloads. For downloads, you need to make sure your metadata is on point! Also you need to have monetization is place – IAP, paid apps etc to make sure you are actually making money off of these users which you are spending money to acquire.
How long did it take for you to start seeing impressions? We have pretty competitive keywords so i’m using extremely high CPT. $10+ and i’m still not seeing any impressions. It’s been 24 hours.
If you haven’t setup scheduled ads, it should be quick. I had mine within an hour if I remember right. I would suggest trying for less competitive keywords though.
What’s your experience and tips for driving iOS game app downloads via paid ads platforms like Facebook Ads, Apple Search Ads, Youtube ads, etc…?
No experience but as a iPhone user i often see myself downloading apps while browsing instagram. So I’d assume you’ll be spot on with instagram/snapchat/tiktok or maybe even youtube shorts.
App Store search ads keyword match types
Search Ads involve three different types of keyword matches.
They are ways for you to tell Apple whether you want to bid on keywords exactly as you enter them or more broadly. This is influenced by campaign goals and will ultimately determine campaign results. So you must first understand the different types of keyword matches Apple offers.
Broad Match
Broad match is the default keyword match type. By selecting broad match, you are telling Apple that you want to bid on the keywords you select and other keywords that are broadly related to them.
Broad match includes misspellings, plurals, closely related words, synonyms, related searches, related phrases, and translations.
For example, when you type “Friends,” Apple also considers variations of “Friend,” “Amigo,” “Freind,” and more.
Exact match
Exact match helps you narrow your ad bid spread. By choosing exact match, you’re telling Apple that you want to bid exactly as entered for the selected keyword.
Common misspellings and plural forms will also be taken into account.
For example, when you type “friends,” Apple will consider “friends” and “friends.
Search matching
Search matches are best suited for keyword discovery. By selecting Search Match, you allow Apple to use its metadata to automatically match your app to relevant keywords and search terms.
For Search Match to work, your app’s metadata needs to be up to date and optimized. This means that App Store optimizations have been completed and recently updated. In this way, Apple can easily pull information about your app and generate the best and most relevant keywords.
App Store Search campaign types
When creating an account to start keyword bidding, ASA best practice is to split your keywords into four different campaign types: Generic, Branded and Competitor, and Discovery.
Generic Campaigns
Typically set to broad match, generic campaigns use keywords that are relevant to your app. For example, if you have a fitness app, you should include keywords such as “fitness” or “exercise” in this campaign. The purpose of the general campaign is to attract high intent app store visitors.
Branded campaigns
You will want to use a brand campaign to reach a more specific audience searching for your brand in the App Store, drive reinstalls and brand protection. Your keywords in this campaign will be keywords related to your brand name or a variation thereof. By bidding generously on your branded keywords, you ensure that your competitors don’t take this valuable space away from you.
Competitor activity
Set up exact matches, competitor campaigns to target App Store users who are searching for competitors. Keywords for these types of campaigns include your direct competitor’s name or a variation of their name.
Discovery campaigns
You need to set up a discovery campaign to discover new keywords or find alternative keywords that you are not using in other campaigns.
To maximize the effectiveness of a Discovery campaign, new keywords from Discovery should be added as exact match keywords to the other three campaign types, and all keywords from branded, generic, and competitor campaigns should be added as negative keywords in Discovery.
Best practices for using Apple Search Ads
Getting started with Apple Search Ads isn’t a problem. But you need to make sure you adopt some best practices that will ultimately help you make the most of your investment. Here are some App Store advertising best practices you should follow when using Apple Search Ads.
Review app metadata before launching a campaign
Before launching a new campaign, you’ll want to visit App Store Connect and take a closer look at app metadata. The appearance of your ads will be based on your app’s metadata, and you won’t be able to change it later. Keep in mind that the same ad is unlikely to be shown to every user. Some people may get a simple description of the app, while others will see screenshots and preview videos.
USP-based targeted keywords
This is very important for marketers using ASA Advanced. You need to do some research and identify keywords that will increase installs. For example, if you have a fitness tracking app, use keywords like “fitness tracker” or “diet plan” as keywords. You must understand the search patterns of your audience because it can greatly improve your conversion rate.
You can always expect higher competition with general keywords, but if you can find more specific keywords, they will not only be cheaper to bid on, but will also have a higher conversion rate.
Tip: Use the keyword research in your ASO strategy to understand your options and sync your goals!
Use the 80/20 budget allocation method for App Store promotions
When comparing keywords, you must split your keywords between broad match and exact match. 80% of your spend should go to exact match and the remaining 20% should go to broad match. Both will be used primarily for discovery campaigns to identify keywords that perform better than others.
Exact match keywords will allow you to attract and convert interested users. They will be easier to convert and more likely to generate more revenue. They may cost more, but they will also pay off. Ideally, you should allocate an 80/20 budget to get the maximum return. Once you start generating interest, you can also reduce your budget allocation.
How to leverage your app business within ASO and ASA on iOS app store?
The great thing about Apple Search Ads is that you can use the search match feature to identify new keywords. When Search Match is enabled, your ads are automatically matched to new search terms based on metadata in your App Store listings, information about similar apps of the same type, and other available search data.
The ability to check keyword relevancy is an invaluable part of Apple Search Ads. In just a few hours, you can run a small test campaign to collect data and get a complete picture of which keywords to optimize for in your ASO efforts. By analyzing Tap Through Rate (similar to Click Through Rate on the web), in-store conversion rates, and actual downloads, you can begin to develop a more effective ASO strategy. In addition, you can use attribution tools to explore the LTV of each keyword for campaign analysis.
ASA can help you narrow down your ASO strategy, but it’s not a gold mine; ASO is a long-term strategy, and your goal should be to keep increasing natural downloads. A key learning point is to look at ASA data from a longer-term perspective so you can see the true trends and performance of each keyword.
Apple Search Ads only work if you know how to properly target your keywords. To ensure maximum app visibility and download rates, you need to target specific and general keywords and carefully determine how much you are willing to bid for each keyword. An easy way to find keywords is to use a tool that automatically compiles a list of targeted keywords. You should increase your bids until you reach your cost-per-acquisition target and start winning downloads from popular keywords related to your niche.
Unfortunately, simply outbidding your competitors for high-volume keywords isn’t enough to win the number one spot, because Apple also considers the relevance of your app to the keyword. To ensure you always rank #1, you need to combine winning bids with ASO optimization. Factors that affect your ASO include app name, URL, description, reviews, and ratings.
Source: How to Leverage ASA to Boost Your App Visibility?
So, how should you optimize your Search Ads campaigns for profitability?
1. Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Goal:
The first thing you need to determine is how much you can afford to spend for every Search Ads install, so how much your target CPI (Cost-Per-Install) or Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Goal — as Apple names it — should be. Note the difference in naming here: unlike other networks, Apple uses the word “Acquisition” and not “Install” because they actually only measure when users hit download and not when they have actually fully installed the game (we will hear more on that important difference later in this article).
To do this, if you are already running campaigns on other networks, you know your customer LTV (lifetime value), or how much every user will spend on average in your game.
Let’s say your game net LTV is $6 for iOS users in the United States.
On Apple Search Ads, you can either set your bids based on a Max CPT (Cost-Per-Tap) you are willing to pay or choose a CPA Goal, which means Apple will try to display your ads automatically and maximize conversions. But we don’t recommend that option because, while it will make sure you don’t go above your target CPA, it will limit your impressions quite a lot so you will miss out on several opportunities to convert.
So, for Max CPT, we usually apply a 30% ratio of the LTV of the game we’re promoting, because we normally observe an average 30% conversion rate (from taps to installs) on Search Ads.
In that case, we would be using:
Max CPT Bid = $6 x 30% = $2
Source: Medium
Measuring your ROAS:
Now comes the most important part: What’s the revenue generated from your Search Ads campaigns?
Apple doesn’t track (or share) any detailed activity coming from the Search Ads installs they have provided you. So you will have to use your MMP for that.
Depending on the LTV curve of your game, you’d be looking at your Day 7, 15, 30 etc. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) on a campaign, ad group or keyword level.
Cohort Reports for Search Ads Campaigns in Adjust
Let’s say you use Day-7 as a goal, you will then be doing this calculation:
Day-7 ROAS = Day-7 MMP Revenue / Search Ads Spend
And then compare that your Day-7 ROAS goal. If it’s above that, that’s a good sign and you should keep your campaigns/ad-groups active but make sure you monitor the retention of these users in the long run to validate their good performance.
If it’s below your goal, let’s say by more than 25%, then you should consider pausing or reducing the spend on these ad groups or campaigns.
That’s the formal way of assigning and reporting revenue coming from Search Ads.
But you have to take into consideration the installs that are not seen by your MMP and which may have also generated revenue.
ROAS = ((Revenue) * (1 + LAT Rate x 50%)) / Search Ads Spend
Bid Optimization:
Once you have launched your campaigns, give it a few days and then look at the performance of the ad groups you have created.
The first thing you need to check is if the keywords you have selected convert to installs. If there are ad groups with a Conversion Rate below 25%-20% it means that the keywords you have chosen are either too broad or not relevant. You should then consider pausing or reducing the bid on these ad groups.
On the contrary, for ad groups and keywords that have a high Conversion Rate, for example anything above 30%, you should increase your bid for as long as it’s aligned with your projected ROAS. In order to know how much is necessary, in the Search Ads interface, Apple suggests a bid range to have an indication of how much you should spend to match or beat your competitors. You should adjust your bids for every keyword that are are below the suggested bid ranges (as long as it stays within your target CPA goals).
Many factors affect how your Apple Search Ads Basic app promotions perform, including relevancy, your maximum cost-per-install (max CPI) amount compared to your competitors, and user response to your ad. The following best practices can help improve your app promotion results.
- Review your metadata in App Store Connect to ensure it’s the best representation of your app. Your app title, descriptions, and keywords are all considerations Apple Search Ads uses to assess your app’s relevance for specific search queries, so you should take great care in crafting them. Apple Search Ads Basic also uses the app name, subtitle, description, preview videos, and screenshots approved for your App Store product page to create your ad. Take the time to review your app metadata in App Store Connect before you start using Apple Search Ads Basic.
Review App Store metadata best practices
Note that if you change your App Store metadata, it can take up to 24 hours to be reflected in the ad preview within your account, and up to two hours to be reflected in your ad on the App Store. - Take a look at your ad creative. It can play a key role in your app promotion performance. Because Apple Search Ads uses the app name, subtitle, description, preview videos, and up to the first three screenshots approved for your App Store product page to create your ad, you may want to consider adjusting these assets if your ad isn’t performing well.
- Consider your product page, too, as it can also help drive installs. With three app previews, 10 screenshots, and new text fields, product pages offer more opportunities to showcase your work.
- If your ad isn’t delivering results, try raising your max CPI to increase the likelihood of your ad being shown. You can use the suggested max CPI in your dashboard as a guide to help determine the right amount.
- Consider running your app promotion in all the countries and regions where your app is available. This will give you more opportunities to reach interested customers. Check your monthly budget to make sure you’re reaching as many customers as possible. You may need to increase your budget, especially if you’re running app promotions in multiple countries and regions.
- Make sure you’re using the right business model. The right business model for your app balances your goals with the expectations of key audiences, and can also affect the performance of your app in App Store search, including with Apple Search Ads. If you’ve tried the above and still aren’t seeing results, it’s a good idea to review App Store best practices. Learn more here…
Google Search Ads Optimization Techniques
Tips for Scaling a performing Google Search Campaign
Don’t dedicate an entire campaign for a top-performing keywords.
How long did you “test[ed] simply raising budget” for? Are we talking about a week, month, multiple months?
Here are some other options for you:
- Review your Impression Share and top of page rate metrics (Impr. (Top) % and Impr. (Abs. Top) %). Are these trending in the right direction? Are you losing out due to budget on high-performing campaigns? How do your ads perform when you’re placing above organic search results vs below (aka “Other”)?
- Look at 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows for things like audiences, demographics, and locations. Are there options here that are high-spending but underperforming, and could be excluded? This would allow, moving forward, al of the budget to be spent on better-performing targeting options.
- Consider testing new ad copy. If you can achieve stronger CTR, this allows you to generate traffic within the existing impression volume.
- My preferred setup is to group keywords by a shared intent. I have B2B SaaS clients, so the majority of my campaigns are all focused on very high-intent searches that contain both context (around my clients’ services/solutions/vertical) and intent (keywords matching to search terms including “software”, “platform”, “solutions”, etc). To scale traffic, I’ve created a separate campaign that bids on keywords that contain just the contextual terms, but not the software-intent, with lower (manual) bids, using negative keywords to appropriately filter traffic. Considering splitting out your campaigns/ad groups by high-intent vs low-intent keywords, with budget given to higher performers.
- Example: Let’s say your client offers a software for enterprise businesses to manage their cybersecurity. A high-intent keyword would be something like “enterprise cybersecurity software”, whereas a low-intent keyword would be just “enterprise cybersecurity”. We still require the user to use “enterprise cybersecurity” in some context, but that short-tail keyword does not require any specific intent like looking for a third-party tool/platform.
The keyword “enterprise cybersecurity software” will likely be significantly more expensive, and likely lower search volume/impressions, but has a clear, higher intent. The shorter-tail keyword will get you a larger number of impressions, but has a higher likelihood of leading to potentially lower-quality searches and clicks. I’d recommend starting out with trying to capture the high-intent searches first, but when you’re looking to scale, that’s where I’d add in the low-intent keywords, but separated into their own campaign, or at least a separate ad group.
On average, you spend a good amount of money on Google Ads, but still not worth the money results. So, spending the money without having the proper knowledge is a waste! And spending money with no results hurts, right? Don’t worry! We will tell you how you can get the value of your money. We will discuss tips and tricks to improve your Goggle Ads conversion rates.
Follow the ways below to improve your Google Ads Conversion Rates:
• Lead With an Attractive Offer or Value
The book cover is the Book’s first impression. And, you might have heard- “don’t judge a book by its cover”. Well, that’s exactly what we all do. We take a look at the book cover if it doesn’t please our eyes, we move on to the next.
Similarly, the headline is the first impression of your content. If it doesn’t please the eyes of your visitor, he/she won’t take an action on it. Hence, use some catchy phrases to create an attractive headline that will lead your content.
• Refine your CTAs
You need to tell your visitors what to do, otherwise, they won’t turn act! Yes, that’s true! It’s you who have to direct your website to take an action by generating a need for it.
Studies show that the most used CTAs by top-notch brands are- “get”, “buy”, and “shop”. Phrases like these, create an urge to take action, and that’s what improves your conversion rate.
• Boost your CTRs
Create content copy that can convince a reader to click right through your product. Write blogs or Ad copies that can convince your visitors to click. And for this, understand your audience. Convince them that they are missing something big and your product can fulfill that crack.
Don’t try to hurry them up to buy your product. Remember, in this step you just have to convince them to walk through your content and not buy your product. Use soft tone phrases like “get a quote”, “get more details”, etc.
• Align your Ad with an Accurate Landing Page
The general mistake we do sometimes is not checking up on our landing page. Whether we aligned our ad to the right landing page or not! Or, is the ad redirecting to the correct landing page or order! If you won’t do this right, you can lose a large audience.
For example, Your ad is about American diamond earrings, but the ad is aligned to a bangles landing page. This is not fulfilling the purpose of your Ad, and you will lose your potential customer here only.
Create a landing page for every segment and align them with the Ad properly.
• Work on your Quality Score
When you create or run a Google Ad, your Ad gets a ranking which is called Quality Score. This score is given based on the performance of your product. How much your Ad is impacting the audience, how it is performing in the market, how effective it is, and what value it’s giving out!
All these factors decide your Ad’s quality score.
According to studies, the more the quality score the lesser the overall CTR cost. This quality score can be improved by three factors- the landing page, the CTR, and Ad relevance.
• Don’t Miss out on your Social Proofs
People trust reviews. They are afraid of being the first one to use or buy anything. They look for the assurance and experience of others to rely on! Hence, putting out your social proofs is very important. Include the brands or firms you have worked with, put their reviews, and that will make you look authentic and preferred. This will attract and convince the visitors to be your potential loyal customers.
• Step-On your Competitors
Sometimes, not getting enough conversions via Google can be a targeting issue. And to sort that, you should focus on the audience’s intent. Like, what they are looking to buy, what is their need, etc. And, a clear way of doing this is branded keyword search.
Branded keyword search is when a person looks for something brand specific.
For example: “dresses on Myntra”, “Sports shoes on Reebok”, etc.
When a person will search the above keywords, he/she will not only get the results for the brands above but the Ads of alternatives too. That’s what stepping on your competitors is! Run your Ads on the brand keyword research of other competitive brands. I know, it’s something that sounds illegal but isn’t!
• Enhance your Landing Page
Optimizing Ads is not just enough! You need to work on everything else. One of the major things is the landing page. By having visitors directed to your landing page, you will have a task to fulfill what a visitor is expecting from you. Your landing page should have all the information needed in an organized manner. Don’t fill it heavily, but keep it on point.
Put product videos or video testimonials of the product or service, they tend to have greater chances to hook your visitors. And, the videos can help you better with conversion rates.
• Run Mobile-Friendly Ads
With the world going mobile, it’s important that you run mobile-friendly Ads. Keep the dimensions of your posters or Ad copies that can fit a mobile screen efficiently. Make it easy to access for the visitors. The only-desktop specific Ads will not look good on the mobile screen, and you might lose a great set of audience as most people access things through their mobiles.
Hence, move with the trend.
