A Facebook Ads Mistake That Must Be Avoided

So if you've ever run a Facebook or Instagram ad and thought to yourself, I don't know if this is actually working, then there's a good chance that it wasn't. And it's not necessarily because of your targeting, and it's not necessarily because of your ad creative. It's because of something that a lot of marketers never tell you about, and that's the invisible gap, as I call it, the invisible gap between your ad and the results that silently waste your budget while making it look like social media ads don't work for your business. So I've seen this now for the last 14 years, since 2012, since our agency has been running ads on the platform. I've seen this cost business owners thousands of dollars before anyone caught it. And here's the problem. The fix takes less than an afternoon to set up once you know what you're looking for. So if you stick around for the next few minutes, I'm going to share with you exactly where to look, why it matters more than ever today in your campaigns. And what to do about it today. If you're new here, I'm Darrell Evans, CEO and founder of MindShift Digital. We've been helping companies grow their businesses online since 2011. Now, to understand why this matters so much, you have to understand the Meta advertising platform. What it starts doing at the basic level is it starts showing your ad to different segments of your target audience, different ages, different behaviors, different devices, different locations, different times of day. And it's testing and observing constantly. And what it's looking for is who actually completes the action that you want done— who fills out the form, who registers for the event, who downloads the guide, etc., etc. Now, when someone does that, Meta notes everything about them. They look at the 2,700 data points in that profile and tries to match up the types of things in their profile to other people that might look like them. Over time, it builds a model it learns what your ideal converter looks like, and it starts to now show your ad to more people who match that profile. It's actually quite fascinating. This is a process called campaign optimization, and it's genuinely powerful. Arguably, to me, one of the most sophisticated targeting technologies that I've ever seen in my 35 years of being in business. And it's available to you as a small business owner. But here's the catch. Meta can only learn from the conversions it can actually see. Said another way, if the conversion happens somewhere that it can't observe— a third-party form, a Google Form, a website that's not properly set up with tracking, an email reply— the loop is broken, and Meta's like flying around blind. Meta sends people to the form, some people complete it, some people don't, but Meta gets no signal back to indicate that those people took that action. It has no idea who converted. And it can't improve the model for you. So it'll just keep spending money in the dark. This problem is more common than you think. There's this business owner that I was talking to that set up a campaign on Meta. They wanted the people to register for a webinar. They built a Google Form because it was free and it was familiar and it was easy to set up. Took basically a couple of minutes. And here's where the invisible problem, as I say, starts before the campaign ever begins. Google Forms do not have a customizable confirmation page that Meta can track. There's no URL that changes when someone submits the form, which is how Meta's pixel, or the new version, which is the Conversion API— don't want to get technical here, it's just the advanced version— that tells Meta that your person did the thing that you wanted them to do. This tracking code lives on your website and is the signal. It's the bridge that tells Meta that when someone went to your website after clicking this ad, those people mattered and did the thing that you wanted them to do. Did the thing, by the way, is simply converted, downloaded, opted in, signed up, bought, whatever that looks like in your world. Did a thing. So the campaign runs, people click through, keep clicking through. Some might fill out the form, but Meta never sees it. And from Meta's perspective, the ads are generating the clicks but zero conversions because they can't see anything. So it keeps optimizing now instead of for people to become a lead or to buy, they keep optimizing for people to click because that's the only thing they can see. And now you're spending money to get the wrong signal back on your campaign. I hope you're following me. This is one of those things where the issue isn't the ad, the issue isn't the targeting, the issue isn't even in this case the campaign objective, which a lot of people blow too. Let me take a quick sidebar. Never use a campaign objective that isn't what you want the end goal to be. Let me make it clear. Don't run a traffic campaign hoping you're going to get leads. You run a lead generation campaign to get leads. Traffic is just part of the process. You don't run a brand awareness campaign if you want people to buy your thing. It's just going to get people to see your brand. Meta is that smart. They know what bucket people fit in. They know where there are people who will just look at the ad. They know where people are that will just click on the ad. They know where their people are that will buy the thing that you're offering in the ad. So don't get lazy in your campaign objective. Here's what we see all the time. The ad is good, the targeting's good, the copy's