Christina: (00:03) You are listening to the scaling of freedom podcast. I’m your host, Christina Bernhard. And in this episode, we are talking about how to know if your ads are working. So, one thing that I hear a lot is that people will come to me or I’ll have a discovery call with someone and they will say, I do have someone who’s running my ads, but I don’t know if they’re actually working or I’m running my own ads. And I don’t know if they’re working. So this is really important to know if you are investing money in ads spend, as you can probably imagine. You want to know if you are getting a return. Um, and so we’re gonna talk about how to calculate that, because I know that it can be confusing, especially if you have a longer purchase cycle, which we’ll talk about that. Um, but it’s definitely something that is worth learning how to do and making sure that you, if you do have someone who’s running your ads, that you’re also relying on them.

Christina: (00:54) Um, and just letting them know that you need help to understand this part of the process and just make sure that’s super clear. Um, that way, you know, even though ads are more of a long game, you can make sure that you’re being intentional with your investment and that your money’s actually going towards something that’s going to really pay off if you’re not completely sure if ads are the thing, that’s moving the needle in your business. So we’re gonna talk about what numbers you need to know. I always love to run the numbers. So the numbers are really ex uh, important, but you need to know what those numbers are, um, and what you need to do for each metric that is low and understanding and calculating your purchase cycle purchase cycle is gonna be really important and the importance of using data when investing in ads.

Christina: (01:41) So let’s talk about the numbers. So the first thing that you want to look at is, or the first thing you wanna do is find the break. So you want to find the break in all of your different metrics. So with your metrics, you have, if you’re running ads, you have, and I’m just, this is like a, a basic scenario that I’m gonna go through. So if you have an ad, um, let’s say it’s to a webinar. And then from your webinar, you have an email sequence, um, that goes into a sales sequence after your webinar. So that’s just a very simple funnel. Um, very common. So with the ad, you have, people will click through the click on the ad, go to the landing page, opt in, register for the, um, webinar, and then they will join a specific list or email sequence that you have they’ll attend the webinar, right?

Christina: (02:30) And then they will go through the email sequence. So then from there you have numbers along the way, we need to figure out what the break is or what the lowest number is. So we have the main metrics that you will need to know at minimum is going to be the ad click through rate. So we want to see if the, um, ad is performing well as far as getting people to the landing page. Um, and of course, we’re gonna look at cost per lead and things like that, but I’m mostly just focusing on the funnel metrics. So we have the landing page conversion rate. So once people land on the webinar, how many of those people are actually registering for the webinar, and then we have the funnel conversion rate. So at minimum, those are the numbers that you need to know. Um, you can definitely dive into more, there are more metrics than that.

Christina: (03:21) We can get more, um, different variables and we can get a lot more granular on that. But if you just want to know, like the main numbers that you should collect and, and figure out and be measuring on a regular basis, those are gonna be your main numbers. Um, another one that I’ll throw in is the cost per lead. That’s gonna be really important, especially when calculating your return, but today we’re gonna talk about how we can make sure that our ads are working. So, um, I’m gonna leave that out for today, but it is an important metric. So if your clickthrough rate is low for your ad, um, because we wanna know, you know, if we’re not getting a lot of signups, then we need to know, you know, where where’s the break and why is that? Is the landing page conversion rate too low?

Christina: (04:08) Um, is the ad just too expensive is the clickthrough rate on the ad too low? You know, we need to know where people are dropping off. So if the clickthrough rate is low, we want the clickthrough rate to be at least 1%. Um, that’s usually what we’re shooting for. Um, we can get a lot higher than that. And sometimes if your ad is cheaper, like the CPMs are lower, a lower clickthrough rates can still be pretty profitable, but we still like to shoot for that 1%. So if it’s not 1%, if it’s less than that, the first thing you wanna do is just try new creatives. Um, you’re gonna test new copy. Uh, you can test different copy hooks. You can try out different creative types. So different media videos, reels, graphics, animations, um, things like that. Just test out different things. If you are targeting a cold audience, you definitely want to test out the audiences as well.

Christina: (05:00) Um, and then also another thing that I would do is check your campaign. Objective, make sure that it is the right objective. This is just something really common that I see where someone will put up an ads campaign if you’re running your own campaigns and what you’re actually wanting is a conversion objective. Yet you are getting, uh, you’re using a traffic con uh, objective. Although if you’re using a traffic objective, your click-through rate is probably not very low, but if you’re using like reach or engagement, or if you’re boosting a post or something like that, sometimes it could just be because of your campaign objective, it’s not your creatives or your audiences. It’s just that the way that the algorithm is prioritizing the people in that audience, they’re not prioritizing the specific people within that audience that are more likely to convert if you’re not using a conversion objective.