• Use Remarketing
We often forget how important remarketing is! Many times, a customer leaves the product in the cart or wishlist and forgets about it! Remarketing can help you catch back such customers. Look for Ads that performed great and are older. Run then again, they will lead your old visitors as well as create new leads as well.
Google Ads can be a whooping asset to convert your visitors into customers. You just need to do things right! If you will implement the above tips in the right manner the Google Ads conversion rate will definitely go up!
If anyone of you bright people has more tips to add, please feel free to add your opinions and suggestions. It’s always great to learn.
Read More: Conversion Rate Optimization Services
Another way to get good quality score on your ads these days is to write really awkward headlines that include the keywords, and then pinning any discounts. Kinda sucks but it’s been working better for me than traditional CTAs.
Quiz1: Jim Has Created A Google Search Ad With A Bid Of $5. Two Other Advertisers In An Auction Have Bids Of $2.50 And $2. How Much Would Jim Pay For The First Spot In The Auction?
Answer1: $2.51
Quiz2: True Or False? Google Audiences Are Updated On Every Impression, So Advertisers Can Reach Only The Most Relevant Consumers On YouTube Answer.
Answer2: True
Quiz3: On which social network should you share content most frequently? Correct Answer
Answer3: Twitter
Quiz4: You Want To Find New, High-Value Customers Using Their Data. Which Audience Solution Should You Use
Answer4: Similar Audiences
Meaning of key terms used in this blog:
Avg CPA: The average amount you’ve been charged for a conversion from your ad. Average cost per action (CPA) is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the total number of conversions.
- For example, if your ad receives 2 conversions, one costing $2.00 and one costing $4.00, your average CPA for those conversions is $3.00.
- Average CPA is based on your actual CPA (the actual amount you’re charged for a conversion from your ad), which might be different than your target CPA (the amount you’ve set as your desired average CPA if using Target CPA bidding).
- Use performance targets to set an average CPA target for all campaign in a campaign group.
Avg CPT: This is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a tap on your ad.
Your default max CPT bid applies across all keywords in your ad group unless you specify a max CPT bid at the keyword level.
When calculating the amount of your max CPT bid:
- Decide what amount you can afford to spend on a new customer or action. Let’s say it’s $2.50 (U.S.).
- Estimate the percentage of customers who tap your ad and who you think will download your app or take your desired action. In this case, you estimate 40%.
- Calculate what you can afford to pay up to 40% of $2.50 (U.S.) — or $1.00 (U.S.) — for each tap. Therefore, set your starting default maximum CPT bid to $1.00 (U.S.).
Avg CPM: Average cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) is the average amount you pay per one thousand ad impressions on the App Store.
CR: The conversion rate (CR) is the total number of installs received within a period divided by total number of taps within the same period.
Dimensions: A dimension is an element of your Apple Search Ads campaign that can be included in a custom report. For example, campaign ID or CPT bid. Dimensions appear as rows in your custom reports.
Impression Share: The share of impressions your ad(s) received from the total impressions served on the same search terms or keywords, in the same countries and regions. Impression share is displayed as a percentage range, such as 0-10%, 11-20%, and so on. This metric is only available in predefined Impression Share custom reports and on the Recommendations page.
Impressions: The number of times your ad appeared in App Store search results within the reporting time period.
Installs: The total number of conversions from new downloads and redownloads resulting from an ad within the reporting period. Apple Search Ads installs are attributed within a 30-day tap-through window. Note that total installs may not match totals of LAT Off and LAT On installs, as additional downloads may come from customers using iOS 14 or later.
LAT Off Installs: Downloads from users who are using iOS 13 or earlier and have not enabled Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) on their device.
LAT On Installs: Downloads from users who are using iOS 13 or earlier and have enabled Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) on their device.
Match Source: This identifies whether your impression was the result of Search Match or a bidded keyword.
New Downloads: These represent app downloads from new users who have never before downloaded your app.
Rank: How your app ranks in terms of impression share compared to other apps in the same countries and regions. Rank is displayed as numbers from 1 to 5 or >5, with 1 being the highest rank. This metric is only available in predefined Impression Share reports and on the Recommendations page.
Redownloads: Redownloads occur when a user downloads your app, deletes it, and downloads the same app again following a tap on an ad on the App Store, or downloads the same app on an additional device.
Search Popularity: The popularity of a keyword, based on App Store searches. Search popularity is displayed as numbers from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most popular.
Search Term: Search terms are keywords and phrases that people have used to find the particular type of app they’re looking for.
Spend: The sum of the cost of each customer tap on your ad over the period of time set for your reporting.
Taps: The number of times your ad was tapped by users within the reporting time period.
TTR: The tap-through rate (TTR) is the number of times your ad was tapped by customers divided by the total impressions your ad received.
Keywords: Keywords are relevant words or terms someone may use when searching for an app like yours on the App Store. With Apple Search Ads Advanced, you bid on keywords to trigger and include your ad within relevant App Store search results — so when an App Store customer types in a search query that uses one of your keywords, your ad could appear.
Apple Search Ads knows a lot about your app and its genre, and will provide a list of keyword recommendations to save you time when you add keywords to a search results ad group. You can also add keywords of your own, and Apple Search Ads will suggest a further set of keywords related to the ones you’ve provided. To add any of them to your ad group, simply click the plus sign next to them.
I’ve managed +$10M in paid media over the last 8 years. Here are a few “less mainstream” FREE tools/websites/extensions I use. Hope this helps!
1. Adveronix
Adveronix is a handy Google Sheets add-on that allows you to export data from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or any other channel automatically into a spreadsheet daily. You can then connect this spreadsheet to Google Data Studio and have a free connector for most media channels.
Polymer Search has been one of my latest finds and a beneficial tool for creative analysis (and a few other things). For example, I usually test new creatives on Facebook Ads using dynamic creative testing campaigns.
I can then simply export my Facebook Ads data into a spreadsheet, connect it to Polymer Search, and immediately see which creative elements are working the best and which ones aren’t. The Auto-Explainer tool uses AI to immediately sort “Above Average” and “Below Average” creatives.
There’s also a ton more this tool can do – massive potential for media buyers.
3. BuiltWith
Before taking on any new client, one of my first steps is always to look at their website.
Suppose I don’t see anything like Klaviyo, Google Analytics, the Facebook Pixel, or any other marketing-related tech. In that case, this is usually a sign the client might be in a too early stage for me to help them out.
BuiltWith also helps you look into competitors and see what sorts of software they’re using.
The Ad Creative Bank is one of my top sources to find creative inspiration for new ads. It’s pretty simple: just look into the type of ads you want to create and browse through their well-organized library of great-looking ads.
5. Unicord Ads
Same as above, with the difference that you can sort by different industry/niche.
I find the ad quality slightly lower than Ad Creative Bank, but still a great library of ads to discover new brands and find inspiration for yourself!
6. One Click Extensions Manager
If you’re anything like me, your Google Chrome browser has +10 extensions cluttering your view. In short, One Click Extensions Manager allows you to organize all extensions into one single icon near your search tab, which makes everything feel a little more organized.
VidTao.com YouTube ads searchable by adspend over time. Perfect for modelling and competitive research.
And not forgetting:
Facebook Ad Library : Shouldn’t be overlooked.
Surferseo – it have free tier with a bit of tools
lsigraph.com – when you have no idea of keywords
I’ve audited a dozen Facebook campaigns this month. Here’s the common mistakes I’m seeing people make:
Most of these mistakes were from ad accounts that are in the early testing stage and spending under $100/day. The majority of these mistakes are related to what NOT to do during the testing stage in an ad account. I had a few people get audits that were spending higher amounts ($500/day and above) but their situation was very specific and the solution I provided was also specific so it most likely wouldn’t add much value to share that scenario.
- Multiple interests and/or behaviors in one ad set (aka stacked audiences)
Doing this defeats the purpose of testing because you don’t know which interest is bringing in the results. Many other reasons to not do this during testing including you could have a great interest stacked with a bad one and that could skew the potential results. There are some instances where maybe it would be okay to have 2 stacked interests if the audiences are very small, but what I was seeing people do often is stack over 10 interests and behaviors into a single ad set.
2. Using CBO (campaign budget optimization) too early
CBO is not recommended for testing stage in Facebook ads. I’ve seen a couple of people do fine with CBO for testing but it logically doesn’t make sense because you don’t have much control over the budget allocation. This is why ad set budget is better for testing because when you want to put $20/day into one and set and $20/day into another, you know that the test is even. CBO will most likely not even out that budget. Even with setting ad set budget minimums and all of those constraints, which is sort of redundant. Facebook will recommend doing CBO by giving you messages inside of the ads manager but most of what Facebook says in their ads manager is not based off your current situation. They don’t know that you are in a testing phase and don’t have enough data to do a CBO, they just see that you are trying to spend a certain amount per day and they recommend CBO. Facebook’s ad manager isn’t smart enough to say “I see you are testing headline combinations – you should switch to ad set budget” or “I see you are trying to scale your store – you should use a CBO campaign”. You should use CBO once you’ve properly tested at least 4 audiences with ad set budget optimization.
3. Creating Lookalike audiences with low-quality data as a hail Mary
Yes, lookalike audiences are pretty neat. When you don’t have enough purchases, there are other source data pools that you can create them with. Video views, website traffic, page engagement, etc. The problem is you are pretty much creating a lookalike audience based on people who DON’T buy. Especially if you don’t have anyone buying your product. There is probably something wrong with your targeting as it is and you need to stick to interest targeting and optimizing for purchase conversions. I’ve seen people run a traffic campaign, get a few hundred clicks, and zero sales. This is because you are getting very low-quality traffic from Facebook and creating a lookalike is just going to find more people similar to that low-quality data. If you have a sort of “niche product” and you think that you can’t target them based on interests then you are not thinking outside of the box enough to find interests to test (more on finding the right interests in a later section).
4. Spreading too little per ad set and running multiple ad sets (I’ve seen as little as $3/day budgets)
For the campaigns that I audited, I gave them each a different recommended daily spend per ad set depending on their budget, niche, etc. so I don’t want to say that you should spend X amount per ad set, but $3/day is way too low. If you have a small budget, then you are better off testing less and spending more per ad set. So if you are doing $3/day to over 10 different ad sets to try and test 10 different audiences, you are going to get better data from spreading that same amount across 2-3 different audiences.
5. Interests narrowing and exclusions
I’ve seen some exclusions that make sense like excluding AliBaba and dropshipping whenever they were getting comments on the ads, but I’ve seen this done where the audience they were targeting needed to have interest in fashion AND apparel. Doing this is trying to target better than Facebook which is usually not a good idea to do unless you’ve tested both audiences on their own and if they are different categories of interests (music taste w/ hobby, industry interest w/ behavior targeting, etc.). At a testing stage this will cause CPM to be higher than needed.
6. Trying to target high-income people
This is on par with the previous mistake, but I wanted to make this its own blurb. Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean they are going to shop at your store. You aren’t going to have better luck targeting the top 10% of zip codes based on income for your $20 sunglasses. Higher income people resonate better with name brand products that have credibility behind them so you would probably need to build up credibility, stellar branding, and high-quality products before attempting to target high-income people on Facebook.
7. Targeting interests that are too obvious
Your target demographic has many layers to their personality and social media behavior. When you sell a certain product and you only target the interest that is literally named the same thing that your product is, then you are limiting yourself to interests that your competition is probably targeting as well. Some of the best interests I’ve ran ads towards with Facebook ads are two or three degrees of separation from the product. I’ve sold supplements that were geared towards people who engage in certain activity, so instead of just targeting “supplement” I targeted “activity” interests. I’ve targeted music interests based on certain elements of a product that I’ve ran ads for, and the product wasn’t a music related product at all but people who liked that product typically listened to a certain type of music as well.
8. Focusing on cheap link clicks instead of purchases
The amount that you pay for a click does not matter if you are getting little to no sales. You want to pay more for expensive clicks from people that Facebook deems as likely to make a purchase or whatever action you are wanting them to do. I’ve audited a few campaigns where they ran two ad sets and the owner of the ad account concluded that “Ad Set 1” was better than “Ad Set 2” because it got clicks for half the cost. But neither of them got a sale, so neither is better than the other. Or I’ve audited campaigns where the store owner says “this ad did well, it got over 1,000 clicks” but it got zero sales. Typically this was done with an improper campaign setup anyway so none of those clicks were going to convert either way.
9. Not testing ads/audiences long enough
One campaign that I audited turned off an ad after just a few hours of letting it run because Facebook was spending the money too fast. I recommend letting a test run for at least 5 days. If the ad is setup properly then you will have some good days, some bad days, and some okay days. I’ve seen many times where the best day ever is right after a very bad day. Know that a bad day is still data for Facebook because it is learning what NOT to do.
10. Hanging on to an audience that stopped working
Audiences, ads, and campaigns can eventually stop working after a certain amount of time, regardless of how well they worked at one time. There are many reasons for this to happen which would be a whole post on its own, but if you’re struggling to get an audience to work then just move on and try again in the future. I audited a campaign that was running ads to a specific lookalike audience that was setup very odd and it wasn’t producing them very good results recently anyway, so I obviously recommended that they turn it off and try setting it up a different way that would be more likely to work. The user did not take the advice because that was their best performing audience many months ago. This is why you want to be diverse with your targeting so that when an audience stops working, you don’t cling onto it like overly attached girlfriend meme.
11. Setting up a funnel that is filled with low quality data
Running traffic campaigns is just going to get you a ton of traffic that is most likely not going to turn into a purchase. You are more likely to get a purchase from 100 high quality clicks than you would 1,000 low-quality clicks. Traffic campaigns give you the absolute bottom of the barrel traffic that Facebook has to offer. What I see people do is setup a funnel with traffic campaigns at the top, and retargeting at the bottom with a campaign optimized for conversions. This makes sense in theory, but in practice you are just continuing to retarget the low-quality traffic. And it just costs too much money to spend going after those low-quality clicks over and over again when you could just go straight for the purchase conversions campaign traffic. Those are the ones that are more likely to purchase without needing to see the ads 5 times. There are a lot of impulse buyers within those campaigns. Do this even if your store has zero purchases.
12. Worrying about 4 steps ahead when they are still on step 1
“I’m spending $50/day but what should I expect when I am scaling and spending $1,000/day?” That is going to be different for everybody but this is one of those situations where they are trying to solve a problem that hasn’t even happened yet and you’re essentially taking focus away from the step you are at right now and projecting it into a future scenario that may or may not happen.
13. Thinking the cost per purchase that they got on their own is what they’ll continue to see
If you are doing things incorrectly with Facebook ads, then you should expect to see results that are not very good. It’s one thing to have a frame of mind like “I’m not getting good results on my own but I think they could be better” as compared to “I’ve been running ads for two weeks with little to no experience and I’m paying too much to get a customer so Facebook isn’t worth it”.
3 Lessons After Spending $350K Since iOS 14.5 Hit
1. Account Structure
For me, it feels as if Facebook likes to have the account even more structured than previously. I rarely ever now use Cost Caps because of the delayed sales coming in and generally tend to have an account structure like this:
1 – TOF Scaling Campaign
2 – TOF Testing Campaign
3 – MOF/BOF Campaign (Try combining MOF/BOF in 1 Campaign if possible)
All in all, I try to consolidate my spend into as few campaigns as possible, and I still leverage Broad Targeting (No targeting at all). It has been working quite well for me on most accounts.
If you’re spending less than $500/d, I’d say Look a likes also are impacted. They are not getting as many data points as they were getting before, and therefore generally now have a lower value than before.
If you’re at the sub $500/d range, try Big Interests or just Broad Targeting if your look a like audiences are struggling.
2. Retargeting
Retargeting has changed a lot for me.
Especially at lower budget accounts, I broadened that retargeting window. Where I previously had 14D ATC, it is now 60 days. I also often combine multiple retargeting audiences, such as Add to Cart and View Content.
All in all, I try to have as few exclusions as possible since even if you e.g., exclude purchasers, those people see the ads. I’ve noticed this because a lot of new TOF Ads are getting comments from people who bought within the last 1-2 weeks from the brand.
So, with exclusions not being as effective, you want to prevent overlaps in retargeting audiences, which is why I consolidate.
3. Patience
Overall, tracking purchases has never been more challenging, and it feels to me as if Facebook is only tracking 40%-60% of all purchases from Facebook. This is why it is now super essential to look at your overall ROAS (Revenue / Ad Spend)
If your revenue increases when you scale up, but your ads manager is not showing up any purchases, they most likely come from your ads (Unless you’re running a big email promotion, got featured on a big magazine, or something like that, of course)
Purchases tend to show up in bulk for me in the ads manager after a few days, so don’t freak out if you see a low ROAS on your side, as long as the revenue is there. Make fewer day-to-day changes and keep an eye on results for a longer time.
Insights From Doing $150K+ a Day in Revenue on Facebook Ads
March 2022 Update on this: For those just seeing this now, Facebook has become significantly harder, but the general strategy here still works. And that’s testing LOTS of creatives, not fancy hacks. We’ve since started spending over $10K+ per day on Tik Tok as well and it’s doing WAY better than facebook for us.
What’s up everyone! Just wanted to drop in and share some insights into what it takes to manage $20K-60K+ a day in spend on facebook in DTC ecom. (I’ve done $150K-250K revenue days on facebook, personal best in terms of ROAS was a bit over $200K in revenue at about $60K in spend on a single one of our brands, not including black friday which was insane)
Just a caveat here, how I run ads might not work for you, especially if you’re super low in spend. Different brands require different strategies, and most importantly, my own strategies are constantly developing. How I test and scale on facebook now is completely different than how it was 6 months ago for example. Also another caveat, some of the tactics we use are really only necessary at a super high level as you’ll see here, if you’re a mom and pop shop they won’t be necessary (for example running multiple facebook pages which I’ll get into).
