The “One Button” Fix That Cut Our Ad Cost by 61%

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the YouTube channel. Today we are talking about how we decreased our cost per booked call by 61% in 48 hours. And the kicker here is we did it by literally pressing one button. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I promise you it is not. For those who are new to the channel, hello, my name is Elliott. I'm the CMO here at Entrepreneur's Circle, former agency owner, and I make videos about how to drive traffic, convert traffic, and close sales so that you can get more profit from your business. In our company Entrepreneur's Circle, we have got a software. It's called Genie AI sales and marketing system. It's absolutely banging. And what I'm talking about today was the ad campaign we were running for Genie AI. And so here's a little proof, a little bit of snapshot. So here's one of our campaigns and our cost per book call was at £103 and it went to £40, literally in like a 48-hour period. It was nuts. And so that was a 60.76% change and that was very helpful and our sales team were very happy. So I'm gonna explain exactly how we did this. And so to do so, I just take you back a little bit to March. And so in March, we spent around £31,000 on this particular funnel. 8,000 clicks, 400 leads, 199 calls. And so you can see our little chart here. And what was happening in March, as we were spending more, our cost per booked call was just going up and up and up. And that is a very distressing thing. You see, the way we run the ads for Genie, again, useful context, It's a software as a service demo funnel. So what do I mean by that? We run ads on Facebook to a landing page where people can book a demo. They schedule the appointment. They then go to a thank you page which has some useful content on it, which leverages some of our backend selling systems. And then they have a live demo with one of our team, run them through the software. If it's a fit, fantastic, we sign you up. If not, you go our separate ways and that's absolutely fine too. So it's a very simple funnel at its heart and one that we've been running for many, many years now. I've had this software company for about 3 years and it has always been super simple. But in March, here's a little snapshot from 4 of our campaigns. You see, we spent about $20,000 on these, only 100 calls booked, which for $20,000 is really not that many. And you can see our cost per result here was not looking good. $153, $253, $307. Everything started to get really expensive. Which is not a fun place to be in business. And so me and my team had to kick into gear and we had to solve this problem because we needed to bring that cost per book call down so that we could continue to grow and scale our business at a profitable rate. And so in order to do so, whenever our results start to increase, we have to act like a data-driven marketer and we have to find the constraint. We have to find the current limiting factor that is causing this poor performance. Because in any funnel, when performance is bad, there is one core constraint. There is always one area of highest leverage that if we fix, that will have the biggest impact on overall cost per result. And just because our ads started to get expensive does not mean that it is 100% the ads' fault, because the ads send people to a landing page. And on the landing page there's a scheduler and they have to schedule an appointment to make it to the next step and the next step and the next step. Now we were dealing with a cost per booked call constraint because this was our metric that was messing up our overall sales. And so with the cost per booked call, we know that constraint must be limited to basically the first 2 steps because if it was anything else, after they booked the call, then that is to do with our thank you page, show up sequence, and indeed what our sales team are actually doing. But in this case, it's the custom book call. So we knew it was either the ads or the landing page. Now, we had not made any changes to the landing page, so we could kind of rule out that the landing page was a major factor here because it was the same page that had been running for a while. The first thing you should always do whenever your results start to increase and creep up is do what I call a mechanical check. And so we did our mechanical check because what the mechanical check is, is we go through our funnel as if we are a user. We click through an ad, we see how our landing page loads, and we just go through it on a mobile device. Normally if we're on Meta, because 85% of our traffic on Meta comes from mobile and we click through, we make sure is it loading properly? Are the buttons still working? Does the scheduler appear? Does it all work? Because the joys of technology, 9 times out of 10 when we have a campaign that spike in performance, it can be traced back to a simple mechanical fault. A button stopped working, there was an update to the scheduler, someone's got their availability wrong so there's no actual slots. And so we checked off all of those things to make sure that functionally the landing page worked and there were no mechanical faults. Once we'd done that, because we hadn't made any change to the landing page, we knew this is definitely an ad issue. There's no other variables that could really be impacting this. Now we have ruled them out one by one so we could have a little bit of a closer look at our ads. And so that's what we did. We dove into our ad account and we had a variety of ads running, including some of me wearing some surgical gear. There's context behind that. We hosted an event earlier this year called Your Business Health Check, the 12 vital signs that you need to know about about your business. And so it was all medical themed, and hence the surgery gear. So I took the opportunity to film a bunch of ads, and they had worked really well. They had crushed. They were obviously very eye-catching. They're a bit unusual, seeing some random bloke in his scrubs appear and then talk about some marketing software, but they had worked very well. But when I dove in and looked at how these ads had been performing, what we started to see within Meta was our cost per call booked as you can see here, started to just go up and up and up and up and up. And this ad, which was getting, you know, the majority of the spend from one of our ad sets, was just getting more expensive. So what does that mean when things start to get expensive? Well, it means creative fatigue is normally settling in. So what is creative fatigue? Creative fatigue is a kind of annoying reality of advertising online. And what it tells us is that over time, our ad creative, particularly Meta ads, will tend to spike in performance within a few weeks of launching, and then it will slowly become less and less and less effective over time. Now, this is caused by people being exposed to your ad, and in the beginning, when people are exposed to it for the first time, Lots of people like it and they convert, so our results shoot up and we have a great start. But as Facebook shows the ad to more and more people, because now people have converted, over time we are going to scoop up all of the people that could be convinced and persuaded by that particular ad creative, because sadly that is going to be a finite amount of people. And so what we normally see after a period, normally it's weeks, but it can be months if you have a really good ad. But performance just slowly decreases because we, we catch all the good people and then we're now showing it to more and more people that are less of our ideal customers and therefore less likely to convert. And therefore the performance dips and our cost per result goes up. Now, depending on how good your ads are will depend on how quickly this sets in. 