Christina: (05:48) So make sure your campaign objective is the right one that you actually want. So if your clickthrough rate is fine, then the next thing would be, be your landing page. So we want to know what is your landing page conversion rate, if that is low for free offers, it varies, but we want it to be at least 50%. Um, so you want to optimize the landing page. And usually if you start with copy, um, this can be the fix a lot of the time, um, a lot of time is messaging. So, um, another thing that you want to make sure is that you are being cohesive with your ad and your landing page. So we don’t want your ad to look super different than your landing page. And we certainly don’t want the messaging to be different. So whatever got them to click on the ad, we wanna make sure that we’re continuing that same messaging and that same vibe, the same branding, the same feel, everything on that landing page.

Christina: (06:44) Um, so this is something that I, I don’t see that often, but it does happen whenever someone has someone else doing the ads and someone else doing their landing pages, or maybe you’re doing your landing pages and you’re hiring someone else to do ad creatives for you make sure that anyone who is doing your ad creatives, they are doing it off of your landing page, using that as the variable of how they’re going to, you know, what the messaging’s gonna be, um, what the ad creative’s gonna look like. That way, everything is cohesive because if the messaging is really reaching out to the audience and they click on your ad, and then they land on a landing page that looks like just totally different than what they thought it was going to be. Um, they’re more likely to just click off, so make sure that your landing page and your ad is all cohesive messaging, again, vibe, branding, all that stuff design.

Christina: (07:36) Um, so if your landing page conversion raise low, that’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna optimize that if your funnel conversion raise low, this would be your email sequence. Then you want to test out different emails, but also if your part of your funnel conversion rate is your webinar, then you can look at your webinar attendance or your drop off. So there’s lots of optimizations here. I’m talking about a pretty, pretty big journey, um, going from your web, signing up for your webinar all the way to when your card closes. So there’s so many different optimizations. So I want you to really dive into the individual metrics throughout. This is going to be for every single email, um, for programs that are under the two K mark. Most of my clients’ funnels convert around three to 5%. Um, it could be, uh, one to 2% for higher ticket, um, and it could be much higher for lower tickets.

Christina: (08:33) So if you have a like $300 program, your conversion rate might be 10, 15%. Um, so it really does depend on, you know, what your offer is, but we can use that as just like a gauge for whether you are on the right track for a, um, conversion rate. And there’s no like right or wrong conversion rate, the numbers that I’m giving you is just usually what we aim for to be able to get a return on ad spend. So if you’re running ads, then your conversion, rate’s gonna be super important because you’re investing in the front end of that funnel. So we need to make sure the back end is converting at a proper number so that we can get a return. Um, so these vary a lot. Um, and also the larger and older, the email list is that you have, can make your conversions look lower as well.

Christina: (09:18) So lots of variables there, but, um, and then you also want to take in consideration how cold the audience is at the time that you’re measuring. So if you are running an ad campaign to a webinar and it’s mostly to cold audiences, keep that in mind that your conversion rate’s gonna be lower than maybe your first launch ever when you had a all organic, warm audience. So, um, just keep that in mind, but make sure that you are going through each of those individual metrics, finding the drop off and optimizing that, testing, that, trying something new, um, to see a return on your ad spend. We want to know what your purchase cycle is. So I mentioned this in the beginning. So your purchase cycle is when someone comes into your world. Um, usually the metric that we use for this is your, when someone joins your list, just because we have a hard date of when they joined the list, um, and when they actually join your program or purchase with you.

Christina: (10:15) Um, so if it’s six months, then you can’t expect a direct return within a 30 day period, which is why this is really important. Um, another thing that you can do is once you know, your purchase cycle, you can, um, actually see what you can do and make optimizations to shorten it. So I had a client that her average purchase cycle was eight months and her program was two grand. So we really wanted to see if we could shorten that up, especially because she was investing in ads. So we wanted to get a return faster, and she was able to shorten it to four months. And whenever I mentioned the purchase cycle, I’m talking about the average. So of her eight months, there were some people who were just on their, on her list for like a month or even a couple weeks, or some people even just, you know, come across her and painful.