When I first got started in online advertising, I was always searching for the ‘perfect’ way to run ads through shitty gurus, and honestly there is NO perfect way. I recommend learning the basics and devising your own strategy, which is what I ended up doing. Another thing, at lowish spend (less than $5K-10K+ a day I would say, you’re usually going to get decent fluctuations in performance day to day on facebook. Consistency on facebook comes from high spend and feeding the algo as many data points as possible.
I’m fortunate enough to be in a network of the most elite DTC brand owners so I’ve accumulated a ton of knowledge about what works at this level of scale, but this game still requires constant learning! This isn’t set in stone but its just what I’ve found works for me, so here it goes.
Consistent naming conventions are super important for analyzing data in ad reporting at a glance. You can figure out your own but here are mine if you’re looking for a quick idea:
TOF: Prospecting (Top of Funnel)
BOF: Retargeting
T: Testing
S: Scaling
SS: Super Scaling (these campaigns are typically $2K-10K daily budget)
X.XX numbers at the end of campaign names or ad sets names: date of launch, i.e. 5.15 is May 15
Campaign name example: SS – TOF – CBO – Beast – 6.05
Targeting – Countries – Age – Placement – Attribution – Date of launch
E.g. Broad – US + CA – 18+ – Auto – 7dc1dv – 3.15
e.g. INT – Theme parks – US – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 3.24
E.g. LLA – Lookalike (US, 10%) – 2+ Purchase 180 Days – US – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 2.16
Brand – FB Page – video/image number – ad copy number – lander/advertorial number – post ID – date of launch
E.g.
PP – vv100 – adc49 – lp3 – 123434341834813 – 8.08
PP – p3 – vv100 – adc72 – lp53 – 123434341834813 – 8.08
Testing random interests found in facebook audience insights, similar interests to winning interests, etc using best 2-4 post ID’s to “feed” the pixel data
Audience insights is phasing out so this might not be useful in the future
Small budget ad sets of $30-50
Can dupe winners out 2x in same campaign at slightly higher budget of $50-60
I do this with lookalikes too but I do not run interests or lookalikes with any real budget whatsoever nowadays. I literally run all creative testing and scaling with completely wide open targeting
Phase 1 testing campaign
All new videos/images get launched here
I like to do them in batches of 3-4 new videos/images at a time in a single broad ad set with the budget set to 1.5-2x AOV
Broad targeting (US + CA, 18+ so we determine how effective the creatives truly are without being skewed by very good lookalikes/interests etc. In the case of more niche products, can try broad interest targeting, like interest ‘fitness’ if selling fitness apparel or ‘coffee’ if selling coffee product, with detailed targeting expansion checked ON)
Using best copy variation, best offer, best lander/advertorial
Winners graduate to testing phase 2
Phase 2 testing campaign
Take each winning winning creative from phase 1 and put it into its own broad ad set in this second campaign, testing 4-5 different ad copy angles (separate ad), still using best lander
E.g. ad set naming convention:
img192 – Broad – US + CA – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 3.02
Means img192 is the constant image across the 4 ads, with 4 different copy
Winning ad copy variants graduates to step 3
Phase 3 testing campaign
Here’s what differentiates us from most ecom brands. We test a TON of advertorials, like 3-5 new advertorials a month focused on different angles. Seriously at scale this is what separates winners from losers. In this campaign I’ll also test running direct to our top sales lander as well as one of the ads. We NEVER run direct to a shopify store, we have a subdomain with dedicated landing pages/advertorials that we run to with custom checkout that converts MUCH higher and has a much higher AOV with it’s upsells.
Take winning video/images + copy combo and test 3-5 different landers/advertorials as mentioned
E.g. ad set naming convention:
vv65 – adc220 – Broad – US + CA – 18+ – Auto – 7dc – 3.21
Denotes that vv5 and adc220 were the winning variables from previous test, now testing 3-4 different landers/adverts with these two winning combos
By now the creative has run through 3 different testing campaigns/phases. If still performing, it can be moved to bigger budget testing to see its scaling potential
Can also be moved to optional step 4 for generating more winning post ID’s
Also optional: Winner of this test can be moved back to step 2, testing more ad copy focused around the advertorial if a specific advertorial won during this test
Optional step 4
This is another tactic that I don’t see many bigger brands using. In this campaign I’ll take the winning ads from the previous steps, and re-create them on 3-4 different facebook pages that aren’t our main brand page. These are ‘blog’ style pages. For example the name of one of the pages if you own a furniture store might be “Home Decor Insider”. What you don’t want to do is create fake influencer pages like “Katie’s Home’s” or something like that as that’s not allowed.
Take the winning video/image + copy + lander/advert combo and test it on 3-4 different facebook pages to generate more winning post ID’s as mentioned.
The point of this is multi-fold:
Generate as many winning post id’s as possible because at scale you’ll need them
Distributes negative feedback score away from your main brand page (negative feedback can become an issue at scale, especially last year with covid shipping delays)
Different pages perform differently in the auction, some page names may resonate with people more and get cheaper cpc’s and cpm’s.
As you can see here the point in all this testing is generating as many winning post ID’s as possible.
BPA meaning best performing ads
This campaign is for testing all the winning post ID’s from steps 1-4 at higher budgets.
Like to do them in ad sets with batches of 2-4 ads
Also broad ad sets, but can also try with different LLA’s or broad interests
Budget 1.5-3x AOV, and scale it but dupe. I.e. start the ad set at $300, if doing well over the course of 3 days or so, dupe out at double $600. From here you’ll get a sense of how it does at higher budgets. Sometimes it can do very well in the smaller 1-4 step testing, but falls flat here. If it was getting decent metrics in testing, but falls flat here, you can try duplicating the ad set and trying it again, or testing with a couple different audiences.
DCT seems to work better with lower CPA products, or requires a very high budget for higher CPA products
I haven’t had much success with dynamic creatives for testing, and especially now with the ios update facebook doesn’t show in breakdowns which creative variables are getting the purchases so they seem essentially worthless.
If i were to do creative testing for DCT I would do something like:
One broad ad set for each new video/image
$100-300 budget
1x new video/image, 2 best copy + 1 new copy, 1 best headline + 1 new headline
Pull winning post ID’s out, follow testing steps 3-4 above to test different landers/adverts/offers/fb pages
What i DO like dynamic creative for lately is time sensitive sales, like black friday where I don’t have a ton of time to test stuff. What I usually do is toss in a ton of my existing winning videos/images/copy/headlines (I might just add a black friday sale specific line to the top of the ad copy) running to my best advertorial/lander and let it rip at about $1000 a day budget. If it does good after 1 day I’ll duplicate it out into a cost cap/bid cap at $5K-10K a day or whatever
This is a CBO with 5-7 ad sets, each ad set is a separate angle containing winning ads from the above campaigns, that get added to their respective angle ad set. Budget is about $1K per day for me. All ad sets wide open broad targeting
Here’s the fun part. My methods of scaling nowadays have evolved with what works on facebook. The good thing is with this level of spend I learn quickly what is or what does not work on facebook anymore so it keeps me current. I have a few different scaling campaign structures that I’m currently running simultaneously. This is what I’m finding works right now:
Lowest cost CBO -> 1 ad set (completely Broad) -> Best 6-10 post ID’s from testing campaigns. I’ll add new post ID’s/turn off ads if performance is on a decline over a week period. I will increase the budget by 20-30% a day if performance has been consistently good over a 2-3 day period.
Same as above, except this campaign is made up entirely of non-brand page post ID’s from the page testing campaigns
^ These campaigns are both often running at $2-5K+ a day
I duplicate the best ad sets 3x from the CBO angle testing campaign into a separate ABO campaign, each running at a different bid. Ad set one’s bid cap is set to target CPA + 25%. So if my target cpa for example is $50, the bid cap would be set to $62.5. Ad set two is set to +50% ($75) and ad set 3 is set to +100% ($99.99, I round down in this case as my theory is if i set the bid to $100, I’ll be put into a higher tiered auction pool and may get outbid, dont quote me on this lol)
I set budgets at about $1K-5K per ad set here. And because you can have one of these campaigns for each angle, you can see how quickly scale can build up here.
Same as above, but the cost caps for this campaign will be +15%, +25% and +50%
4 completely broad ad sets duplicate of each other, all with the same cost cap. This campaign contains the best 6-12 post ID’s overall from all testing campaigns. You’ll have to play with the cost cap here to get it to spend properly. This campaign is generally a big one for me usually with a $10K daily budget. I’ll also have a minimum ad set spend of about 3-5x the CPA set for each ad set
The point in having so many scaling campaigns is multi-fold:
Prevents reliance on a single scaling campaign on poor days. For example one or two of these campaigns might do mediocre one day, but the rest are crushing and make up for it
Optimizes differently and hits different points in the auction by utilizing both CBO and ABO
If you want to go crazy you can also take these exact scaling campaigns and scale them across multiple accounts as well. For that $200K day I had $10K+ cost cap campaigns scaled across like 4 different accounts.
And that’s it! Like I said this is not end all be all of running ads, just what I’ve evolved to do after spending high budget day in and day out for single brands
The most important thing about scaling with this level of spend and what separates the brands who do great online and those who don’t is content. We’re testing about 10-15 NEW video ads per WEEK + variations of winning videos on top of that (different hooks for example)
Audience “hacking” is no longer really a thing and hasn’t been for a while. I don’t run any interests at scale for the most part and lookalikes I barely use nowadays either (they worked great last year up until Q3-Q4). literally just wide open 18+ targeting. broad targeting might not work as well if you have a super niche brand
It’s true that nowadays facebook has certainly become a lot more difficult. We aren’t spending as much on it compared to last year (though still a lot and it’s our primary DTC revenue driver still), we’re trying to crack other traffic sources to diversify for cold traffic, especially with Tik Tok, Youtube, GDN and Snapchat. Snap is spending about $3K-5K a day at so-so ROAS.
How to structure your entire Facebook ad campaign (From prospecting to retargeting)
Having a defined structure and strategy is essential to a successful Facebook ad campaign.
I run an ads agency and one of the biggest mistakes I see with Facebook ads is a complete lack of structure. Many business owners and advertisers treat Facebook ads like darts, throwing hail Mary’s at the board and hoping for a favorable outcome. This is especially apparent when it comes to scaling, I think this is what people struggle with most.
In this post I will give a complete overview of how to structure your Facebook ads, from TOF prospecting to BOF retargeting.
Quick disclaimer, this is just a general overview of strategy and structure. Every ad account should be approached differently and it’s important to tailor your strategy to your brand.
This is what it should look like from a birds-eye view:
TOF – 1 Testing Campaign & 1 Scaling Campaign
MOF- Retargeting Campaign for Soft Interest (Landing page view, video views etc)
BOF – Retargeting Campaign for Heavy Interest (ATC, IC etc)
BOF Post Purchase (Optional) – This is brand dependent and isn’t applicable for all. This is post-purchase retargeting.
TOF – Testing and Scaling
This stage of the funnel should ideally be split into two campaigns, it may require more with bigger accounts.
This entire stage of the funnel only involves cold audiences, a majority of your budget should be allocated to TOF.
Testing
The first campaign is the testing campaign. It’s important to test EVERYTHING. This campaign should be ABO and every ad set should be allocated an equal daily spend. Test audiences and creatives for 1 week, kill ad sets that aren’t performing, winning ad sets and and creatives will be moved to the scaling campaign.
It’s also possible to scale ad sets vertically in the testing campaign. However, be careful to not get overzealous as you risk sending the ad set back into learning. To scale vertically, slowly increase the ad set budget by 10%-20% every couple of days.
Scaling
All your winning ad sets from the testing campaign must be duplicated into the scaling campaign. Sometimes ad sets will perform vastly different when duplicated so this is why we also scale vertically in the testing campaign. Sometimes it may just be a matter of duplicating the ad set twice before it performs. This is a result of Facebook’s learning phase always being different.
Now, this campaign should ideally be CBO as your goal is to maximise results. You should still be introducing new ad sets from your testing campaign, some people even introduce new ad sets directly to the scaling campaign. At this stage of the funnel, keep an eye on frequency as you don’t want to risk audience fatigue. It’s important to keep introducing new creatives to combat audience fatigue.
The TOF campaign should include both cold interest audiences and cold LLA audiences. As I said, test everything. It’s also important to start with logical audiences. Once you start getting traction you can begin introducing some more obscure interests.
Your copy at this stage should also be problem/solution focused, you are selling your product at this stage.
MOF – Retargeting Soft Interest
This stage of the funnel will only be effective if your cold campaigns were optimised for purchases, otherwise, you will be wasting money retargeting low-quality audiences.
The targeting for this stage is simple. It’s important that you exclude audiences that you will be targeting later down the funnel, such as ATCs, ICs, and Purchases.
The copy is really important at this stage of the funnel. You have already somewhat sold them on the product, hence why they clicked. I’ve found that trust-building copy and creatives are effective. Customer reviews/testimonials can be leveraged to build trust with your audience and convince them that your product delivers on what it promises, or at least, has a real customer base. People like to follow the herd, convince them that the herd buys your product.
Some advertisers skip this stage of the funnel completely, or combine it with the bottom of funnel retargeting. This is ok, but I like structure and separating the campaigns is much more orderly. It also allows you to ensure copy and creative is consistent with the funnel stage.
BOF – Retargeting Heavy Interest
This is the campaign that should provide you with the best results in terms of ROAS and CPA. However, as the audience will be much smaller, the daily ad spend will be relatively low.
It’s important that you exclude the MOF audiences, as well as purchasers.
Creative and copy should involve a strong CTA. This audience has already been involved in the purchase process and thus, have shown strong interest in your product. We often use discount codes at this stage as a CTA.
You can also get creative with your copy. Remember, this audience already knows your brand and product.
BOF Post Purchase – Optional
This is only applicable for brands with multiple products for sale. Only a very small budget should be allocated to this campaign.
Again, this audience is already very familiar with your brand so use this to your advantage.
As mentioned in the beginning, this is just a basic structure and there are many variations. It’s important that you take your own situation into account when setting up your Facebook ads.
I hope this post has been helpful, it’s not as granular as my previous posts but I think it’s important that people understand how to structure an entire Facebook ad strategy.
Top 10 CPM’s most expensive/cheapest Facebook
Here are the top 10 most expensive CPM’s for February-March 2022:
Australia – $19.57
Denmark – $18.98
Norway – $18.19
United States – $17.26
Singapore – $15.43
Israel – $14.68
New Zealand – $14.23
United Kingdom – $12.40
Canada – $11.86
Sweden – $11.71
Here are the top 10 cheapest CPM’s for February-March 2022:
Uzbekistan – $0.06
Belarus – $0.09
Kyrgyzstan – $0.16
Tajikistan – $0.16
Turkmenistan – $0.21
Kazakhstan – $0.22
Guinea-Bissau – $0.41
India – $0.41
Azerbaijan – $0.42
Wallis and Futuna – $0.43
Your poor performing Facebook Ads is not as simple to fix as you probably think it is…
If you are experiencing poor results with your Facebook Ads and have a “quick fix” in mind, please read this post before you attempt to fix it.
When you create Facebook ad campaigns, you know that there are just so many different ways that it can be set up.
Like a dozen different campaign objectives… Many conversion optimization options… Hundreds (maybe thousands, idk) of interest you can target… Lookalike audiences… The different platforms you can place your ad on… Video vs. image… Square vs. rectangle… Long copy vs. short copy…
And the list goes on and on.
So whenever you launch a campaign on Facebook and it isn’t working after 5-7 days, you can see how many different things can be adjusted in an attempt to fix it.
I’ve worked on hundreds of ad campaigns on Facebook and have had thousands of conversations about Facebook ads with either my clients or with people who are needing help running their ads and they come to me for consulting or to have me personally launch and scale their ads properly. Sometimes they will tell me what they think is causing their issues and what they say ALWAYS falls into two categories. They either say “I have no idea” or they say that they think the fix is just one thing like “I just need better targeting” or “my ads don’t get enough likes” or “I’m just not sure how much my daily budget is, that’s my main problem”
And I’ve made the mistake of taking their word for it so when I dive into their ad account, I go in with the expectation of just making that easy fix and everything else in the ad account being setup properly. Just fix their targeting or budgeting and it’ll all be smooth sailing from here. Nope. There are always many more problems I see as I go in their ad strategy and setup.
I’m going to go a bit deep here… people often emulate this type of thinking with a lot of things in life that are big problems but think the solution is super simple. When people need to lose weight, they’ll say “If I could afford healthy food and a gym membership, I would be in great shape” but there are so many other problems like their consistency or workout routine… their opinion of what “healthy food” is could be inaccurate. Get them free unlimited healthy food and free gym membership and they’ll still be out of shape. And people think “if I had a million dollars, I would be happy with my life” but then they win the lottery and are still miserable.
Maybe there is some sort of psychological pattern that people do to themselves to feel less overwhelmed with their problems? I’m not an expert in that area!
Here’s the point I’m trying to make: the fix for your low performing ads is MUCH more than just one single small little fix. It’s either a lot more little fixes or one big fix.
If I dive into your Facebook ad account and I see horrible campaign structure, improper budgeting, confusing ads, and terrible targeting… turning on “target people connected to Wi-Fi” is NOT going to fix your campaign. Find the “perfect interest” to target won’t fix it either. But this is the type of thinking that people have that I talk to with broken ads.
When it comes to fixing broken Facebook campaigns, all of the solutions fall into two main categories, each having their own criteria that MUST be met.