good, the landing page is good, the offer is compelling, but it's the plumbing or the tracking in the campaign that's actually broken. And no amount of creative, no amount of budget, no amount of tweaking and modifying, no amount of optimizing is gonna fix the plumbing problem. So here's what a properly connected campaign looks like. And I want to be clear, this isn't complicated. Once you understand it, it has to be set up intentionally and you have to walk through these steps from every single campaign. The reason for that is every time you launch a new campaign, there are a set of default settings inside these platforms that could actually derail you on accident. So be diligent about what I'm about to tell you. Step 1: Make sure the form that someone is filling out is actually on your website, not a third-party platform that disconnects from the ad platform. Your website is the home base where your Meta Pixel or your conversion API is installed. That pixel is the thing that's listening for the objective and the outcome from your website to send the signal back. It's like, hey, Meta, check this out. Someone just converted. Roger that. Meta now knows who to go find. Step 2: When someone fills out the form and submits it, make sure that they are being redirected to a thank you page or a confirmation page or a completion page. This particular page is where you're going to tag and send the data. That's where the listening happens. It happens on the thank you or confirmation page or the confirmation of your buying page. And it literally has to be as simple as, thank you for doing the thing. Thank you for registering. Thank you for buying. Thank you for downloading. You don't have to get any fancier than that. Now, there are some fancier, more advanced things you can do, but that's the basics. Step 3, make sure— and this is where people mess up— they'll install the Meta Pixel on the website, maybe even go so far as to install the Chrome browser extension. That shows you that it's tracking page views. But what they fail to do is they forget to fire the conversion event when someone lands on that thank you page or clicks a button along the buying journey, which there are some advanced ways to set up. So if you're advanced watching this, you know what I'm already talking about. This is the signal that's being missed. When Meta sees that that URL was visited, it then knows that a conversion happened, whatever that objective of conversion was. It records that visitor, provided someone didn't have their cookies blocked. I can hear some of you listening to this right now saying, yeah, Darrell, but what about cookie tracking? And what if that's— I hear you. We're talking to folks who are missing the basics. I appreciate you being in though. Make sure you hit like and subscribe. But it records everything that that visitor does, who they are, what device they use, what browser they were in, where they converted from, where they live, what their profile looks like, and all the other interests that that person has. And the reason it does this is to help you get more of what you want. Meta's not out to just take your money. They can't make money if you don't make money. Last I checked, I think Meta makes 93% of their money from ads, but they're not going to make that money from ads if nobody was having any success with ads. Come on. But we have to help them help us. Over time, this data trains the campaign, trains Meta's algorithm and AI to know who to go find. And it gets smarter and smarter about who it shows your ads to. Now, nothing's going to be 100%. There's no such way to say for every 1,000 impressions, they're going to get you 1,000 buyers. That's just not how it works. So how it works in the real world, it's not how it worked in door-to-door sales. It's not how it worked in cold calling. It's not how it worked in billboard, radio, and TV. And you can't expect that that's how it works here. But when you do this right, you can go from zero conversions to 1 conversion to 10 conversions to a compound effect of Meta saying, oh, this person, not that person, more of these people, not those people. And that's what optimization is all about. What you find is you find your cost per lead goes down, you see your lead quality or your sales go up, and the whole machine starts to optimize and get better over time. Now, I want to be clear here, nothing works 100% of the time. Obviously, we're working on an advertising platform that is essentially a machine and the machine breaks down. Our bodies break down, cars break down. This ad platform, just like all, does break down. They have ebbs and flows. Things are on in sync and then sometimes you're like, what the— But this is the basic difference between a campaign that works and one that's just running. One more quick note. I was talking to a business owner years ago that was working with an ad platform set up through GoDaddy. I have no idea how GoDaddy got into the advertising business., but that's for another video. And the minute when someone tells us— we can diagnose a problem the minute they tell us what the issue is. Well, I've been running ads for this long and I haven't got any results. Tell me what you're doing. Tell me what your setup is. Tell me where you're sending the traffic. We can spend about 5 minutes, 10 minutes tops, and we can identify without ever logging into the account. And this particular person had their campaign set up, same type of thing, no tracking on the back end. And then worse off, they were actually running a traffic campaign