Christina: (11:04) Like, you know, you do have those like fall out of the sky clients that happens. Um, but I’m talking about the average. So to do that, usually what we’ll do is whenever you have a launch, you can look at everyone who joined your, um, mastermind or whatever it is that you have your group program and just see how long the, those people have been in your world and take an average of those people. Now, the higher ticket your offer is then, you know, if you have lower number of people, um, the higher you go up, your product suite, you’re gonna have less of that data, but it’s still something to go off of. So you know what to expect whenever you are investing in ads, um, whenever you are list building with ads, you know, that if you’re the average person who joins your mastermind or your program tends to be on your list for like three or four months before they actually join, then you just have that gauge that whenever you are list building, you know, in about three or four months, that’s the average time that people will be on that list before they actually convert.

Christina: (12:04) So those are some numbers that you can look at some things to do if they are low and just some gauges to go off of where they should be. I, I don’t like saying should be because it really depends on lots of other variables as far as like where it should be, because it’s gonna be a little bit different for everyone, especially if you are talking about different points in your product, suite and different, um, price levels, but that’s just to give you something to go off of. But I also wanna talk about what it means when your ads work and what that means for you. So being able to define what does it mean for you is going to be really important in figuring out whether the ads are working. So are you trying to optimize things and gather data? If so, are people coming in from the ads?

Christina: (12:52) Because it doesn’t necessarily always mean that you’re getting a return. Some people are trying to test things out and we really just need, especially for evergreen funnels, whenever we’re going from a live launch to evergreen model, um, sometimes we just need to, we need to tweak it and we need that like steady flow of people coming through so that we can have, we can actually go through that process. And the more people we have going through it, the faster we can get through this process of having a profitable evergreen funnel. So in that case, if people are actually converting and signing up for the entry of that funnel or whatever the case is, then you could say that that could be a definition of the ads working for you. Um, so make sure that you understand what that means before you try and figure out if the ads are working or decide that they are or aren’t working.

Christina: (13:38) The other thing would be whether you are getting a return, obviously. So that’s usually what a lot of people want out of ads. That’s usually what most of us want. Whenever we are a business owner and we are making an investment, we want an actual return. So I do have a free calculator. Um, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but you can go to Christina bernhard.com/roes freebie. That is R O a S freebie it’s, uh, stands for return on ad spin. And I have a spreadsheet that I actually use for all of my clients before we go into a launch to project, what their launch is going to look like. So we can make sure that we’re spending enough money to reach whatever their launch goals are based on their metrics. So some of the metrics I talked about today, you can input into that sheet and actually see if you would get a return.

Christina: (14:24) If you invested in ads, you can also look at you. If you’re already running ads, you can use your metrics that you have from your current ads, like your current cost per lead, um, and some past spin that you’ve done and put all of that into the sheet, and it will tell you what your return is. And so this is going to be a really concrete way to see if your ads are working. So you really want to run the numbers. If what you’re looking for is the actual return. We need to have solid numbers. It’s really important that we don’t just go off of gut feeling. We have to do the math. Um, and that’s just because it’s, for both ways. Um, sometimes people just assume that their ad spend is working out really well. And sometimes P and it’s not actually giving them much of a return.

Christina: (15:10) Um, and sometimes, you know, you might feel like your ads aren’t working, but they absolutely are. We just don’t understand things like purchase cycle. And we haven’t actually ran the numbers to look at what the overall picture looks like. So definitely go download that calculator. It’s completely free put in your numbers, figure out what your return is, and look at all of these little metrics. If you have someone on your team that can look at these metrics for you, highly recommend utilizing them and having them look at these weekly, um, certainly every launch, if you’re a live launcher, um, I’m sure you gather this data, but definitely do a lot of comparison and look at these, um, smaller metrics within the larger ones, um, to really figure out where the break is, what you can optimize and make better. Um, and then also if you are getting a return on your ad spend, whenever you do factor in ad spend cost per lead and all of that, so downloaded the calculator, um, figure out what your return is.

Christina: (16:04) If you have any questions, um, you can definitely always DM me on Instagram. My username is Christina D Bernhard. Um, I will also put that in the show notes as well. Um, so send me a DM if you are confused by any of this, cause I know that it’s kind of a lot, but I can help just point you in the right direction. Um, so that you can know for sure if your ads are working or not. Um, if it’s something that you could, you should consider investing in or continue to invest in, or if you should really look at your funnel and your launches and get those converting a bit higher before you actually start, um, and or continue, um, with your Facebook ads. So I wish you guys the best of luck and I will see y’all next week. Thank you for listening to the scaling to freedom podcast. If you are a seven figure coach looking for ads management with an agency that partners with you to get your work out into the world and amplify your impact. See if we are a good fit by applying for a spot in our agency. Christina, bernhard.com/apply. Find the link in our show notes.