The categories
Campaign structure
Product (or offer)
The criteria that both must be met for a winning ad campaign
The campaign structure must cater to what Facebook prefers
The product must cater to what your target demographic prefers
Some things do overlap a little bit into both categories. For example, the ad design needs to be social media friendly so that Facebook doesn’t throttle your reach with high CPM and your ad must cater to your target demographic by being easy for them to understand what you are selling. So that’s a little bit of both Facebook and target demographic in that situation. And then in the scenario where your product can’t go against Facebook’s ad policy is clearly something that must cater to Facebook’s preferences.
I could write a book going over all of the things that fall into these categories that will fix a failing ad campaign, but here are a few real examples I’ve seen inside of ad campaigns over the last few weeks.
1. Budget spread too thin among ad sets and/or ads
An ad account I started working on last week was using dynamic ads with as many ad variations as possible. Maxed out number of creatives, maxed out number of ad copy, and headlines. The amount that they were spending on this dynamic ad was about $100 per day, however because they had so many dynamic options, they basically had like 200+ ads in one ad set. Put $100/day into that and you’ve got 50 cents per day per ad. That’s not nearly enough budget to give Facebook with any ad. If you are going to use dynamic ads or multiple ads in one ad set, try to give each ad a range of $5-15 per day.
2. Ad talks more about the business or brand instead of the product
This one broke the rule of having the ad and product cater to the target demographic. Especially for newly established brands, your best target demographic are impulse buyers. They don’t typically care about how long you’ve been in business or how your product is made. Now I’m not saying you should never put that into an ad, but I would recommend talking about the product or special offer at the top of the text in the ad and in the headline which is the first thing that a viewer will read.
3. Targeting is far too restricted and narrowed down
A rule of thumb when it comes to Facebook’s targeting is you want to make it easy for Facebook to find who it is you are looking for. When you add too many constraints on your targeting, it requires Facebook to work extra hard on figuring out who to put your ad in front of and Facebook makes you pay for that extra work it has to do by raising your CPM substantially. The ad account I worked on had 5 interests in the first level that were entertainment based, then narrowed down to 3 more interests that were hobby based that must match, and then finally was narrowed down again towards engaged shoppers. So when Facebook finds someone in that first level of audience, it needs to check if they match the second level, and then the third as well. For best results, just test out one or two interests in each ad set starting out.
4. Creative is not social media friendly
Your ad doesn’t need to be “good” as much as it needs to be designed in a way that Facebook prefers so that it shows the ad to a lot of people. This is the first warning sign that I encounter when I look at an ad in the ads library for a Facebook page. I was on the phone with someone consulting them on their Facebook strategy and they said “My biggest problem is the targeting. I have no idea what interest is the right one,” but then I look at their ads in the ad library and it doesn’t matter who they target with that ad, Facebook doesn’t like the ad. Too much text on the ad and low quality image is the common one I see for this one. The 20% text rule is no longer in effect, however if you put too much text on an ad it will throttle the reach and increase the CPMs (usually by a TON to where it is nearly impossible to counter) If you have some big bold text you want to put on the creative, just put that in the headline of the ad instead.
And there are many more errors that I have witnessed but I’m sure that a lot of people who read this post are making similar errors to just the few examples I’ve mentioned and I hope this can help them fix their ad account at least a little bit.
How to leave less money on the table with your FB ads
I’ve audited hundreds of ad campaigns, from huge organization like Greenpeace to startup drop shippers.
There are 9 areas I pay attention to when doing these audits:
Structure
Objectives
Targeting
Placements
Customer Avatar / Personas
Copywriting
Visuals
Landing Pages
Funnel / Strategy
Here are the most common mistakes I see businesses make with each of those Pillars, that hold them back from the ROI they need if they are to grow.
Biggest Mistake: Not using clear naming protocols.
Explanation: This is possibly the least sexy area of FB ads, but if you don’t name your campaigns, ad sets and ads consistently, you end up with unclear names for things and everything takes longer when trying to find your way around your account, look back at results, or compare performance of two campaigns/ad sets. Look at this example…How to avoid making the same mistake: The naming convention I recommend is as follows:Campaign:Objective | description | date i.e. “Guide download | Overwhelm | Jun 2019” Ad Set:Description | date | testing variable i.e.ad set 1: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | email lookalike” ad set 2: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | Interest: Moz” Ads:Description | date | testing variable | creative variable i.e.ad 1: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | email LLA | H1C1V1“ ad 1: “Overwhelm | Jun 2019 | email LLA | H1C1V2“ (H= headline, C= ad copy, V= visual)
Biggest Mistake: Not using the conversion objective
Explanation: I think this comes down to people not quite understanding how Facebook’s targeting and objectives work.
Here’s an (over-simplified for the sake of clarity) overview:
There are two main factors that affect who sees your ads, your targeting and your objective. By choosing targeting options, you narrow down your potential audience from ‘Everyone who uses Facebook’ down to (for example) ‘people who like pages related to surfing’ or ‘women over 40 within 10 miles of my business’.
Then Facebook takes that group of people, and ranks them in order of ‘most likely to complete the objective you’ve chosen’ based on the huge amount of historical data they have on everyone. This means that if you’ve selected an audience of 100’000 people, and chosen the ‘traffic’ objective, then Facebook will decide who of those 100’000 people are most likely to click your ad (based on things like how relevant they think this ad is to them, and how often they’ve historically clicked on things like this), and show it to them in rough order, from person 1 to person 100’000.If you chose the ‘video views’ objective, then Facebook will decide who of those 100’000 people are most likely to watch your video (based on things like how often they watch videos like yours), and show it to them in rough order, from person 1 to person 100’000.So…
By choosing different objectives – your ads will show to different groups of people within your audience. This isn’t a big deal if you have an audience of 30’000 because your ad will likely show to all of them in a short timeframe, but if you’ve got an audience of 2 million people, then you want to show it to the people most likely to do the thing you want. And typically, when you’re sending someone to your website, it’s because you want them to do something when they’re there – i.e. download a guide, or buy a product, or book an appointment. So by not choosing the ‘conversion’ you are likely getting worse results than you could be.
How to avoid making the same mistake:
Read through the following paragraphs to learn when to use the most common objectives:
Traffic – Use this when you’re sending people to your website but don’t have an action for them to do when they get there, or can’t track what they do when they get there – I.e. a blog post/ press release/ new thing you’re doing, or when promoting third party content (where you don’t have access to a tracking pixel on the end site).
Conversions – Use this when you want to send someone to your website AND have them do an action – i.e. getting them to buy something, sign up for an event, or download your awesome guide.
Within conversions – you can set up different objectives. Best practice is to start with the end goal you want, i.e. purchases, and then move back along the customer journey (purchase > initiate checkout > add to basket > view content > view landing page) if you don’t get results.
Page Post Engagement (PPE) (This is the same as boosting a post) – Use this when you want to get comments/likes/shares on a post – i.e. content that doesn’t require an action/ for a competition/ getting people to tag their friends. These are also great when you have a messenger bot setup, triggered by a comment.
Video views – If you’re building an audience of people to retarget, then video is likely to be the cheapest route, because you can track anyone who watches 3 seconds or more of your video. Also if you want to get cheap awareness of something that doesn’t include a direct action you want someone to take.
Lead Generation (Lead Forms) – These seem undervalued by many advertisers, probably because getting the leads from the form into anywhere useful like your CRM, isn’t as easy as it should be* – but if you want to get people to sign up for something, or give you their details, and you they are already qualified, then Lead forms can work great. For local businesses who want leads (i.e. gyms or cleaners), lead forms consistently get me the best results. * Use Zapier to easily get the info people fill in sent to your email/phone instantly.
Reach – Using the reach objective is telling Facebook to not worry about any end objective, but rather to just show your ads to everyone in your chosen audience. This is useful when you’re targeting a small number of people (e.g. retargeting the 2000 people who’ve watched a specific video of yours), or if targeting a small geographical area (e.g the 5km radius around your business)
Brand Awareness – An underused objective – presumably because it doesn’t produce a very measurable end ‘result’ but brand awareness ads are actually very powerful. Facebook will choose who to show your ads to based on who is likely to remember your brand in a couple of days time. This means it can be very useful for ads going out to a broad cold audience, with a view to retargeting them. HOWEVER – I’ve also found it to be one of the most profitable objectives to use for retargeting in multi-tiered campaigns (i.e people who’ve visited your website but not signed up for your course yet)
Biggest Mistake (Non-Local): Ignoring custom audiences. Explanation: The following order of targeting options are (broadly speaking) the preferred, because they go from warmest to coldest:
Custom audiences
Lookalike Audiences (LLA’s)
Interest targeting
Location
Age & Gender
And obviously, the warmer the audience, the more likely they are to buy from you.
Yet I see a lot of businesses just constantly pumping out ads to a cold audience, and ignoring the people who have already watched their videos / been to their website / added a product to their cart. In – businesses, a retargeting campaign, going out to people who have added something to cart but not bought is the highest ROI campaign 9 times out of 10, and it’s the same no matter what you sell.
How to avoid making the same mistake: Plan out a proper customer journey. What are all the different steps that someone goes through between first coming across your business and becoming a long-term customer?
Downloading a guide and getting on your email list?
Watch a video of you explaining how your process is ideal for them?
Browsing your website?
Scheduling a call with you personally?
And then create ads for each relevant stage to help guide them along that path. Remember, as they become more familiar with you, you will also speak to them differently.
Biggest mistake: Wasting money on the audience network.
Explanation: There are over a dozen different places where your ads can show. But not all of them tend to be equally effective, and Facebook will often push a high amount of traffic to the audience network because it is less saturated. The audience network is a huge number of websites and apps where Facebook also show ads. There are times and places when the audience network is great – I’ve seen it work well for link clicks to blog posts, and as part of a retargeting campaign, allowing you to ‘be everywhere’, but too often it’s not the right choice.
In recent times (since sometime in 2019) Facebook’s ability to choose the right placement has seemed to massively improve, to the point where I often leave placements on ‘automatic’ because I end up with a better end ROAS, but the audience network is the most common culprit for wasted spend, especially if you’re looking to get video views from a cold audience.
How to avoid making the same mistake:
Go to the ‘Performance and Clicks’ pulldown menu in ads manager, and then use ‘Placements’ in the ‘Breakdown’ pulldown menu to see if there are any Placements which are performing above or below the average.
If you see that you’re spending lots on the audience network and not getting results, then you might want to turn it off in future.
You do this at the ad set level, select the ‘Edit placements’ radio button instead of ‘Automatic’ and untick the placements you don’t want. Caveat – As mentioned, this is an area that I am encouraging people to play around with a bit less recently – it’s worth testing, but I’ve seen many examples of CPM’s increasing significantly when you remove too many placements.
When it comes to defining their customer clearly (if you don’t know who you’re selling to, it’s hard to speak to them in an appealing way) there are two related/intertwined mistakes I see made most often.
Biggest Mistake: They don’t define their target customer at all in the first place, and just use generic language that (sort of) appeals to everyone.
If they have defined an avatar, they’ve lumped everyone in together, to some amalgamation of all their customers.
Explanation: Generic language speaks to (and disqualifies) nobody. Buying is first and foremost an emotional decision, and if we don’t trust the person selling to us, we’re not going to buy, so you need to show that you UNDERSTAND THEM, and UNDERSTAND THEIR PROBLEMS.
How to avoid making the same mistake: First, define all the different groups of people that buy from you, there should be at least 3, but if you’ve got loads, then just identify the biggest few. Each of these personas will have different opinions/goals/pains etc, so once you’ve done that, ask yourself the following questions for each one:
For each one we want to know the basic demographics that define them:
age,
gender,
location,
income…
Then the psychographics that relate to what you’re selling:
What do they want?
What do they care about?
Who are their enemies?
What are their dreams?
What do they believe?
What are their suspicions?
How have they failed before?
What are they afraid of?
Then when you create an ad campaign, create it for just one persona at a time, and craft your message and your offer to match them.
Biggest Mistake: Copywriting is a huge topic, but you don’t have to be a world-class copywriter to get results from Facebook ads – the biggest mistake I see being made is talking about you, not about your clients.
Explanation: This follows on from the above customer persona section – because if you don’t have a clear picture of who your ad is for, then you can’t write for them. But you need to write for them, because talking about yourself is NOT going to appeal to them. “We are the biggest supplier of…”“I am a skilled teacher and can do…”This isn’t interesting to the reader, and will not get them to click.
How to avoid making the same mistake: WIIFM – Every time you write a sentence, read it back and ask yourself (from your reader’s POV) “What’s In It For Me?” If you have a clearly defined picture of who you’re writing for, then you can go through everything you write and make sure that it’s relevant to them, their hopes, dreams, goals, objections, fears…
Biggest Mistake: Not testing them.
Explanation: The PRIMARY job of the image/video that you use is to get enough attention to stop someone scrolling for a split second, so that they can scan the ad copy to see if it’s relevant/interesting.
If you just chuck up one photo and never try anything else, who knows how much money you’re leaving on the table.
How to avoid making the same mistake: Effective attention-getting-visuals tend to fit into one of 3 categories:
The target market Show an image/video of the type of person you’re speaking to – they will pay attention because it’s relevant to them. For example – if you run a food truck, then a photo of your customers eating an awesome looking burger in front of a recognizable place/landmark in your town.
The problem/solution/aspirations Demonstrate either the issue at hand, or your product/service solving that issue – again, people will pay attention because it’s relevant. For example – If you sell waterproof hiking shoes, you could show someone with wet socks looking miserable.
A pattern interrupt. Something that just seems out of place will get attention (read Purple Cow by Seth Godin), but beware using ‘wacky’ but irrelevant images/videos for the sake of it. these might get people to stop/click, but it’s likely doing nothing to qualify the right people. For example – I saw a FB ad a while back that was just a picture of a cute dog, with a headline along the line of “Instead of you seeing a boring advert, I’m paying to show you this pup” – it got my attention, but that was that.”
So find (or create) a bunch of images and video that fit those categories and see which gets the best Click-Through-Rates and the most conversions.
Caveat- you can of course, also use the video in your ads to teach/inspire/sell directly, but remember that without getting initial attention, your efforts will be passed over, and you still need to be testing different variations.
Biggest Mistake: S L O W loading times.
Explanation: Your landing page is the page that you send people to if they click on your ad. It could be a simple blog post, a product page on an e-commerce store, a booking page for a cafe, or an opt-in page where someone can give their info in exchange for a download/course/freebie.
Landing pages are consistently given less attention than they need especially compared to the ads sending people there, which is crazy because it can easily increase/decrease the ROI on your ads by 100-500% or more. and the biggest culprit is loading speed – how long it takes for your website to load for the viewer. According to Neil Patel “Nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.”
How to avoid making the same mistake: Google ‘pagespeed insights’ and click the top link, then enter your website/page. All those things that appear, they are all costing you money. ‘Eliminate render-blocking resources’ ‘Defer unused CSS’ ‘Properly size images’ – it’s all geeky stuff, and it all counts – so find a website developer and pay them to fix it. The great thing about speeding up your site is that it’s going to pay for itself over and over and over. If you’re paying money every month to run ads, then it’s worth paying a one-off fee to increase your conversion rate overnight.
Biggest Mistake: Randomness
Explanation: To put it bluntly – most businesses don’t have a plan when it comes to FB ads. They tried a couple of ads that worked, but now they aren’t working so well, and they just keep throwing things up without much of a clue.
How to avoid making the same mistake: It’s not complicated, not groundbreaking. but it is effective. You find an established business like yours, that’s already running ads, and you ‘model’ what they’re doing.
And the great thing that came from Facebook’s privacy stuff is that all this info is publicly available. Here’s how to you find it:
– Find known successful companies on FB – OR search keywords for your niche – Look for the ‘Page Transparency’ box on the right.
– And if they’re running ads, Facebook will tell you.
– You click on ‘Go to Ad Library’
– And there you go, all the ads that they’re currently running.
– You can click on them, follow their funnel, see what they’re doing.
– And model it for your business.
This isn’t perfect, and you can’t just copy/paste a funnel from another business, but it gives you a starting point, and if you model what a similar business is doing, adapt it to your own products & clients, then test from there, you’re likely going in the right direction, rather than driving around without a map.
There you go – avoid these 9 mistakes and you’re probably halfway there.
The hardest part of working on Facebook is working with Facebook.
Set your conversion objective for business goal, even if you can’t exit “Learning Limited”. Cheaper results.
You can get incredible results if you go “Broad” targeting. This means no targeting parameters. But first you have to groom your Pixel Metadata with Lookalikes, retargeting, etc.
Videos are gold.
Play it white hat. The “gurus” who teach you “scaling tactics” with duping and running small ad sets either haven’t advertised in 3 years or they are just saying what someone else told them.
These 5 rules will help any budding FB Advertiser.
What’s your favorite FB hack?
Before running an ad for my target country, I run the same ad for low-cost countries like African and Asian countries to gather insane amount of Likes, Shares, and Comments.
Then I use the same ad to run for my target country. The likes and shares serve as a social proof that the ad is worth watching.
This is a common strategy 🙂 But you don’t have to run the ad to third world countries – you can simply run it optimized for Engagement in the US (or wherever your target market is). Engagement-optimized campaign CPMs go as low as under $1.
It’s always better to accumulate social proof (especially comments) from your native country’s users.
How I Scaled An Ecom Brand From $45K To $120K In 30 Days
Your Landing Page/Purchase Flow and your offer.
I rarely see people testing landing pages, and even rarer, I see people talking about offers.
But changing these 2 things allowed me to scale an ecom brand from $45K/m to $120K/m within 30 days.
How?
