Off The Cuff with Meta Lead Ads

Every week I’ve been creating content for you with the intent on helping you find an easier path than the one I follow as an affiliate marketer here on SoapboxBob.com. And this week I am done creating and I’ll do this off the cuff with Meta Lead ads.

It was Feb 22 when Meta decided that after a good 6 month run, my ad was stating unrealistic outcomes. Well Meta, I say  IN YOUR FACE! I’ll prove you wrong and replace that full-time income of which I will be happy with a few $K monthly.

While I very quickly made adjustments to the offending ad, It took me a while (March 11 as you can see below) before I decided to take a new approach and start running ads in a separate Meta ads account.

 

Some play-by-play Stats

To give you the play-by-play, here some stats since starting the new ad on a new Meta ads account:

Cost	Impressions	CPI	Date Start
$3.00	32	$0.0938	11-Mar
$3.00	44	$0.0682	12-Mar
$3.00	38	$0.0789	12-Mar
$3.30	27	$0.1222	12-Mar
$3.63	36	$0.1008	13-Mar
$3.99	49	$0.0814	13-Mar
$4.05	78	$0.0519	13-Mar
$4.00	52	$0.0769	14-Mar
$4.40	43	$0.1023	14-Mar
$4.84	39	$0.1241	14-Mar
$5.32	52	$0.1023	15-Mar
$5.85	43	$0.1360	15-Mar
$6.00	63	$0.0952	16-Mar
$6.60	82	$0.0805	17-Mar
$7.26	99	$0.0733	18-Mar

At this rate it appears it’ll be forever before my costs reach the $200 threshold that I’ve stated. BUT, as I recall with my first ad account – just when I thought my threshold would never be reached, Facebook surprised me by allowing my stated threshold to stand. Like I’ve constantly heard from my doctors over the years, “We’ll wait and see.”. lol

 

Different Strategies for Meta Ads testing

There are many combinations that can be used for testing ads. Originally the Internet Profits tutorial I was following suggested running 1 campaign and up to 10 Ad set/ Ad combinations. This is a good starting point that I did not follow this time and I should have.

I’ve been playing with different combinations of the ad set – meaning I’ve been using mutliple interests in the one ad set. And I mainly take this approach because I’m not ready to take the $300 hit again for running different interests over a short period of time side-by-side to see which performs best.

But now I have a few Meta Ad specialists telling me that using certain interests with proper names like, Russell Brunson will cost you extra. And as soon as I heard that, I’m thinking What Did I Dooo? Back when I first started with Facebook lead ads, I couldn’t find Russell as an interest – and perhaps that’s when my cost per lead was running at a good level. At the time, little did I know Russell was spelled with two “L”s. lol

 

Reviewing the Numbers

So here I am with 3 ads running and being tested. I’ll call them Ad 1, 2, 3 and 4. These are stated in Canadian dollars with no conversion. But today’s FX was that the Canadian dollar was worth .73 cents on the US dollar.

Ad 3. This is the new ad under the new account. I let it run for about a week. And for $20 I got 10 clicks, 3 leads and 654 impressions. It’s important to note that we pay by the impression even though one of our benchmarks uses “cost per lead”. And I won’t state the stupidly awful results for you at this time. I just created Ad 4 and turned Ad 3 off.

Ad 4. I went back to some basics and this is under the new account as well. I changed the creative image. I used just one selection for each of the Primary Text, The Headline, and the Description. Whereas with Ad 3 I was going with Meta’s suggestions to use mutliple of those items. I won’t go there again until I know for sure that my copy is working for each.

And that goes for all of Meta’s Advantage Plus settings. I do not go with those as they apparently do not work well with lead ads. But if you are going with just plain Facebook ads instead of the lead ads – then this is the way of the future with Meta – run it broad with all the placements – and let the Meta AI do it’s thing to find you the right leads.

Now I realize some of what I’ve been saying may sound like gobbledegook – so it looks like I may have to make a blog post that goes over the make-up of each of the three components: Campaign, Ad set and Ad.

Ad 4 has been running just about 24 hours as of my writing and It already has 2 clicks and a lead, so that is encouraging, right?

Ad 1. This is the ad I had created immediately after the original was rejected. I kept the original creative image as I get a lot of likes and comments on it. And I didn’t want to loose those. But generally it did not appear that performance has caught up with the original. Still at running this ad for just about a month it is showing a 55% optin rate – which is great!

But not according to Meta. They now label this ad as “learning limited”. They state there is not enough results to be able to exit the learning stage. They suggest I alter my ad set and costs are set at the Ad set level. I’m thinking they want me to up my budget – for which I likely will – just to get it out of the learning phase and then I’ll bump it back. But I may wait until I’ve stopped juggling ads and dealing with one or two good performers. We’ll just have to wait and see! lol

Ad 2. This new ad has been running just a few days and the results are dismal. I have one lead and no clicks. Yes, you read that right. Don’t ask me how this happens – no clicks but you get a lead, huh? I made more changes to the copy and I left the creative image the same. The major difference of this one is that I changed over to the Meta Instant Form that I was using on Ads 3 & 4.

Originally Ad 1’s Instant Form sent my leads to my AWeber autoresponder and the button on my form lead to my Facebook Business Page. Overtime, I’ve had many likes and new followers. But in Ad 3, 4 and now Ad 2 my leads are still sent to my autoresponder so they can get the advertised lead magnet BUT, the form’s button also  goes directly to my lead magnet.

Just given the behaviour of most Facebook scrollers, they won’t take the immediate action of going to their email to get a link to the lead magnet. So instead, I place it right in front of them and I’m hoping to see an increase on the number of leads who actually view that lead magnet which in my case is a video.

 

Conclusion

If you’re going to use Meta Lead Ads for your paid traffic strategy then you’ve likely heard that this is a strategy with the least cost – like 5 bucks US per day. But you must be willing to take an intial investment hit to find the ads that will be the performer you set and forget about. And in the back of your mind, you will know those other strategies for paid traffic are gonna cost you an arm and a leg in comparison.

And then ongoing – anytime you find some extra bucks – use that for more testing. I’ve gone about my testing all wrong. I make big sweeping changes – hoping one of those changes will turn into a BIG performer. But in actual reality, I should be making one little change at a time so I know exactly what works and what does not. It’s the number one strategy for analytical trouble-shooting, determining, “What Is, and What Is Not.” I glean that from my Electronics Engineering days.

BTW: I thought I could do an off the cuff post but here I am again doing sections and adding an image and links – just to make the SEO Happy Face go green.

Let me know in the comments – how you feel about using Facebook Lead Ads as a paid traffic strategy. Also let me know if you have any relatable experience with them.