How to fix your Facebook ads when they stop working!

The podcast discusses the challenge of local lead ads, where ads start strong but quickly lose effectiveness. This is attributed to changes in consumer behavior influenced by platforms like TikTok. The speaker, a 46-year-old who spends most of his time on TikTok, explains how quickly he consumes content. The podcast also mentions a conversation with a company in Florida that specializes in custom-built wardrobes. The company's localized ads are reaching a fraction of the intended audience, causing a decline in leads. The speaker advises on strategies to address this issue, such as optimizing landing pages, testing different creatives, and exploring other ad formats like videos and carousels. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. So today I want to be talking about if you have a small radius to go to, essentially local lead ads because I've been getting a lot of calls lately through my ad clinic that of people who are basically getting to the point after 7 to 10 days, maybe a little bit longer depending on the ad spend or the size of the location, they're finding that their ads are starting off great and then they're just falling off a cliff. And I kind of wanted to have a little conversation about that and why that's really happening and what's going on the platform to make that happen because if we were to go back four years that wouldn't be happening. We would be putting an ad out there, we switch it on, and it just goes and goes and goes and it's always been the way. But things have changed in the last few years really with the likes of TikTok and the way that we as consumers on the platforms, not advertisers, as consumers on the platforms are engaging with content. So what you have here is you have a very, very fast growing platform called TikTok and you have an audience and the way the audience engage with that content is moving over to all the other platforms. Now I know that what a lot of you might be thinking is, yeah, but I'm not on TikTok, that's just for kids. And unfortunately, guys, it isn't anymore, it's not just for kids at all. I spend myself, what am I, oh, 46, in June I'll be 46, and I spend probably an hour a day on TikTok. I go on Instagram for less time looking at holiday destinations I can't afford and restaurants I can't afford to eat in is what I see on Instagram and Facebook. I go on there to look at Marketplace and then when I'm going onto Marketplace I'll get drawn into a couple of things to see what friends are doing, but I spend most of my time on TikTok. Now, as a 46-year-old man spending most of my time on TikTok, it means that I am consuming a hell of a lot of content really, really quickly, which is slightly, partly educating me, maybe 20%, the rest of it is amusing me, not even silly videos, but it's just clips of the things that you really, really like. So, what I'm sort of giving you an example of is how that then falls back into our localized ads. So, if I give you an example of a call that I had the other day with a lovely lady in Florida who is, if you're in the UK, we have a wardrobe fitting company called Sharps and they come out to your house, you've had your main bedroom built in the loft, you've done a loft conversion, for instance, and you've got a triangular ceiling and you can't fit just a normal square, rectangle wardrobe into that area, so you have to get a custom-built one. And this is basically what this company does in Florida, they're a successful small company doing custom-built wardrobes, and her radius is kind of funny because they're on the coast, they kind of go down the Florida coast like a sausage opposed to our standard circular radius. So, when we go into a broad audience, when we look to our ads manager, there's a broad audience and there are circa a million people to go to. So, what I explained to her was that, and to you guys now, and to my own team, is that unlike a database of email addresses, if you bought a thousand email addresses or you have a thousand email addresses and you put them into your MailChimp or Klaviyo and you press send, in fact, I'm going to stop you right there because I need to introduce you to my new podcast, Let's Run Email Marketing Podcast. I know, I thought, what do I name this? Let's Run Facebook, Let's Run, we went with Let's Run, and our company is called Let's Run Social. So, Let's Run Email Marketing with myself and my head of email within my agency, Fraser Sweeney. So, head over to Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your downloads, type in Let's Run Email Marketing. I think there is, the first three episodes are up now, but we've got more, I think we've got another seven episodes ready to go up in the next couple of weeks, and we go all in on email marketing. So, if you are literally running an email marketing funnel, or you're doing Facebook as you're collecting email addresses or e-commerce and you're basically not doing any email marketing, then you really need to, and we teach you how to do that there, so go on there. So, anyway, back to where I was. This localised company, down the sausage, down the middle of Florida, rather than Radius, doing localised ads, and the thing is, when you've got an audience, like I said, of this particular company, there's circa a million people in that audience, it's not like an email database where you will put a million emails into your email campaign press send, and let's say, pretty much most of them are all going to get delivered, okay? It's not the same on social media, TikTok, Instagram, Meta as a whole, it's not the same. It is based on what the users are going to engage with, going to the beginning of this podcast, when I talk about how I consume content, if the platform doesn't think that I'm going to consume the content you're putting out, even though I'm falling into maybe an audience, they don't think I'm going to be interested, I'm not going to get