Improving both Landing Page and Offer resulted in a conversion rate increase from 1.38% to 3.35%.
Let’s dive right into it, and hopefully, you can get something valuable out of this post:
Landing Page/Purchase Flow:
What is the purchase flow?
The purchase flow is each step that a customer has to take to buy the product.
A standard purchase flow usually looks like this:
Product Page – Add to Cart – Cart Page – Checkout – Purchase.
—-
In the brand I’m using in this example, the purchase flow looked like this:
Homepage – Offer $120 AOV Product Bundle (they have the option to add to cart here) – Product Page – Add to Cart – Cart Page – Checkout – Purchase
—–
Which in itself is a rather long flow with a high AOV. Generally speaking, you want to keep your purchase flow as short as possible to prevent drop-offs.
How a short purchase flow may look like:
Product Page – Add to Cart Button – Checkout (Skip cart page) – Purchase
Note: You might want to add upsells on the cart page, so this flow is not always ideal. It could also very well be that you need to explain your product to convince people to buy it, which is why e.g., sending people to a homepage or specific landing page can also be better than sending them straight to the product page. You need to test here.
So, the landing page from people who came from Facebook was the homepage combined with a relatively high AOV product bundle (2 products) for $120.
This did a decent job at selling the product, and the conversion rate was 1.38%, with an AOV of $120.
So our revenue from 100 visitors looked like this:
(100*0.0138)*120 = $165
So, our RPV (Revenue per visitor) was $1.65 ($165/100)
This offer was not profitable for the client. The overall ROAS was way below the ROAS Targets, and I knew I needed to change something. However, on the ads side of things, everything looked great.
So, here’s what I changed:
Landing Page
First of all, I started by redirecting the traffic to the product page to see if this affects the conversion rate.
This, however, wasn’t a success because the conversion rate didn’t increase significantly. In addition, the Facebook Ads were still unprofitable, and I knew a greater change needed to come. So, I built my specific landing page for that product bundle.
Since I’m not the greatest at building landing pages or writing landing page copy, here are two excellent guides where I learned a lot:
How My Landing Page Structure Looked Like In Order:
Hero Banner (With a button that automatically scrolls to buy section)
“Featured In” Part
Why “Product” Part
Reviews Part
Guarantee
Product Buy Section
Reviews
—
How The Purchase Flow Looked Like:
Landing Page – Scroll Down – Add to Cart – Cart Page /w new Upsell – Checkout
—
I follow the structure from the 2 guides above, so if you’re interested in building your own landing page, I highly suggest you check them out!
Note: I always use GemPages for landing pages, so if you’re a Shopify store owner, I’d suggest you use GemPages to build your Landing pages. ShoGun is also pretty good, but I prefer GemPages.
While the new landing page did a slightly better job selling (Conversion Rate increased from 1.38% to 1.7%) than either the product page or homepage, this still meant the Facebook Ads were just barely even profitable. So a more significant change needed to be made.
I changed the offer.
2. The Offer
Before, we were selling a product bundle upfront for a $120 AOV with now a 1.7% CV Rate, which meant we were getting a $2.04 RPV (Revenue per visitor)
Here’s what I changed:
I advertised a lower-priced AOV product with a discount on the landing page (core product) and instead created an in-cart upsell with the old 2nd bundle product. So if customers bought these 2 products, it was basically the same bundle as before.
How the numbers changed:
AOV: Decreased by 10% (which was to be expected) from $120 to $108.
CV Rate: Increased from 1.7% to 3.15%
RPV: Increased from $2.04 to $3.78, which is a huge change.
So from the start ($1.65 per visitor) to the end ($3.78 per visitor), I was able to increase the revenue per visitor by $2.13, which is an increase of 129% just by changing the landing page and offer.
TL;DR: By changing the Landing Page and offer from a brand I was able to increase their revenue per visitor by 129%.
I hope I could show you with this post that it’s not only your Facebook Ads you need to work on. In the end, your ads + homepage are connected, and even something as simple as the offer can have a significant impact on your conversion rate.
Facebook Ads: How iOS 14 will affect your campaigns
Campaigns will be affected in a variety of ways including:
Delayed Reporting: Real-time reporting for iOS devices will not be supported, and data may be delayed up to 3 days.
No support for breakdowns: For both app and web conversions, delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region, and placement will not be supported.
Attribution Changes: The attribution window for all new or active ad campaigns will be set at the ad set level, rather than at the account level. Additionally, going forward, 28-day click-through, 28-day view-through, and 7-day view-through attribution windows will not be supported for active campaigns.
Targeting Limitations: As more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, the size of your app connections, app activity Custom Audiences, and website Custom Audiences may decrease.
Dynamic Ads Limitations: As more devices update to iOS 14, the size of your retargeting audiences may decrease.
Limited to 8 conversion events per domain: You’ll be restricted to configuring up to 8 unique conversion events per website domain, and ad sets optimizing for a conversion event that’s no longer available will be paused when Facebook implements Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework. Businesses that use more than 8 conversion events per domain for optimization or reporting should create an action plan for how to operate with 8 events maximum. (Note: Facebook will automatically configure the events most relevant based on our activity)
(There’s more, especially for mobile campaigns, but you can read about it at the link at the bottom of my post)
Action Items:
We’ll want to preemptively verify our domain ownership in Business Manager. This will allow us to have authority over which conversion events are eligible for our domain should we choose to do so: Apple dev verification
We’ll have to be vigilant in terms of keeping these changes in mind when assessing campaign performance. For example, our FB ROAS will likely appear to be lower in the coming days and we may not be able to simply look at yesterday’s data when assessing performance. Instead, we may need a 3-day window.
This will likely affect Google Ads as well, but I have not seen Google release a document outlining the specific impacts this will have. For now, we can assume that what’s happening to Facebook will be the same for Google.
How to Make a Good Landing Page: The PPC Advertiser’s Guide
Knowing how to make a good landing page makes a massive difference to your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. When you design a landing page that offers a better user experience, you’ll see marked improvements in key metrics, including your Ad Rank (Quality Score & CPC), bounce rate, and conversion rate. As these factors improve, your costs will fall, ultimately helping you earn a higher return on investment (ROI).
In this guide, we’ll show you how to make a good landing page, covering each vital step to make it easy for you to deliver an experience people won’t forget.
When you’re learning how to make a good landing page, you should focus on the following:
Relevancy of landing page
Define your unique selling point (USP)
Show your product/service in action
Tell people what they need to know
Make your landing page mobile-friendly
Simplicity
Make your call to action clear
Remove distractions
Provide transparent policies
Leverage social proof
Minimize loading times
Build engagement
Optimize for voice search
Social Sharing & Feeds.
Test and update
Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Here’s a common mistake in PPC advertising:
You promise one thing in your ad, but when people click it, your landing page fails to deliver that promise. For example, your ad may offer a 10% discount on brake pads, but when people arrive on the landing page, it offers a 5% discount on brake discs.
This inconsistency will deter users, and your business will lose out on possible leads and conversions. You must create relevant landing pages that align with your ads — and with user intent.
Is your ad and landing page closely aligned now?
Good. Now, it’s time to define your unique selling proposition, which is how you differentiate your offer from your competition.
Your ad may address a problem that your target audience needs to solve. With a strong USP, you can show prospects that your product or service is the best solution available.
For example, if you are a quality pizza delivering company and you are best at coping with your delivery time you must emphasize your quality and your delivery time on the landing page.
Humans are visual creatures. If they see products or services in action, their appreciation and desire to have it will increase.
You can experiment with these ideas to improve engagement on your landing page:
Still photos
Animated explainer video
User tutorial video
Carousel shots that highlight specific features
Infographic
Also, it gives you a chance to explain the product or service in more detail, answering any common queries, and dispelling doubts before they arise. For example: if your landing page is having steps to complete by the user, escort them in a way that keeps the interest active for the user. Like:
Step 1: Fill the form
Step 2: Get the offer
Step 3: Get Paid
Nowadays, there is zero room for fluffy content, especially in paid advertising. Your ads and landing pages must get to the point – fast!
Use your landing page to explain only vital information that prospects need to know, such as:
Benefits of your product or service
Pricing and purchasing options
Business contact details including physical location and phone number
Social media channels and email address
Focus on the essential information to maintain interest and build credibility with your landing pages.
In the mobile age, nobody wants to deal with confusing websites. Therefore, you must create landing pages that offer smooth and straightforward navigation, right to the point of sign-up.
Make your landing pages mobile-responsive, so users on smartphones and tablets can quickly scan through the page, and complete any action that’s required.
Here are a few pointers:
Compact images – Make your images small (in dimensions and file size). This will speed up your loading times and make pages easier to view.
Reduce typing demands – Keep things simple for users.
Avoid auto-downloads – This annoys users by taking up space in their device.
Avoid auto-play videos – Intrusive audio can embarrass or annoy users, especially if they are watching videos in a public place.
Minimize animations – Use color effects and GIFs sparingly to speed up loading times. Provide animation if it is really required to show some demo otherwise don’t use it.
Learning how to make a good landing page may seem scary, but here’s the best tip of them all:
Keep it simple.
Here’s how:
Simple and direct copy
Clear, direct headlines
Minimalist design with plenty of white space to enhance the information rather than hiding it.
A clear call-to-action (CTA) that tells users what you want.
Fewer colors
High-readability
Here is the example of clutter vs. simple and clean landing pages.
Keeping it simple will lead to better results in terms of engagement, clicks, and conversions.
No landing page is complete without a strong CTA.
Whatever your product or service is, and however you make your offer, you need CTAs at decision points on the page to drive action.
Consider these strategies for better CTAs:
It’s a good idea to avoid having too many CTAs. It may be best to use just one at the very bottom of the page. That being said, having another CTA above-the-fold is a popular choice.
If you decide on that, make sure you also include vital information above-the-fold, so users have those details to guide their decision.
Have you ever seen an action button with the word “submit” on it?
This is a common choice, but not a great one because it lacks strength and inspiration. Instead, you want to incite action.
Create a stronger CTA that gets people to react. For example, “Don’t miss out on your FREE download” is better than “download now.”
Outline how easy your visitors will find your product or service to use. With clear, easy-to-follow directions, the value of your offer becomes undeniable — and often, irresistible.
Here’s something you should keep in mind when you want to know how to make a good landing page:
You must focus on a single conversion goal. Just one.
Therefore, anything else that distracts from your goal is surplus. Get rid of all distractions, external links, and unnecessary CTAs, images, or information that dilutes your message or invites users away from your landing page.
Ideally, you want to streamline the journey on your landing page to funnel leads to your final CTA.
As we move into 2020, consumer privacy matters are at an all-time high. The data breach scandals of Facebook, Yahoo, and Quora caused panic, and the General Data Protection (GDPR) regulations have taken effect across the globe.
Now, you must be transparent with the processes and practices you use for collecting, storing, and sharing consumer data. If people can’t trust your brand, you’ll never make a sale.
Follow these tips to nurture trust with people:
Use cookies toolbar to notify people that you track on-site behavioral data.
Use terms and conditions page to outline what your business is responsible for, and what it’s not.
Share your privacy policy, so people understand how you use consumer data.
Publish an FAQ page that answers common questions people may have about your brand, and your products and services.
Imagine your company provides analytics services to major corporations. Once you have one or two big clients in your portfolio, you can leverage those relationships to convince others to convert.
By getting positive reviews, you’ll have strong social proof from happy customers — that pay well. That can be enough to sway other top-tier clients.
To maximize this strategy, try to get video testimonials. Video content is much more engaging, and it will be a high-impact addition to your landing page.
Speed is crucial in the customer journey. Nobody wants to wait around for a slow website to load, especially on mobile.
Here are some tips to slash your loading times:
Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as this is an important ranking factor of Google’s Mobile and Desktop Indexes.
Use compact-sized images and files.
Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Opt for client-side scripting rather than server-side.
Use CDNs (content delivery networks)
Reduce redirects
Enable compressions
Shoppers have a lot to choose from online. You need to work hard to convert prospective new customers, tailoring your marketing tools and techniques to engage your site visitors in ways that they appreciate.
For instance, you can harness data insights with a live chatbot feature, or utilize pop-up discounts that cater to each visitor’s interests.
These techniques keep people on your page and make them consider your offer or brand as an option.
In 2019, voice search enjoyed significant growth, primarily driven by the improvements in voice-enabled technology. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant are battling it out to be king in voice-enabled devices, and with it, they are changing search engine optimization.
How?
Well, people who use voice search tend to do things a little differently than those who do a regular text-based search.
So, when you’re thinking of how to make a good landing page in 2020 and beyond, you should think about the following:
When people use voice search, they usually have a particular need, such as:
The address or opening hours of a store.
The price of a specific product.
Whether a business offers a specific type of service etc.
Keep user intent in mind to create content that answers specific questions, providing answers to things people want to know.
Google may be a smart search engine, but it needs all the help it can get. The better you optimize your content, the easier it will be for Google to analyze it — and promote it.
Schema markup makes it easier for search engines to comprehend the content of a webpage. Consider your website, your audience, and the CRM editing capabilities to use the right schema markup that will help you get noticed by voice searchers.
Voice search queries are typically conversational in style, often framed as questions or full, grammatically-correct sentences.
You can incorporate these long-tail, conversational keyword phrases into your landing page content to attract targeted traffic. As a bonus, this defined traffic is often cheaper.
Show your social feeds and tweets on your landing page to show your presence on social media. Once visitor purchase or do some conversion, make it easy for them to brag about their purchase and share their experiences by adding links to all types of social media. It will increase your credibility and presence on social platforms.
Like everything else in PPC advertising, your landing pages are not a set-and-forget task. Once you publish your landing pages, you must keep an eye on the analytics to gauge their performance.
Try A/B testing several ideas to determine the most effective version of your landing page. For example, you could test out two versions with different:
Headlines
Benefits
Images
CTAs
CTA positions
Run variants for a while, gather the data, and then analyze it to identify which version generates more clicks, leads, and conversions.
This process of testing and monitoring should be ongoing, helping you continually update and improve your landing pages, eliminating flaws, and optimizing strong points to create the best possible user experience.
Remember only to change and test one aspect at a time. This makes it easier to determine the impact of the change. For example, test images one week, then pick the best image. Next week, test headlines, then select the best headline. The following week, test CTAs, etc.
So, now you know how to make a good landing page. By analyzing these areas and putting in the time and effort to optimize each one, you’re sure to see dramatic improvements.
PPC advertising requires patience and strategy, more so than a big budget. Learning how to optimize your landing pages is crucial to maximizing your ROI.
Is Organic Search Traffic from Blog Posts superior to Google Ads?
From my experience Google ads cost me $0.80 per click. Of course it depends on the niche. So it might vary.
Now for $10 I can find someone on Upwork who writes me a 1000 word blog post. Again it depends on the niche. But that’s been my experience.
So $10 spent on Google ads will give me 12 clicks. Wouldn’t a $10 blog post give me much more traffic than 12 clicks over the years? Assuming it has a good headline and maybe some tags.
If I had to bet, I would bet that the blog post over time would far outperform the Google ads. But I don’t yet have the data. So I’m curious what you think about that?
Answer:
The blog probably would get more unique visitors, yeah. But are they qualified, are you selling them in the blog post, does your $10/article writer understand their needs and have experience on writing copy that converts?
With ads you can filter your keywords to find customers who are warm and are actively looking for a solution, it’s a little harder for articles on that front. E.g. a search for ‘welders in hackney’ would be a solid term to target with ads, but an article written on that topic probably wouldn’t rank well enough without a lot of research on the companies, finding out their pricing, services offered and enough unique and smart content to rank above those services own websites.
If your plan is to replace every advert keyword you’re targeting with a $10 blog post, you’ll end up with hundreds of really low quality articles that Google will recognize as low-effort and out of sync with the searcher’s intent and you won’t rank for anything.
Blog post with SEO included that ranks for specific keywords will have a good roi. But just make sure it is quality content as $10 content is likely to be worth exactly that.
What advice would you give someone wanting to learn google ads in 2022?
Working on an actual account will teach you more thing s than a course
Take a course only to cover the basics for developing strategies work on an actual account
Always look out for new features in ads manager, as Google is often biased towards new features and provides results at cheaper costs
Courses are a great start but nothing beats just running ads. Personally I think there is more than enough free info on YouTube to last a lifetime…..and good info too.
Learn the basics. Understand each feature in the dashboard. You’re general marketing experience with FB will help you.
I would recommend taking a client up on the offer or running ads for yourself to learn.
- The best way to learn google ads is by doing so. Do not buy a course! Google has some beginner courses (skillshop) take some of these and than ask an ngo if you can work for them. For ngo‘s google ads is free so it is a nice why to get to know the interface and everything around. And after than maybe you are able to go to an agency, there you could learn a lot.
