When Facebook Ad Performance Doesn’t Tell You The Whole Story…

As tempting as it is to send off a stern Slack message after reviewing last week's drop in performance. 

Or, watching sales roll in after a new campaign launched wondering just how they did it.

Performance goes beyond your ads.

Ads are the first to take the credit when performance is up. And the first to blame when performance drops.

Facebook, Google, YouTube, or TikTok. The same applies.

Here are 3 case studies to show you what the ads alone weren’t able to tell us about performance:

Case Study #1: New campaign launch generates $3.00 leads when the goal was $20.00.

85% better than you hoped is enough to get someone a raise.

Or, at least a Starbucks gift card.

But the little dashboard inside Facebook Ads Manager doesn’t tell us ‘why’.

Results like this make for fantastic testimonials, and great case studies, and can even lead to referrals.

But sometimes they miss a vital point.

…Would they have got these results anyway?

When we zoom in and take a closer look, here’s what the ‘results’ don’t tell you.

• The client supplied the landing page, the creative, and the ad copy.

• We loaded up the assets into Facebook and pressed publish.

• The performance is a reflection of the brand assets, not magical media buying.

This is how agencies and media buyers can receive credit for the results that their campaigns get, not saying that’s what we did.

Here, the magic was the funnel, the creative, the offer and positioning, and the economics.

In the following example, we see how the opposite is also true. When performance is down, the ads are the first to blame.

Case Study #2: Dropping spend on Facebook because it wasn’t performing well, or was it?

No one wants to open their laptop on Monday morning to see a sternly worded Slack message pointing out a decrease in performance.

Worse, is having to write it in the first place.

When performance dropped on Facebook there was a desire to spend less money and invest time and energy somewhere getting better results: Organic social media.

Was this an accurate assessment?

When we zoom in and take a closer look, here’s what the ‘results’ don’t tell you.

• When spend on Facebook increased by 45%, organic performance incrementally rose by 25%.

• In simple terms: Investment in Facebook produced results on organic social media.

• There is a ‘halo’ effect from investing in Facebook that benefits all other marketing initiatives but it cannot always be easily attributed back to Facebook.

If we were to view Facebook in isolation it might make sense to spend less.

In reality, the performance was better than first realized and a reduction in Facebook could negatively impact organic social media results – the opposite of the intended goal.

While sometimes things are better than you realized, other times, like in the following example there are external factors at play.

Case Study #3: Performance fell off a cliff, what did you change?

Generally, we expect our paid advertising efforts to work.

We want performance to progressively improve month over month so we can invest more and generate more profit.

It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

But when results dry up like a river run dry, the person paying the bill wants to know where the water went.

It can be a ‘wtf happened’ kind of moment.

But the little dashboard inside Facebook doesn’t always tell us where the water went, only that it’s gone.

Sometimes there are external factors that come into play.

When we zoom in and take a closer look, here’s what the ‘results’ don’t tell you.

• Sales reps can directly affect the perceived performance of ad campaigns.

• The average close rate went from 30% to 12%.

• All ‘ad’ metrics remained stable with little to no changes.

Easy to blame but not always the cause.

While sometimes it is the ads other times it’s a close rate, or the time of year, or an election, or a tech glitch…

I encourage everyone to think bigger than ‘ads’.

Creating exponential growth through Facebook ads, in my opinion, is rarely done through Facebook ads.

When I help people validate and scale high-ticket offers, 7 out of the 8 signals I review go beyond the Facebook ads manager.

-Landon

PS

If you have a high-ticket offer or you’re looking to run ads to a VSL, webinar, workshop, or challenge I’ve created a guide showing you how to validate your funnel and prep it to profitably scale to cold traffic. 

If you’re interested, you can grab it here: https://ck.landonp.com/guide