About a year ago, I was running Facebook ads for a high-ticket B2C offer.

The funnel was pretty standard. We drove traffic to a “book call” VSL page (video sales letter).

Since this client was already running ads, the goal was to decrease cost per lead, and cost per quality call to ultimately make more profits.

$500k mistake

We created some new ads and targeted a broad audience. (US, 18+, all genders, no interests)

We made some new creatives with insanely good offers and crazy good real testimonials.

The ideal audience for this client was sophisticated people with existing experience in the niche.

But the ads spoke to complete beginners.

So for about 2-3 weeks, new ads enormously outperformed the previous ads. (30-50% lower cost per lead)

Everyone was happy with the early numbers but when the results at the end of the sales cycle came in, we realized what we had done was a giant mistake.

Even when our cost per lead decreased by about 50%, and cost per booked call decreased by about 30%, lead quality sucked and the sales team couldn’t close them.

About best practices:

Before I go into the details about what exactly went wrong and why, I think it’s important to talk about best practices.

There’s a lot of noise out there about Facebook Ads’ best practices. Especially when it comes to technical setup.

Things like placements, audience targeting, etc.

Some advertisers will tell you to run only broad campaigns and let the algorithm figure it out.

From what I’ve experienced over the last 5 years, broad only makes sense when the conversion event you’re optimizing for is your end goal. (so it’s most certainly true for e-commerce).

Ad platforms evolve over time so this might not be true tomorrow.

How to avoid losing money with Facebook ads when running non-sales campaigns:

Here are the key takeaways from this cautionary tale:

When running ads for a conversion event that is not your end goal (sale/or user value) you should:

1. Test more narrow targeting (age 25+, interests, gender) in your ads.

   • Here’s the Facebook Ad Campaign setup I would start in a new account

     • One CBO campaign

     • 3-6 ads (ads are the same in every ad set)

     • 2-4 interest ad sets

     • 1 Broad asset

     • 1 10% Lookalike from your ideal customers (if you don’t have this data, feel free to skip it)

2. Make your creatives that attract your ideal customers (higher value). Talk to your ICP. Disqualify in your copy/video.

Yes, these things will likely increase your cost per action.

But they are also likely to decrease your overall CAC(customer acquisition cost) and increase customer value from paid acquisition channels.

Thanks for reading,

Growth Catalyst Club

Before You Launch Another Facebook Ad, Read This!