- anyone else burning Shopping budget on ghost SKUs and disapproved listings?by /u/Yvonne_Tamarillo (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 22, 2026 at 12:10 am
just finished auditing our Google Shopping feed and genuinely have no idea how long this has been going on. we're at around 5500 SKUs across fashion and accessories and I found roughly 400 active listings for products that haven't been in stock for two seasons, plus another 200 or so disapproved for attribute mismatches we never caught because nothing told us to look. the color thing alone is maddening, our PIM has midnight and dusty rose, GMC wants navy and pink, so they just silently disapprove and we keep burning budget on the listings that do serve but convert nowhere because the product is effectively misrepresented. size mapping is the same story, we list EU 38 and Google wants US 8 and half the variants just quietly break without anyone flagging it. private label stuff gets flagged for missing GTINs basically on a weekly cycle and someone has to manually re-exempt them every time like clockwork. we were on DataFeedWatch and it was fine at 1500 SKUs but once the catalog pushed past 4K the wheels started coming off, rules conflicting with each other, feeds timing out, support telling us to split into multiple feeds which completely defeats the point of having a feed tool in the first place. at this catalog size is anyone actually managing feeds through native commerce platform sync to GMC or is everyone just stacking third party tools and quietly suffering? submitted by /u/Yvonne_Tamarillo [link] [comments]
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I don't trust many human beings. Yet I have a killer idea i've been sitting on for a while. submitted by /u/Seedpound [link] [comments]
- we’ll rotate it laterby /u/Vouchy-MOD (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 8:56 pm
Back in 1883 New York got its first telephone exchange. Took about a week for the operators to realize they could listen to every call going through the switchboard. They’d trade the juicy stuff on smoke breaks. Business deals, affairs, arguments about money. Nobody thought to encrypt anything because nobody knew they had to. That’s basically your company Slack right now. 28 million secrets leaked last year. Passwords, API keys, tokens, all pasted into chats because someone needed it quick and we’ll rotate it later. Nobody rotates it later. That key from 2023? Still works. That database password Dave sent you on email? Still works. Every message sits on a server forever. Gets backed up. Gets indexed. Probably ends up in somebody’s AI training set. submitted by /u/Vouchy-MOD [link] [comments]
- Any RV/Campground owners here?by /u/LyricalHolster (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 6:06 pm
Hey gang, I was wondering if there's any RV or campground owners here? I am in the process of considering purchasing a RV/campground dual business and would like to know more about operating it, pitfalls, risks etc. Would love to chat a bit about your experience either simply owning or running such a business. Thanks in advance. submitted by /u/LyricalHolster [link] [comments]
- Going live 3x a week increased monthly revenue by 40%by /u/eattheinternet (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 5:36 pm
Not to be a little Gary V but live selling is indeed a game changer. I have a beauty brand that’s been around for a decade and does around 100k a month. We started selling live on Whatnot 3x a week and within 3 months we’re doing 40k/month on that channel. We’ll start selling on tiktok soon and I’ll update you guys if you’re interested. I’m hyper bullish on live selling it’s actually making me sick (so to speak, just stress of holy fuck I need a million live shows and live businesses asap) Tiktok JUST added a bid feature - exactly like Whatnot, and from what I’ve seen and heard they push you to the fyp if you’re doing auctions (tiktok is probably seeing the success of whatnot as they’ve doubled in size year over year, so they’re going for that bid market). So I’m stressing at the potential there! Current live market in China: 1 T Current live market in USA: 50 B The US generally follows China’s buying trends. We’ve only JUST scratched the surface of live selling and I’m more than convinced (I KNOW) that if you go hard here and build an entertaining show selling quality products at good prices - you will build something substantial and ride the wave. Anyway just wanted to drop this thought so I can close the tab TLRD: going live increased monthly revenue by 40% maybe u should try it submitted by /u/eattheinternet [link] [comments]
- Update on Worm Bucket Composter Kitby /u/VandyMarine (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 5:27 pm
Hi everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on my launch of our indoor worm composter kit called the Worm Bucket. My wife and I launched this brand in 2022 right here on Reddit and we had a post hit the front page and gave us a great initial traffic bump. In 2023, we audition for Shark Tank and were selected to be a contestant on the show. We were cut prior to taping unfortunately but had a great experience. What followed wasn’t monster success though. In fact growth fell flat and then started declining. The product reviews were good but our rankings in the Amazon and Google algorithms were pretty poor. One thing that kept showing up though - teachers and non-profits in the ecology and sustainability spaces were using our product to teach about composting with Worms. I mean we were getting large orders - 20 units, 40 units at a time. These were pretty infrequent but we could tell this was a potential angle for growth. Using Gemini, I started revising my Amazon listing and my Website to appeal to teachers and homeschoolers. My conversions have gone from a paltry 2.3% to consistently over 11%. Now we are not out of the woods yet but the pivot to positioning Worm Bucket as a beginner starter kit for an easy introduction to worm composting appears to be working. Happy Composting 🪱♻️ submitted by /u/VandyMarine [link] [comments]
- I think I’m done, potential sell outby /u/mod-mike15 (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 5:25 pm
It’s been a long journey and I feel like I’m getting nowhere. 5 years ago I decided to embark on my first business adventure. I started a men’s jewellery business as I saw there was a gap in the market in this space for affordable jewellery that doesn’t turn your skin green nor breaks after a few days. High quality affordable jewellery. I started with no experience so my journey is all over the place but I started selling jewellery at house parties then at local markets etc alongside this I built a website and learnt a huge amount about branding, seo,marketing everything. After a year I got my first wholesale customer which was a designer brand retailer who understood that jewellery paired excellent with what they sell. Alongside this I created multiple wholesale commissions most notably a wholesale graduation pendant for the university that I went with, who then sold it to graduating students (was really proud of this). From the start I understood how valuable (and easy) it was selling jewellery in person so I saw a space for affordable, high quality jewellery on the high street. My local city was doing a £7mill refurb for the old market place and I saw this opportunity. It was going to be my way to create a chain. Fast forward many delays, I eventually got the space and it worked amazing. We were hitting between 5-6k monthly from in person sales but slowly the problems started seeping in. The market opened in summer, the council forgot to put in aircon and this didn’t get fixed till September then the heating broke all the way through winter. It took 3 months for them to put some music in the market place. Overall the atmosphere of the place within 6 months was horrible and in a decline. After the 6-8 months I knew I needed an exit strategy, I just couldn’t find the right place. We were still doing sales but costs were just killing us. It’s hard to see that you’ve done over 4k monthly in sales and then you look at the bank account at the end of the month and see little for yourself. I was still working part time along side this. So after a year of opening the shop, searching for an exit plan without luck it’s safe to say I was burnt out. I had to make a business decision based on my mental health which was difficult. So from September I decided to fully commit to turning it online. Although it’s been mentally refreshing, my doubts and motivation are in negative arrears. Is not that I believe my business doesn’t work, my business has demonstrated proven concept. I’m currently sitting at £400-800 organic sales a month which is causing me to loose money every month. I had a safety pot saved from the shop and I’ve been slowly bleeding it throughout the months which is getting more and more stressful. I thought I would just have to hone into Meta ads to get the growth that I need but that’s not worked out so far. It has just caused the money to sink faster. I also detest social media work although I would say our branding and content is decent I just hate every minute of it but I have put the effort in. I’m currently sitting on about 30k market value worth of stock, (I definitely over purchased stock, I am aware) the foundation of the business has been built I just can’t get it to grow. Maybe I’m just trying to grow it too fast because I keep telling myself I’m a relatively new e-commerce but man I dunno. After 5 years of constant graft am I a fool to continue. I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this, maybe to vent, maybe to understand if there is a way out via selling it. It’s hard to speak to anyone about this as no one around me is going to understand. TLDR- grew a men’s jewellery business over a 5 year period with lots of ups and downs, had my own shop, decided to close it as I needed a change in direction. Been working as an e-commerce since last September. I do £400-£800 organically but still losing month and I can’t grow it anymore. Struggling with drive and motivation. Looking to understand if selling is an option as I have a solid business foundation with over 30k market value of stock Help submitted by /u/mod-mike15 [link] [comments]
- Starting on google ads. Can I take customer data from my CRM and upload it to GA to make my ads better?by /u/Ornery-Sun9972 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 5:22 pm
Seems to simple to work but idk. submitted by /u/Ornery-Sun9972 [link] [comments]
- Who's currently running reddit ads?by /u/A_Small_Town_Guy (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 3:54 pm
I manage paid ads for a d2c health and beauty ecomm site. We are looking into using reddit ads. I've seen all the haters. If you're a doomsdayer, don't comment. What has been your experience? Are you seeing return? What challenges have you seen, what successes have you had? What budget are you running now vs what you started with? Any help you can provide. Do comment it it was bad, but I want honest feedbackn, not they typical negativity, you know what I mean. BTW- I'm new to this community. I know there is a reddit ad tag, but I can't find it. submitted by /u/A_Small_Town_Guy [link] [comments]
- EU Consent setup with Shopify, Pandectes, Elevar and GTMby /u/wolfmatter5522 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 1:34 pm
I am trying to figure out what's the right way to set up EU consent - each system has its own configs but not very clear how they should all work together. How is it all supposed to flow through? Is there a single place that should be tracking it, or should each system's consent tracking be turned on? Any help will be appreciated! submitted by /u/wolfmatter5522 [link] [comments]
- what do you tell people when they ask what you do?by /u/No_Procedure8667 (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 1:12 pm
someone at a dinner asked what I do and I said "I run a software company." they asked what kind. I froze. what do you guys say? submitted by /u/No_Procedure8667 [link] [comments]
- Microsoft Ads – Should I split a campaign based on top-performing keyword + how to clean up inefficient keywords?by /u/billuaa (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 10:47 am
Hi everyone, I’m fairly new to digital advertising (about 5 months in, no prior experience) and I mainly manage campaigns in Microsoft Advertising. I’m trying to better understand bid strategies and campaign structuring. Current setup: 1 campaign with ~50 keywords Bid strategy: Max Conversions (with CPC cap) One exact match keyword drives ~60% of total conversions and has the lowest CPA (high CVR) The rest of the keywords generate fewer conversions and generally have higher CPA What I’m considering: Splitting into 2 campaigns: Top-performing keyword campaign Keep Max Conversions All other keywords campaign Possibly switch to eCPC Reason: lower conversion volume + higher CPA + inefficient spend Questions: 1)Does it make sense to split campaigns like this, or would it hurt performance? 2)For the second campaign (eCPC): -Should I set bids at keyword or ad group level? -How do you decide starting CPCs without clear benchmarks? -Is there any practical way to estimate expected KPI impact before making changes? 3)Keyword cleanup: There are many very similar keywords (e.g. “running shoes store” vs “running shoes shop”) Some have high CPC and low CVR → high CPA over time Would you: -Consolidate aggressively? -Pause low performers? -Or rely more on match types instead? Context: I don’t have much internal support (small company, no training), so I’m trying to learn by doing and would really appreciate practical advice beyond help pages. Thanks in advance 🙏 submitted by /u/billuaa [link] [comments]
- Does Enhanced Conversions for Leads actually work without capturing anything on the initial lead ?by /u/UnitedWorldliness791 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 10:40 am
I run Google and Meta Ads for a company who haven't been vetting the quality of the leads. After pushing they are finally interested in this and we're trying to close the loop between the conversions I report on their website and actual signed deals in their CRM (Pipedrive). The conversion on the website are: - WhatsApp button click - Call button click - Email button click - Book a Meeting via Calendly - Contact Us form So I was seriously concerned about persisting a gclid or fbclid, pushing into pipedrive and then trying to gather some sort of info on the lead and consolidating against that gclid (just felt very complex agaisnt all those mechanisms) AI is trying to convince me that I don't need to persist clid, just provide hashed user detail (which we will have once the lead is qualified) and fb and Google just cross reference that with the detail they have on who has clicked recently based on logged in user info. Is this how it works?? Would be a major stress solved, especially since I'm sure we are already had these settings turned on so theoretically would work looking back also. neither of the API docs are particularly explicit or well written on how they work and AI likes to hallucinate so I wanted to check with the experts! submitted by /u/UnitedWorldliness791 [link] [comments]
- Media buyer at iGaming conferences: what I wish I knew before my first oneby /u/buttonMashr99 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 10:40 am
If you’re a media buyer going to an iGaming conference, there are a few things I wish I knew before my first one. First off, bring campaign screenshots. Operators will want to see your traffic sources, geos, and conversion rates. Don’t just talk about it, show it. You should know your CPA and CPL costs inside and out, and be ready to discuss them in detail, trust me, they’ll ask. Fraud and bot filters are another huge topic. In my first conference, I had 8 meetings, and in all of them, I got asked about traffic quality. I was caught off guard at first, but now I lead with my validation process and show proof upfront. This saved me a lot of time and helped me build the trust I badly needed. The meeting based format can be brutal if you’re not prepared. You’ve got 15 minutes to prove you’re not arbitrage spam. And if you don’t have the data to back things up, it’s easy to get dismissed. Bottom line, operators want to see proof and results. If you have the numbers to show them, you’re already ahead of the game. submitted by /u/buttonMashr99 [link] [comments]
- Do brands actually use custom landing pages per ad, or is it just theory?by /u/Parking_Bandicoot133 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 9:23 am
I've been reading about message match and how each ad should have its own custom landing page that mirrors the ad's specific angle But when I actually went and checked brands in Meta Ad Library —> Dot & Key, Bombas, several US food startups, every single one just sends ad traffic to their standard product page. Same page whether you came from an ad or typed the URL directly. So my questions: Is custom LP per ad actually practiced at small/mid scale or is it only for big budget brands? At what ad spend does it start making sense to build separate LPs? For a simple D2C product like a t-shirt or serum, what's the minimum version of message match that actually moves the needle without building full custom pages? Would love to see real examples if anyone has them. submitted by /u/Parking_Bandicoot133 [link] [comments]
- New campaign getting ZERO impressions after 6 days (Account previously spent £1.5k+ without conversion tracking). Helpby /u/pars-distalis (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 9:09 am
We recently got conversion tracking set up and launched a brand new campaign 6 days ago. The problem is, it's getting absolutely zero impressions. Here is the context on the setup: No negative keywords blocking traffic. Good search volume for our target keywords. No errors or policy violations showing up anywhere. Account history is solid: We previously spent over £1,500 on this same account without any delivery issues (we just didn't have conversion tracking set up back then). Has anyone experienced a complete stall like this after setting up conversion tracking or launching a new campaign? Any ideas on what the issue might be or what I should check next? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/pars-distalis [link] [comments]
- Founders, what marketing channels are actually working for you in 2026?by /u/Apurv_Bansal_Zenskar (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 9:02 am
Distribution feels like the real differentiator right now. The channel that works is almost never the obvious one. For us at Zenskar (order to cash infrastructure for SaaS companies), the highest-signal channel has been showing up in the right communities at the right time. Not blasting content, just being genuinely present where our buyers are already having the conversation. What's been working for us: Niche Reddit communities over broad ones. Threads where someone is actively comparing tools or asking about a real problem. Being the founder with a real answer converts better than most other things we've tried. Founder-led replies over polished content. A genuine comment on the right thread outperforms a blog post every time. Slower to scale but the trust it builds is different. Direct conversations over funnels. When someone is in decision mode, they want to talk to someone who gets their problem. We've leaned into making that easy. Curious what's working for others, especially in B2B or if you're selling to finance and ops teams. What channels still have real signal for you in 2026? submitted by /u/Apurv_Bansal_Zenskar [link] [comments]
- Working on a headline for a sales deck. What's more relevant to Accountants?by /u/DigiDynamicsN (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 8:55 am
Hey, I'm working on a headline for my sales deck and have two slightly different angles. Which headline do you think is more relevant to an accountancy? Stop relying on referrals. Build a predictable pipeline. Referrals bring clients. They do not build pipelines. A full calendar is not the same as a controlled one. Would be great to get some feedback. submitted by /u/DigiDynamicsN [link] [comments]
- How do you test google ads in low budget?by /u/Low_Fly3630 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 8:09 am
I am about to run ads for my Immigration law firm with a monthly budget of $1500, I am based in Ontario and I am confused on how do I test things? I am going for website visits and they'll book a consultation with me. I am confused between running ads on weekdays only or 24/7 since they have to book a consultation with me. But I have read that you should only run ads when you can pick calls and I am not sure since my main aim is to book calls with me and I don't want them to call me since I am mostly occupied. So what's the way to go. submitted by /u/Low_Fly3630 [link] [comments]
- Talent Tuesday: Services and Collabs | April 21, 2026by /u/AutoModerator (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 8:00 am
Looking to hire, get hired, or find a collaborator? Post what you're offering or what you need. Keep it brief: who you are, what you do, and how to reach you. No spamming. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]
- Why are we wasting ad spend on irrelevant audiences?by /u/Quiet-Sand-4169 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 6:48 am
Been thinking about this for a while now and just wanted to see if anyone else feels the same way. We're running broad targeting campaigns and I swear half the budget is just getting wasted on impressions that never convert. Like we're throwing money at people who have zero interest in what we're selling. I get that broad targeting casts a wider net but at what cost? I've looked at the data and the conversion rates on these campaigns are honestly abysmal compared to when we narrow things down. Maybe I'm overthinking this or maybe our setup is just bad but it feels like everyone in the industry pushes broad targeting as this magic solution and I'm not seeing it work in practice. How are you all approaching this? submitted by /u/Quiet-Sand-4169 [link] [comments]
- My experience using Claude to actually manage Google Adsby /u/tongc00 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 6:10 am
