Paid Ads Sucks? Yes, only if you do these 5 mistakes

Do you believe that Paid Ads don't work? Do you think that paying for traffic is useless?

I’ve spent $10K in Facebook Ads and got nothing. Paid ads sucks!

That was a comment from one of our Customers before starting to work with us! And he was right! It super sucked! They’ve hired an agency for $20K per month, invested in Ads, and got nothing in return.

Sadly this is more normal than I would like to 🙁.

Luckily, it is a solvable problem, for being set up for success, you need to avoid these five common mistakes I’ve observed countless times while analyzing Ads Accounts.

1. Not having a Buyer Persona.

This is one of the most common mistakes. Don’t have a clear buyer persona, at least in your mind, makes it very hard to create compelling ads and target them, making all more expensive and poorly targeted ads, setting the environment for failure.

2. Not researching competitors

This one is one of the worst; when you hire an agency or start running ads without research and learning from what is working for others, you’re saying, “I will not leverage in others that have invested months and millions learning and testing, and I will pay all the learning, from scratch.”

If you are willing to give away millions, don’t forget about me 😆.

Places to start Researching:

• Facebook Ads Library
• Milled
• Ad Spy
• MailCharts

3. Not having a clear message

This is a super common problem. The customer that spent 10K without results had super generic messages and creatives. Remember that when you’re running ads. 72% of the success is to have the right copy and the right creatives, don’t matter which platform you’re running them.

Avoid talking too much about yourself or shootout your product as if it is the best in the world. Focus on selling a transformation to your audience, focus on their problems, and set it clear why you or your product are an empathic guide that has the authority to serve as a bridge to connect your audience from Point A to Point B.

4. Not testing creatives

Do you want to see something terrifying? Look at those stats:

For this customer, the company spends this amount of money on Ads with 0.01% CTR!!!!!!!! And just tested 4 Ads for MONTHS!!! I don’t know you, but I see this, and it enrages me, but sadly, this quality of work is the rule more than the exception.

Now look at this:

We have creatives spending well, with an excellent CPM and a great conversion rate! Why? Because we have been iterating every single week, testing +70 creatives per week, and having a clear framework for analysis of the data that we gathered, so we were able to know what is going on and decide where to double down and continue iterating week over week, getting better ROAS with the time.

5. Not tracking conversions

This is, sadly, one of the most common problems.

I see a lot of companies (especially the ones that develop custom software) not having Pixels rightly configured, not having Goals in Google Analytics, and configuring their media buying strategy for failure using events that provides garbage traffic 99.9999% of the time (Such as Page View Events), so this set up you and your company to a guaranteed failure.

When running Paid Ads, be sure that when you start, optimize your ads for the right objective (i.e., Leads, Purchase, Add to Cart) and follow a good media buying structure.

At least be sure you’re testing Single Interests, Stacked Interest Audiences, and using an Ad Set per Audience + 5 Ads in Each Ad Set.

Conclusion

Each of these is a big topic that can be expanded a lot more, but at least I would like to know the fundamental things you need to get in place so you don’t trash your money running ads.

With Ads, we’ve scaled Creators from $2K / month to $25K / month (and growing), or even I’ve recently helped a company to go from $100K to $1M+ in ARR. Ads are super powerful, but you need to know what you’re doing, and they will become a fundamental part of your business's growth.