shown the ad, because if they show me an ad with content that I'm not interested in, it's going to ruin my experience on the platform. So, what we noticed on her ads that have spent a bit more money, is that she had come to a recency of about three times, three times frequency, had reached about 100,000 people, so it's telling us a tenth of those people are what Facebook is going to show. The rest, the other 900,000, they don't think, they might have an idea, I mean, obviously this is a broad audience, so it's not like, but she has done people who are into home improvements and stuff, but this is a broad audience, gets the million, only 100,000 are what Facebook thinks are interested in seeing the ad. So with that in mind, why are our ads starting to fail? Well, you turn your ad on, you're giving it a, I mean, they've got decent budgets, they've got $350 a day budget, and when they do get a lead coming through, off the website, they're not doing on, they're not doing website leads online, Facebook form leads, they're sending them straight through to the website, and when they do get those leads in, they are closing them, so £350 a day is good, so they're getting them through at like a hundred. Now she'd want them cheaper than that, we all want our leads cheaper than that, and what I explained to her was the fact that, have you reverse engineered what you're prepared to pay for a lead when you're closing £5,000 worth of business quite regularly from the leads that come in, because obviously we all want to pay £10 or $10 a lead, but if you've still got a good margin, you're paying a hundred pounds, $100 for a lead to come in, and of every five of those leads, you close some business at £5,000, then you need to work out, you know, I obviously don't know what the margins are, but you need to work out what you are prepared to pay for a lead, because it might actually be $100, and it might actually be okay if you're a high ticket item. So this is happening, 100,000 people frequency, £350 a day, it's not long before your leads start falling off a cliff, so really the only way of doing this, because you can't expand your area, you can't expand the amount of people that are going to see your ad, but you can be in control of what they see. So you can be in control of what they see, and then when someone clicks through, you can be in control of where they go. So if you are finding that you're still getting 2.5% people clicking through, but, I don't know, of 30 a day, you're only getting one lead, then you can look at the actual landing page you're sending to and think, well, how can we convert better on this landing page? Is the form easy to find? Is there enough information? Are we asking for too much information? All these different factors will help you understand whether the conversion is failing on the landing page and it's not the ad, because if someone's seeing your ad, 2.5% are clicking through, it's not the ad, the ad's delivering, it's engaging, you're getting a really good click-through rate, considering an average of 1%, it's the landing page that's failing. So you could also then look at on Facebook leads, rather than send them out to the website and maybe it'd be easier, but you might feel that they're not as good when they come through Facebook. It's easier for someone to put a lead through, they're not thinking about it as much, whereas the argument is if they go to a landing page, they're thinking about that action more. But what we came down to, because all that was working out for her, is more creative. So I looked at her creative. It's interesting, because this is why I always say you can't, you need to test everything because you don't know what's going to work. When I looked at the, she was running an ad dynamically, when I looked at the five different images that she had in that ad dynamically, the one that I chose wouldn't work and I thought, oh, it's a bit boring, it's a bit plain, was actually the one that worked better. So that fooled me, but I said, change things up, change the colours, depending on how brand aware you are, but change the colours, look at what's working on Instagram, on TikTok, maybe make them into a video, try a carousel. It's just getting more things in front of those, if we're stuck at 100, 10% of those a million, 100,000 people, it's not to say that those 100,000 people have made a decision based on what they've seen. They might see something else and it triggers something. They might see a shot of how the bedroom was before and how it was after, a bit of a before and after. Or you could do a split screen where you've got an untidy, hollow space and you can put a big red X through it and then on the other side of the image, you could do the finished article with a big green tick. Something that's going to stop someone on their journey. So even if you're peeping the click-through rates at the same point, you think, oh, it's not this, but you're as a dying, you need to look at what it is. I personally think that your creative needs to be updated more and more, gone are the days, guys, where we can just have an ad running and running and running. We need to change the creative more and more now. TikTok creative lasts about five days, seven days before you have to really change it on an ad. And Meta are saying it's like three weeks, four weeks before you're going to start seeing failure. So that's what I recommend to this client. That's what I recommended to you. Again, I hope that helps, but again, check out the other podcasts. If you've got email marketing on mind and you think you should be doing it, I'd love to help you get started there. Again, if you are into email marketing, there's no adverts about my ad clinic on that particular podcast yet, but just go to theadsclinic.com and fill that in when I jump on a call for half an hour. Just say, I'm interested in email marketing. We can look at that. I hope that helps and I'll see you in the next one.