Heads up: this is an opinion post, not a tutorial. Plenty of setup guides already exist. The content is rephrased by AI. Context: I run a multi-location service business. 8K/month budget. Former software engineer, so I tend to build my own internal tools instead of buying. I've been using Claude to manage my Google Ads for a while, and by manage I mean read and write. Pausing keywords, adjusting bids, restructuring campaigns, writing new RSAs. Not just summarizing last week's performance. I think this is paradigm shift in how ads are going to be managed. It is a bit early right now, but the as models get better, I just can't see this reversing. But it's worth being precise about who it's actually for, because most takes I see online are either "AI replaces all PPC tomorrow" or "AI is useless for ads," and neither is right. Who this won't help If you've never run a campaign and don't understand how paid search works at a structural level, don't hand Claude the keys. Not because it isn't capable, it is, but because it doesn't have your business context. It doesn't know your margins, your seasonality, which leads actually close, what a defensible CPA looks like for you. Without that, you can't evaluate what it gives you. You'll get plausible-sounding recommendations and no way to validate them. You're better off hiring someone competent. It also doesn't replace strong agencies. Senior media buyers do a lot of work no tool touches: strategy, creative direction, managing Google rep relationships, fighting policy disputes, knowing when to ignore the platform's recommendations. That's not going away at least for now. Who it's genuinely useful for Two groups, in my experience. Business owners who already run their own ads. If you connect your CRM, content management system, google search console, GA4, and Google Ads so Claude Opus can see all of it together, you will get some pretty amazing result because the top models can synchronize and analyze all these data and produce very professional analysis. For example, flagging that a search term is converting on the ads side but those leads never close in your CRM, which means you're paying for the wrong intent. That kind of cross-system analysis requires some expertise and technical ability. It's now within reach for an operator who knows what to ask. A concrete example from my own account: my business offers several distinct services, but my original campaign had all the keywords lumped into one campaign with no real alignment between keyword intent, ad copy, and landing page. Quality scores were predictably mediocre, which meant I was paying more per click than I needed to. Claude restructured the account properly, separated campaigns and ad groups by intent, rewrote ad copy to match each group, and even built out the dedicated landing pages so the whole funnel was actually coherent. That's not a small task that I want to prioritize especially when I am not 100% certain of the return on my time. But with Claude, the marginal cost of making these changes are 0, so I am happy to have it do it all. You see how this is shifting the economics - without Claude, at my budget, no agency or freelancer is going to do deep work on every little thing and even help me change my content and my website. The economics don't support it. That's actually where AI changes things most: it makes that depth of analysis viable at budgets where human help never made sense. So if anything, smaller advertisers benefit more, not less, as long as you know enough to direct it. Agencies. This is the case I think is most transformative, and I'm not sure how many agencies have really sat with the implications yet. If you run an agency, you already have a playbook. How you audit a new account, how you decide whether to restructure or optimize in place, your weekly reporting format, your QBR structure. The hard part isn't knowing what to do, it's executing that playbook consistently across a roster of clients. That's the kind of work Claude Code is well suited for. Encode the playbook as a skill or plugin, and a single operator on a Max plan can produce genuinely customized weekly deliverables for every client. Not template output with the company name swapped, actual analysis grounded in each account's data, with recommendations that reference real numbers and account history. The downstream effect on agency economics is what makes this interesting. Smaller accounts become profitable to serve properly because the marginal cost of a thorough review drops a lot. Headcount scales more slowly relative to client count. And the quality floor goes up, because every client gets the playbook applied consistently rather than depending on whichever AM happens to be sharp that week. Curious whether others here are doing this, and what's working or not working. Happy to go deeper in the comments. submitted by /u/tongc00 [link] [comments]
- Follow up to my pest control post : there's 22 open federal pest control contracts on sam.gov right now and most are reserved for small businessesby /u/canhelp (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 5:57 am
so my pest control post from a few weeks ago got a lot more traction than i expected and my dms are mostly the same question. basically "cool but how do i actually make money here without spending $2M to buy an existing company." which is a fair question and i didn't really cover it. so here's the part i left out. the federal government spends around $141M a year on pest control. thats spread across something like 461 different contractors. and most of it does NOT go to the big guys like Terminix or Rollins. it goes to small local operators because a huge chunk of those contracts are legally set aside for small businesses under $17.5M in revenue. the big companies aren't even allowed to bid on them. i went on sam dot gov (which is where the government posts every contract they want to buy) and pulled every active pest control solicitation from the last 90 days. there are 22 open right now. some numbers: 22 active opportunities 12 are total small business set asides 3 more are SDVOSB only (service disabled veteran owned small business). even smaller pool of eligible bidders rest are open competition or overseas embassy stuff the agencies buying this stuff are mostly VA hospitals (7), military bases / DoD (7), forest service (4), state department embassies (3). basically anywhere the feds own real estate, somebody has to spray for bugs. a few specific ones that are still open as im typing this: VA Los Angeles pest control, SDVOSB only, due april 30 [36C26226Q0595] VA New York, 5 year integrated pest management contract, SDVOSB, due april 29 [36C24226Q0505] Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Alaska, 5 year pest management through Defense Health Agency, small biz set aside, due april 29 [HT941026Q2018] US Embassy Paris, pest control for various american government buildings in paris (which is a lot of buildings), due april 23 [19FR6326R0005] US Embassy Lusaka in Zambia, due april 30 [19ZA6026R0005] a VA in Wilmington Delaware has a geese problem and needs someone to deal with it. found this one funny but its very real [36C24426Q0319] and the army corps in virginia is looking for someone to fly a plane and do aerial mosquito spraying [W9123626Q1AVZ] as for what these pay, here's some recent ones that already got awarded: VA Fargo signed a 5 year IDIQ at $345k. Louisville VAMC did a similar 5 year SDVOSB at a $336k ceiling, 3 bidders. DC regional VA pest contract had a $7.5M ceiling across 9 sites. Edwards AFB came in at $616k. so single site VA hospitals are usually $50k-500k a year. multi site or big DoD installations get into the millions. the $7.5M DC one is kinda an outlier but its not even the biggest, ive seen bigger. why this matters if youre thinking about pest control as a side hustle or a business: my first post was all about why pest control is a good business. 70-85% of revenue is recurring, people dont cancel, margins are decent. federal contracts are that same idea cranked up to 11. when a VA hospital signs a 5 year contract with you, they are NOT switching in year 2 because of some hiccup. the paperwork to switch is insane for them. once youre in, youre basically in for 5 years straight. and since most of these are small business set asides, you are not competing against terminix. youre competing against 3-5 other small local operators. and honestly most of them write absolutely brutal proposals. most of these go LPTA which just means cheapest qualified bidder wins. hitting the technical requirements correctly is where most first timers fumble it. if you want to actually do this, here's roughly what it takes: pesticide applicator license in your state. 1-2 months, its an exam sam dot gov registration for your business. free. takes 2-4 weeks once you have an EIN UEI number comes automatically with sam if you served and have a service connected disability, get the SDVOSB cert through the VA. its the single most valuable cert in this space because only a handful of companies have it and 3 of the 22 current contracts are SDVOSB only commercial general liability insurance, usually $1-2M past performance. this is the hard one. if youve never done pest control for anyone before you cant just win a federal contract cold. you solve it by either doing regular commercial pest work for a year or two first, OR subcontracting under an existing prime on their federal gig (this is common and a great way to learn), OR starting with really small SAP contracts under $250k where past perf requirements are softer realistic timeline zero to first contract: 6-12 months. way faster if you already run a pest control operation and just need to add the federal channel on top. stuff i wouldnt want to gloss over: some of these solicitations are basically pre-wired for a specific incumbent. you can usually tell by reading the PWS. if the requirements read like a job description for one specific company, thats what's happening. dont burn 40 hours on a proposal you were never going to win. margins on federal work are thinner than residential or commercial. the government negotiates hard and LPTA is a race to the bottom on price. you trade margin for revenue stability. payment can be slow. 30-60 days is normal, 90+ happens more than id like. if your cash flow is tight this will wreck you. and if you grow past $17.5M in revenue you graduate out of the set aside pool and suddenly youre competing with Rollins on price. which you lose. so there is actually a reason to stay small for a while on purpose. submitted by /u/canhelp [link] [comments]
- What's the best way to share info at events?by /u/No-Commercial1440 (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 4:19 am
Got one coming up and trying to figure it out, QR codes, printed cards, or digital business cards? submitted by /u/No-Commercial1440 [link] [comments]
- All solo + new dads: Advice on how you managed a new baby + hustle?by /u/rakeshkanna91 (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 2:41 am
We are expecting our little one any day now. It's our first. I don't know what to expect and not sure if I should not worry about it as priorities change and it's natural. (just to give more info) I am close to launching something in 1/2 weeks to friends and family for product validation. So it's not so much that I have paying customers yet. But I know there is a real need for it. I don't want to slow down. But i also anticipate life is going to be different pretty soon. Have you gone through this? Any advice? submitted by /u/rakeshkanna91 [link] [comments]
- Getting Meta leads way outside strict radius...by /u/DelayStunning397 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 21, 2026 at 12:48 am
Hey everyone, I have a local client in Columbus, Ohio. I set the ad set location to a tight circle/radius around Columbus only. I already unchecked the "People interested in this location or recently there" option (so it should only be people living in the area). Despite that, we're still getting leads from Chicago, New York, and other states far away. The dropdown for "People living in this location" (the stricter option) is missing in my ad account. Is this a known issue in 2026? Is my ad account glitched, or has Meta changed how location targeting works? Has anyone found a reliable way to force ads to only show to people actually living inside a specific radius (no travelers, no interested people, no leakage)?Any fixes that actually work? (Advantage+ is on, using Lead Generation objective, low daily budget). Thanks in advance, this is killing our CPL and wasting budget. submitted by /u/DelayStunning397 [link] [comments]
- I'm not sure what's happening anymore and where does crisis comes fromby /u/Bosn1an (Entrepreneur) on April 21, 2026 at 12:39 am
I possess 25 years of experience in web and graphic design, including a decade as a freelancer. My extensive portfolio highlights collaborations with entities ranging from small businesses to some of the world's largest companies. Historically, the majority of my clientele has been acquired through high SEO rankings. However, over the past two months, my website visits have significantly declined, leading to a substantial reduction in service inquiries. Previously, I received nearly two inquiries daily. Currently, I feel disoriented and am seeking to understand the underlying causes of this decline. I am contemplating whether a career transition is necessary, if global economic factors influenced by conflicts are at play, if a recent Google update has adversely affected my website, or if AI advancements are a contributing factor, or perhaps a combination of these elements. I would appreciate insights from others, particularly those within my niche. Thank you. submitted by /u/Bosn1an [link] [comments]
- Meta telling me 9x ROAS. GA4 shows next to no purchases. Triple Whale reports 0.6x ROAS. Wtfby /u/SirSquidlicker (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 9:46 pm
How am I as a business owner supposed to know whether to scale or not. submitted by /u/SirSquidlicker [link] [comments]
- Is anyone else seeing a bizarre drop in actual booked appointments today even though Meta claims they are spending your money?by /u/bashamepan (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 9:24 pm
It’s like someone flipped a breaker on our business. Our calendar is usually packed for the week by Monday afternoon, but since Saturday, the phone has barely rung. The frustrating part is I look at my Meta billing, and they are happily charging my card at full speed, claiming they are delivering traffic. My front desk has nothing to do, but my marketing budget is vanishing. submitted by /u/bashamepan [link] [comments]
- Google Ads conversion tracking on Shopify — multiple accounts + old GTM? (0 conversions after order)by /u/shaniko28 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 6:26 pm
Hoping someone here has dealt with this — I’m getting nowhere with Google support. Setup: Shopify site set up by my partner (not technical, different timezone) Shopify tied to her email She has her own Google Ads account I created a separate Google Ads account Her email has admin access to my account What I did: Set up conversion tracking via the Google & YouTube app in Shopify (per support guidance) Support said everything was “correct” What’s happening: Launched campaigns yesterday → got 1 order Google Ads shows 0 conversions No other real traffic sources, so this feels wrong (maybe lag, but not sure) I see multiple conversion actions, some marked “Attention Needed” Support now says old setups (possibly GTM) might be interfering Complication: My partner may have used GTM before We may not have access to that GTM account anymore Questions: If I’m using the Shopify Google & YouTube app, do old GTM setups still matter? Can legacy GTM tags interfere with current tracking? If I don’t have GTM access, what’s the cleanest way to reset this? Anyone successfully running multiple Google Ads accounts on one Shopify site without issues? What does a “clean” setup look like here (1 conversion action, remove all legacy tags, etc.)? I’ve spent ~6–7 hours with Google support and keep getting conflicting answers. Would really appreciate any practical advice — what to delete, what to keep, what to ignore ... submitted by /u/shaniko28 [link] [comments]
- How a client tried to stiff me on €600 after I saved them €16 per lead (a cautionary tale for freelance PPC folks)by /u/Eddie9512 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 5:43 pm
So I need to get this off my chest and hopefully save someone else from going through the same thing. I’ve been running Google Search Ads for a small local business. Super niche industry, very low search volume per month, and a budget of only €300/month to work with. Not exactly a dream account, but I took it on and gave it everything I had. Here’s what actually happened over the months I managed their account: Every single month was better than the last. Cost per click went down. Cost per lead went down. Traffic went up. Leads went up. And last month their cost per lead dropped by €16 compared to where it was before. Now I know €16 doesn’t sound crazy on paper, but when you’re running a niche business with a tiny ad budget, saving €16 per lead adds up fast and it genuinely matters. Now here’s where it gets fun. They owe me €600. And they’re telling me they can’t pay because “business isn’t going well” and they “don’t have enough clients.” I asked them to confirm they were using the same Google Ads account I’ve been managing since day one. They said yes. So I went in, checked the full history, and the data tells a very clear story. Everything has been going up since I started. Month over month. No exceptions. Oh, and they also threw in that the previous agency they worked with was “better.” Cool. Love that for me. Now I don’t know exactly what’s going on on their end, but the analytics don’t lie. More traffic, lower costs, better leads. That’s the job, and the job got done. What I think actually happened here is something a lot of freelancers and small agency owners have experienced: the client got what they wanted, decided the invoice was inconvenient, and started building a case to avoid paying it. And small businesses sometimes do this specifically because they know €600 isn’t worth a lawsuit for most freelancers. A few things I’d tell anyone starting out or working with small clients: Get a contract with clear payment terms and late fees. Always. Even for small accounts. Screenshot or export your performance data regularly so you always have proof of what you delivered. Be especially careful with clients who have tiny budgets but big expectations. They often feel like they’re doing you a favor by working with you, which makes entitlement way more likely. If a client says a previous person was “better,” that’s usually a pressure tactic, not a real complaint. Ask them to show you the data. The numbers are the numbers. I know what I delivered. I just wish I had been more protected from the start. Anyone else been through something like this? Would love to hear how you handled it. submitted by /u/Eddie9512 [link] [comments]
- Conversions reduced after setting for Max conversionby /u/Little_Restaurant756 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 5:25 pm
Hello, I had an ad set at max click with max CPC of 6 per campaign, which I had set over a month, with advice from Claude. I had 5 conversions over the month and had optimized my keywords to exact phrases. After meeting with Google consultant, she insisted I switch to max conversion, even though Claude told me not to, because I had little conversion data. Now, the campaign is bidding higher than before yet, on the past week it has not converted at all. ( I used to get conversions 1- 2 a week). Was the Google account managers advise wrong? Should I revert to my own previous setting? submitted by /u/Little_Restaurant756 [link] [comments]
- Google's "Ad Strength" score is not a performance metric. Stop optimizing for itby /u/dillwillhill (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 5:14 pm
If you're running lead gen campaigns, chasing "Excellent" ad strength on your RSAs is likely hurting your conversions. Ad Strength is a relevancy proxy, not a results proxy Google designed Ad Strength to measure how well your ad could serve a variety of search queries. More headlines, more variety, fill all 15 slots. The score is really asking: "How much flexibility are you giving us to match ads to user intent?" You might have a "Poor" rated ad that says the same sharp thing every single time and a "Good" rated ad that says something different to everyone. Both have the same chance of success. How to actually test this Run a proper A/B test: one RSA fully unpinned (chasing Excellent), one RSA with your top headline and CTA pinned. Same campaign, same budget split, let it run 4+ weeks. Don't judge on CTR alone. Judge on leads, cost per lead, and lead quality. TLDR: Ad Strength tells Google how flexible your ad is. It says nothing about whether your ad converts. For lead gen, message consistency almost always beats headline variety. submitted by /u/dillwillhill [link] [comments]
- I think most people aren't stuck because they’re too early, but because they’re not getting real signalby /u/Slowoperator (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 4:59 pm
After reading a lot of perspectives here and thinking about it more, I'm starting to see a parttern. Early on, everything feels slow. The part is normal. But what actually matters isn’t time, it’s whether something is happening undermeath the surface. The difference I starting to notice: - If something is working (even slowly), you start seeing small signals People react, ask questions, come back, or you at least learn something specific - If it not working, it feels more like repetition Same effort, same unclear results, nothing really changes And both can feel almost identical at the beginning, which is what makes it confusing. I think the hardest part is not the slow progress itself, but not knowing if there’s actually something behind it or not. Curious how others think about this: What's the clearest "real signal" you've seen that told you to keep going? submitted by /u/Slowoperator [link] [comments]
- Figma just got what ZoomInfo is about to getby /u/Tough_Commercial_103 (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 4:57 pm