hoping for conversions. So when we looked at the data, I said something like, the campaign's doing exactly what you set it up to do. And he's like, what are you talking about? I'm not getting any leads. I said, yeah, well, if you wanted leads, you should have set up a lead campaign, or you should have had them set up a leads campaign. In fact, they set up a traffic campaign. Why? Because it's cheaper. You can't do it. It's not how it works if you don't have a website. Because I can hear some of you thinking, well, maybe I don't have my website yet, or maybe I don't control my website, maybe my landing page is tied to something else, or whatever the reason is. And if you're just starting out, then— and I'm going to be very careful with what I'm about to say here because I don't want you to live on this recommendation— but there is a way that Meta has created for those of you who don't have your website set up, or maybe you don't have all the technical know-how in doing all of that, but you can test and use for a little while what are called Meta's native lead forms or instant forms. These are forms that you can create right in your campaign inside of the Meta platform, which allow for the person who sees your ad who's interested to do the thing inside of Meta without coming out to your website. Now I'm going to tell you, it sounds like it's a great idea, and we've been advertising on the platform since 2012, and I don't remember when Instant Forms came out, but something tells me it might have been in the '16 to '18 range. And they are a little better now than they were in days gone by. But I got to tell you, when someone doesn't have to leave the platform and all they have to do is click a button and their form information will autofill. And for those of you listening who say, "Yeah, Darrell, but you can set up custom fields and make them do a couple of—" I hear you, but we're talking in general. When someone does not have to do very much to convert, and we're talking about a high-ticket or high-consideration conversion, I, Darrell Evans, founder and CEO of MindShift Digital, who's been doing this since 2011, who's been running advertising for 30-something years on all types of platforms, I'm telling you that our experience is not because I said, it's because we see that the majority of those people who do not have to leave the platform to convert or do the thing, they just don't have as much intent. Now, if you're in the audience watching this one right now, I dare you in the comments to argue with me that truth. I'll wait. I'll be in the comments with you. But listen, if you're just getting started, native Instant Forms, lead forms, uh, whatever they call them these days, they're okay to get started. And there are some exceptions to the type of, uh, people who can have success with Instant Forms. Look, if you're a local business and you're wanting someone to call your office, I think Instant Forms are fine. There are some scenarios. I don't want to break them all down here. The bottom line is, is we're here to talk about the best practices that we've seen that have helped our clients do well over $300 million in revenue and counting, and we watch what changes on these platforms and we have enough volume and revenue and dollars to go through these platforms to know what works and what doesn't work, where most of you do not. So again, if you don't have a website, start there with Instant Forms, but don't stay there. That's not the Holy Grail. Here's the mental model I want to leave you with. Running an ad without the proper conversion path is like planting a seed in the ground and not putting water in it. Like, why did you even do it? You did the work. You spent the money, but the system itself can't sustain itself because a critical piece of the process is missing. I make jokes all the time. I love eggs, and— but I'm not the biggest dessert eater. And I listen to people all the time say, well, I don't like eggs. I said, well, do you like chocolate cake? Like, well, yeah, I like chocolate cake. And unless you have, uh, you know, unless you're vegan or vegetarian, I apologize, I don't know how it exactly works. But if you like chocolate cake Eggs are going to be in it. No, no, no. I want a delicious chocolate cake. No eggs. Okay, good luck with that. Right? It's just a part of the process, right? And when we miss this loop in our marketing, when we do this digital stuff and we don't put the digital plumbing or technology in place, which doesn't take long to do, then the conversions that are happening are never being tracked. So therefore the campaign can't optimize. And if the campaign can't optimize, you can't get what you want, which is revenue growth. And instead you leave with a bad taste in your mouth that these types of campaigns don't work and they just waste your money. In many cases, it's in the optimization data that you could have had if you'd have just had the right person do the right thing, which doesn't take more than a couple of hours. This marketing infrastructure stuff isn't the glamorous part of marketing. I get that it doesn't get a lot of attention, but it is the difference between a campaign that spends money and a campaign that converts and grows your revenue. If this has been helpful at all, let me know in the comments. Let me know if you're going to go check your campaigns to make sure nothing's not— make sure everything is connected. And I hope you'll come back for the next video. I'm Darrell Evans. This is the Mindshare Podcast. Go make sure your plumbing's working.