Watching Claude Design launch this week and Figma drop 4% in a session, and the thing I can't stop thinking about is how cleanly this maps onto what's coming for the sales tool stack . A category gets built in layers over a decade, each layer becomes a billion dollar company charging enterprise prices, then AI collapses the layers into one platform and the incumbents have no good answer because responding would cave their own pricing. Figma didn't get killed by a better Figma, it got undercut by a tool that makes the Figma step unnecessary for the 70% of use cases that were never pro grade design work in the first place the landing page, the pitch deck, the quick mockup, none of that needs a 15 dollar a month subscription and a learning curve anymore. Figma still owns the top of the market where designers actually live in the tool, but the floor just dropped out, and that's the move not replacement, floor collapse. The sales stack is two years behind this exact curve. ZoomInfo at 22K a year for data, Outreach at 8K for sequencing, Clearbit and Apollo and 6sense layered on top, a dialer somewhere in there ,combined stack easily clears 40K for a small team. The newer consolidated platforms (Clay, Apollo at the low end, Fuseai in the middle) are bundling data plus sequencing plus signal for roughly 100 to 150 dollars per seat per month, and they're not better than ZoomInfo at data or better than Outreach at sequencing, they don't need to be ,they just need to be good enough at both under one login at a tenth of the price, and the mid market buyer who was never going to get an ROI on a 30K data tool finally has an option. The part designers are feeling right now about Claude design is the same thing RevOps leaders are about to feel about their outbound stack , not something that replaces our professional tools"but something that makes me wonder why we're paying for six of them when three people on the team are the only ones who use the deep features. Once that question gets asked inside a company, the renewal conversation goes differently. I genuinely don't know if the incumbents figure out a response in time, Figma had years of warning and still got caught. Curious what other categories people think are next in line for the same collapse submitted by /u/Tough_Commercial_103 [link] [comments]
- how to ACTUALLY automate your agency (not just build random claude skills) step by stepby /u/W_E_B_D_E_V (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 4:56 pm
Everyone is building claude skills right now, little automations, custom gpts, claude code, zapier flows. That's cool but its also maybe 10% of what ai can do for your agency if you approach it properly Ive been building ai systems for agencies for a few years now and i've been observing the same cycle a few times. Someone at a company discovers claude, builds a few things, gets excited, then 3 months later nothing really changed. Margins are the same, headcount is the same, the team is still doing what they were doing before just with a chatbot open in another tab The reason is nobody thinks about this from the ground up. They skip straight to "what can i automate" without ever asking "what should even exist in the first place." Heres what ACTUALLY works Figure out where time is going. Not where you think, where it actually is. Have your team leads track everything for two weeks, every task, then sort it by whether it actually requires a human brain or not. In my experience about a third of what senior people do is completely mechanical, same template same inputs same output every time. Basically expensive people doing data entry work Delete processes before you automate it. This is genuinely the most important step. You look at that list and the first question isnt "how do i automate this," its "does this even need to exist." I worked with one agency where ten account managers were each building the same weekly report independently. Nobody had questioned it, they just kept doing it because thats how it was always done. You dont automate that, you delete it and build one automated version Document how your best people work. Your top account manager is better than your average one and its not all talent, a lot of it is just method. How they set up a brief, how they deal with a client thats being difficult. You write that down and now you have an SOP that brings everyone up to that level. And practically speaking you cant feed an ai system a process that doesnt exist on paper yet, the documentation is literally the input for the automation Now you automate. This is where claude does shine but only because you did 1 through 3 first. You feed it the SOP, build the workflow, put it in production Now, claude is great but its still standing outside your company. Its a tool your employees open on their laptops, not something wired into how your agency actually operates. Im pretty convinced every agency in the next few years is basically going to become a collection of agents, more or less a saas product that happens to have humans overseeing it And when that happens having random claude agents scattered across your teams computers isn't going to cut it. You'll need custom code, systems that are actually ingrained in your company, not bolted on top The automation is the easy part. The thinking beforehand is where the value actually is. If you're just throwing claude at random tasks without doing the upfront work you'll get some cool tricks but nothing that affects your margins submitted by /u/W_E_B_D_E_V [link] [comments]
- Leads of Hacked Individualsby /u/SorryDependent911 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 3:06 pm
In the last couple of weeks my campaigns have seen an increased number of leads that look extremely qualified, but when we call them we are told that they have been hacked and that their information seems to have been submitted into hundreds of forms online. Has anyone else experienced this and have you found a fix? We already have fairly good form security paired with time to submit verification checks. submitted by /u/SorryDependent911 [link] [comments]
- Would non branded pmax cannibalise from a single product pmax?by /u/Relative_Reporter_68 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 2:21 pm
Hi, I want to test single product pmax, but I have a non branded pmax, would they cannibalise from each other? Would they work out? Not sure, but from my knowledge on google ads, I feel like they would compete and cannibalise... submitted by /u/Relative_Reporter_68 [link] [comments]
- Owner/operator of cleaning companies keep approaching me invest for growth. Lack of barriers of entry scare me. Is there a business model that can capitalize on the solopreneur?by /u/Try_Harder7 (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 12:57 pm
It would be nice to absorb some of the 50 or so cleaning companies in my area that are stuck at one person size. Get there customers and labor, handle their systems, marketing, and Financials. They still want $30-35 on a 1099. Suggestions? If not worth it, please tell me. Employee rates are $23-28 on 1099. I own a large retail/ service business in the same area. submitted by /u/Try_Harder7 [link] [comments]
- How do you go about selling a small business?by /u/oregiel (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 12:38 pm
I built a small business over the last several years that I believe has a lot of potential but I have not spent the time necessary to grow it. Life happens and the side-hustle just wasn't the priority. I have a lot of stuff and the business has value but I don't have the slightest idea how to find a buyer so I can transfer it all to someone who has the time and energy to grow it. About the business: It's an e-commerce business with physical inventory. The product is a game that is assembled in my basement currently and shipped out as orders come in. I sold probably $20,000 in merch last holiday season with 50% margins. I own a patent on the product I have social medias with followers although I have not been active the community is typically an engaged one. Is there a marketplace or somewhere people actually go to find businesses for sale? Googling this typically gets you some spammy sites that have no real users but I need an exit for this if possible. submitted by /u/oregiel [link] [comments]
- how to attribute conversions to snapchat ads?by /u/Educational-Idea-439 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 10:33 am
Testing snap ads to drive traffic to affiliate review content and getting clicks but I don't know what is driving the conversions. UTM tags help but snapchats attribution model doesn't align with affiliate tracking. Have others done this?/are doing this? and how. Thanks. submitted by /u/Educational-Idea-439 [link] [comments]
- $29,000 in revenue from $1.5k in ad spend for a consulting offer. Full breakdown.by /u/scal3mast3r (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 10:10 am
Rewind approximately 1 year. This guy comes into my world by opting in through one of my ads. We hit it off right away and that’s where I pitch slap him. He was operating in a very specific niche with virtually no competition. I tried to find his competitors in the ads library and couldn’t find any. At that moment I knew I had to get him to sign because by the looks of it, getting him results would be a cake walk. After laying out the plan to him, he agreed and I got to work. For context, I typically work with B2B/B2C service providers and consultants who sell high ticket services and I help them implement a lead acquisition system that works for them and their situation. For this guy specifically, my plan was to run a follower ad funnel. The way it works is simple. You optimize your instagram profile in such a way that your ICP would be more likely to follow you than not, when visiting your profile. To me, this funnel seemed like a perfect match. My client had tons of testimonials, wins and case studies on his profile. And he posted stories daily. Great! We banged out some video ads and let the campaign run. The first few days went great - lots of ICP followers, even some calls booked for peanuts. But it quickly went downhill. ICP followers that booked calls got replaced by other service providers trying to pitch my client in the dms :D. And I realised why. With follower ads (visit profile objective) there’s no way to let META know whether or not any given follower is qualified or not. And obviously META wants to get you the cheapest result. But cost per lead doesn’t mean anything if the leads don’t take action. Which they didn’t in this case. So I decided to switch gears. The funnel type I’ve been running for myself for 2 years now is a low ticket funnel or also known as self-liquidating offer funnel. The concept is simple. Instead of running ads to get leads or book calls, you run ads to sell a training or a resource, ecom style. The benefits of this are many. First, if you set this up correctly, the front end sales break even or make some profit on the ad spend so you’re never really running ads with your own money. Second, a buyer is 100x more valuable than a lead. Because they got up their chair, got their wallet, pulled out a credit card and bought your thing. It means they really want to solve the problem they’re having. Third, way less followup needed. Typically, from 10 buyers, 4 to 6 will book a call by themselves, without you flashing shiny offers in front of them. And because the call is not framed as a sales call, the show-up rates are 80% - 90%. Back to my client. I decided that a low ticket funnel is going to be the next funnel we try. My client already had some good lead magnets that they gave away for free before. So we got on a call to decide which would make the most sense to sell as a training to cold audience. Key thing here, you really want to sell a solution to the problem that leads THINK they have, even though the actual problem they have might be something else entirely. For example, a business might think they have a lead problem when in reality they suck at sales and just can’t close the leads they already have coming in. They won’t buy sales training because they don’t think they have a sales problem. But they would buy training on how to get more leads. Without giving our offer away, this is loosely what we did and the thought process we went through. Now the funnel, the ads, the system and the numbers. Funnel - built in GHL, super simple, it follows this structure to the T 1 - Headline: Get {tangible result} in {timeframe} without {pain1} and {pain2} 2 - Problem statement: how the author discovered the problem through a lens of a personal story 2 - Solution statement: continuing the story, how the author found the solution 3 - product reveal/what you get 4 - CTA (buy the thing for $24) 5 - About me section Key thing we did here, after the version 1 of funnel was done, I asked my client to show it to his closest clients and critique the language used. Doing this we got a lot of insight, especially on terms used that were foreign to the ICP. After implementing those changes, the whole sales page got much friendlier to the ICP, language wise. Ads - always starting with text-based image ads that get to the point very quickly. The thinking here is simple - I want to validate the offer, see if it has legs, so to speak. Easiest way to do it is to target the most solution aware market segment, because they typically don’t need much convincing to take action. Will you be able to scale with those ads? No, because that market segment is very small. Will you get quick sales, leads and booked calls - yes, if your offer is good. We launched the offer with 5 image ads and sales and calls started to roll in pretty much the same day. It just took off. Which I attribute to the fact that there were virtually 0 competition, but still. A good feeling nonetheless. Now on the ads side we target less aware market segments that need a bit more educating before they pull the trigger. We use longer form video ads to educate the market and create the solution aware segment ourselves. So naturally, the cost per sale has gone from $9 (month 1) to around $30 (month 6) The entire funnel goes like this CBO campaign with 1 ad set containing 12 ads, everything from static images, Broll reels, longer form talking heads. All in 1 ad set. 1 or 2 interests to guide the algo. Al METAl AI crap turned off. These ads point to the sales page. Once the lead buys the product they go to a call booking page where the promise is simple - you just bought a thing that you might not know how to apply to your unique business. Let me show you how in a call. Those that don’t book a call get email newsletter and retargeting ads with case studies to re-capture them for cheap. Now the numbers. Month 1: Ad spend: $1,606 Cost per sale: $9 Front end revenue: $2678 Back end revenue from selling a $5k offer: $17k Total profit: $18092 Month 6: Ad spend $1,521 Cost per sale: $39 Front end revenue: 1170 Back end revenue from selling a $5k offer: $29k Total profit: $28649 My plan to take it to $100k 2 things that are going to move the needle: 1 - ads that target the most unaware and educate them on the problem and then the solution. I need to create a conveyor belt that takes a person from a most unaware state where they don’t even know they have the problem to a buyer. Right now that conveyor belt is broken somewhere in the middle. Once this is done, we’ll be able to spend much more on ads. 2 - a new low ticket offer that targets a different problem. We already have a few ideas that we’ll test. A new offer like that can easily double total profit made because it allows us to target a market segment that is ignoring our first offer. When you zoom out you can kind of see that there are multiple different ways to scale this. And that’s why I really like this funnel type. When you’re not stressing about the ad spend, you can look at things logically not emotionally. Plus you don’t have the pressure to close every single call that you hop on. AMA. submitted by /u/scal3mast3r [link] [comments]
- Successful Entrepreneurs, what are your best marketing channels in 2026?by /u/CraftyKick5346 (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 9:57 am
Marketing channels feel like they’re shifting faster than ever in 2026. What worked even a year ago either got saturated, algorithmically nerfed, or just stopped converting the same way. It seems like distribution is becoming the real moat now, not just product quality. I’ve been also noticing that a lot of growth now comes from stacking smaller channels rather than relying on one big lever. For example, the best channel for one of my friends business is niche Slack channels they are active in! Some of my friends said its niche subreddits. So curious, successful entrepreneurs, what are your best marketing channels in 2026? Would be great if you added your industry as well for context 🙂 submitted by /u/CraftyKick5346 [link] [comments]
- Video ads are non-negotiable but my budget laughs every time I mention 'production'by /u/EyeImpossible4412 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 20, 2026 at 8:53 am
Everyone preaches video is king for ads. TikTok dances, YouTube pre-rolls, IG Reels fine, got it. Clients demand it because 'authenticity' or whatever buzzword they're snorting this week. But then reality hits: scripting, shooting, editing, color grading, sound design. One decent 30-second spot and suddenly your quarter's creative budget is a smoking crater. Tried the 'genius' hacks already. Stock footage?? Looks like every other lazy agency reel. Phone shoots? Client emails 'is this professional?' AI generators? Spits out glitchy nonsense that makes me question if Skynet hates marketers specifically. Agencies act like we're still in 2015 with unlimited shoot days and craft services. Newsflash most of us are scraping by with Canva and prayers, churning out 50 variants a week for A/B tests that barely move CTR by 0.2%. submitted by /u/EyeImpossible4412 [link] [comments]
- Monday mentorship: ask anything | April 20, 2026by /u/AutoModerator (Entrepreneur) on April 20, 2026 at 8:00 am
New to entrepreneurship or just starting out? This is your space. Ask the questions you're afraid to ask elsewhere. Experienced folks, jump in and share what you wish someone had told you early on. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]
- How are you using Claude cowork in performance marketingby /u/The_Run_Guy (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on April 19, 2026 at 7:53 pm
I currently use Gemini / ChatGPT every so often for summaries, slide decks etc. I see alot of people saying Claude cowork is the next best thing. How are you using it in your everyday running of your ad accounts and everything that comes along with it? submitted by /u/The_Run_Guy [link] [comments]
- Lost another job because I forgot to follow up what do you guys actually use?by /u/Goku560 (Entrepreneur) on April 19, 2026 at 6:33 pm
Hi all, I just did a quote for a bathroom renovation project last week. Client said they will get back to me. Now they have ghosted me and I found out later they went with someone else. Feels like I am losing jobs not because of price but because I am bad at following up. What do you guys actually use? CRM, spreadsheet, phone reminders, or just memory? Curious what's working for small shops. submitted by /u/Goku560 [link] [comments]
- Having a had time starting overby /u/FlimsyPresentation36 (Entrepreneur) on April 19, 2026 at 1:47 pm
I've been thinking about how successful people find their thing, and I'm seeing two completely different patterns. Some people just throw shit at the wall relentlessly. They're not waiting for the perfect idea, they're trying things, iterating, failing, trying again. They find niches and make something work through pure volume and persistence. But then there's another set of successful people who aren't trying at all. They're just living their life, doing something they're genuinely interested in, and somehow an idea finds them. They see an opportunity, they jump on it, and it works. Here's where I'm stuck: I’ve had 3 business now that didn’t work out for many different reasons. The biggest issue is that they were a losing game from the start (I obviously didn’t know). I decided I need to switch paths and find a new niche. I’ve spent the last 6 months trying all sorts of things and brain storming new ideas, so far nothing has really hit it off. I feel like I should stop searching for the perfect idea and just focus on a new hobby. But that feels like I'm wasting time. My full time engineering job is a dead end (and no I can’t just go and find a more interesting job. The job market here in Canada is terrible and I’m lucky to have a job at all). All I want is to start a business and escape this situation. But I'm paralyzed because I can see both paths working yet neither has worked for me. Some people grind their way out by never stopping. Others just live their life and opportunity finds them. And to me, doing nothing feels like a waste of time that won't get me out. At the same time, doing as much as possible has gotten me no where. What really pisses me off is that a lot of advice online when looking to start a business is that people are un motivated and lazy. A lot of the videos just talk about getting people to take the chance and go for it. I am the complete opposite. I am more hungry than ever but yet I am being starved of opportunity. No matter how hard I try I can’t find something to go after. Constant dead ends or failure. I'm really conflicted and could use some perspective on this. Edit: My issue is that I need to find a new niche and I don’t know how. The niche of my last 2 business is not something I wish to continue to explore. This is why im having a hard time finding a new business idea. submitted by /u/FlimsyPresentation36 [link] [comments]
- PPC Salary Survey 2026 Final Report - 11th Year Editionby /u/fathom53 (Ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) on March 17, 2026 at 1:14 pm
Howdy Y'All Our 11th year in the books. This year we got 445, which is about a 40% drop in responses due to me switching email platforms. Sadly a lot of emails seem to have hit people's spam folder. A bit of bad luck. Countries/regions are listed in alphabetical as we got 110+ slides. For reporting, the bar is 20 for the USA and 10 for the rest of world to show a country, region, province/state or a city. The Netherlands is still in the top 3 countries this year. They knocked out Canada for the top 3rd spot for number of responses. USA and UK are top 1 and 2 and Canada was number 4. Congrats to each country. Some Notes It feels like salaries are not growing and getting compressed if you work a salaried job. Does not feel like we are bringing in enough junior level people which could spell trouble for our industry down the line Some people have 1-3 years experience in paid but having been working for 8-10 years, thus they can skew salaries higher. Some people include their bonus in their salaries I imagine. This can make their salary higher than someone who might not have. Hence why we try to use the median salary across all reports Results Served Two Ways Google Slides 2026 Salary Survey or PDF 2026 Salary Survey Thanks you for helping make this happen. I spend a couple weeks on this project each year and it's truly interesting to see the data doing this labour of love project. If you see a mistake or you think something is off, let me know in the comments and I'll look into it when I get a chance this week. This folder has past salary survey results. submitted by /u/fathom53 [link] [comments]
- 🎙️ Episode 003: AMA Ellie Heisler (Attorney - Entertainment Law) ) | /r/Entrepreneur Podcastby /u/FITGuard (Entrepreneur) on March 10, 2026 at 9:58 pm
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