'cause an extremely compelling ad will be able to run for a long time. 'Cause if it's extremely compelling and you operate in a market where there's a lot of people, then it will convert a lot of them and that's great. We have had ads run for years, okay? But that is very rare. Normally what happens is we have ads that are kind of compelling and they launch, they get really good results for the first few weeks because they are compelling to a small group of people and then we run through them, the fatigue sets in and the ad kind of dies. So what do we do about this? The way we solve creative fatigue is actually very straightforward. It's all about having more ads, creating more ads, because if our stuff is getting tired, the answer is to inject new stuff. Because if people all of a sudden are sick of seeing your face, then bam, if we show them our face with a different message, with a different background, all of a sudden they awake and we get a chance to go again. There's also quite a lot of algorithmic behaviors going on in the background behind this. Depending on your messaging in the ad, when the ad launches, Facebook is going to analyze that messaging, that particular ad, and go out to a subset of people that it believes are the most probable to convert. And so depending on the messaging in the ad, that group of people will vary. And so again, if we have a messaging in the ad that hits a really good demographic and a good data set of your customers, then the targeting, the people that Facebook is going to show that ad to, is going to be very good and you'll get longevity from it. If the ad is bad and it goes out to a bunch of people that are not very good, then you're kind of screwed from the start because all of the people that shows the ad to won't really convert. That ad then gets a bunch of bad signals. Facebook views it as a bad ad. It starts to penalize you. And next thing you know, you have no or very, very poor and expensive results. So the solution is more ads. Making ads, honestly, in this day and age is really easy. I've got another video on my channel that goes into how we write ads that convert very well. But we live in what I call the Yap era right now, where because of the rise of AI, and how everybody's using it to script ads and create AI-generated ads. The most compelling ads you can create are pulling out your phone, going for a walk, and just yapping almost completely unscripted and just speaking from the heart and soul, telling, hey, particular person, if you have this problem, I have the solution. You can get it here. Simple as that. And you will actually find you get very good results. It's also why the best advertisers operating at scale, spending many, many tens of thousands per month, you have to have a good creative production workflow. What I mean by that is it has to be embedded in your business. If you're spending any more than like £10,000 per month on ads, your creative production workflow is very important. That is, how systemized and consistent are you at producing new creative? I advise all of my private clients inside my secret vault that you need to be producing at least 10 to 20 new ads per weak, ideally when you're operating at scale, because if you're serious about the ads and they're the core driver of business in your business, then we need to feed the algorithm and give it lots of good stuff. So we normally advise our founders to have a creative cadence where once a week they block out an hour or two and they go for a walk and they film 10 to 20 ads, and that gives them enough to fight the creative fatigue. Now the challenge in our case was that yes, we did go and make some new ads, but that was not what drove the results here. The challenge that we faced was we have 4 salespeople for Genie AI. We have 4 salespeople. They're great guys and gals. And when our cost per booked call is expensive, their calendars are getting empty and they're sat there, you know, twiddling their thumbs, which is not good for them. And it's not good for us. So we had a lot of pressure because you see, normally, you know, this is a screenshot from second week of March. We are great at filling calendars. Normally we are very good at it. And so this is all 4 of their calendars. And you can see a typical week because we work 4 days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is just back to back to back to back to back. That's what we like because we get the most sales. But that's what they like because again, They are in the zone making sales calls. Momentum is flying and they're making sales, they're making commission, they're making it rain, everybody's happy. But when our cost per book call is expensive, ah, we come in on Monday and calendars are looking like this, absolutely dead. And that is not fun. That is not fun for me. That is not fun for them. That is not fun for the business. Because this means, fuck, we've just blasted a bunch of money on ads and now we've got a bunch of people that we're paying to sit there and not really make any sales. So this is going to be unprofitable and that ain't good. So we did not want to dilly-dally and spend too much time filming ads and doing all sorts of stuff. Instead, we need to take swift, evasive action to get the calendars full. So one of the things that we did is dun dun dun, the legendary Frankenstein strategy. So the Frankenstein strategy As pictured, Jacob Elordi here from the Frankenstein film on Netflix, which I will say, excellent film. Um, but this scene when Victor Frankl brings Frankenstein back to life after assembling him from all these dead parts, that is what we did, okay? And this is a tried and tested strategy that I first learned back in my old agency days when I used to manage all of the, uh, Facebook ads for audible in their English-speaking rest of world countries. And what I learned with the Frankenstein strategy is that creative fatigue is a bitch, but when a campaign dies from creative fatigue, it only dies temporarily, and we are able to Frankenstein it, zap it filled with life again, pressing one button and bringing it back to life. So here's how it works. Step number 1 is we find an old campaign that we ran that used to work well, that during a period of time delivered us results at a cost per result that we were happy with. But that campaign, the reason it's not on now and that it's old is because it died and most likely it died from creative fatigue, meaning it worked well, we got results and then you didn't change anything to the landing page, but the results of the ad just started to go until all of a sudden it was too expensive and we killed it. That is what we're looking for. And if you've been advertising for any period of time, you should have plenty of these lying around. So ideally you want one that is at least 2 to 3 months old. But again, we do this with ones that are 6, even 12 months old sometimes. And it's beautiful because then what we do, we found that campaign, we jump in, press one button and we turn that sucker back on. Now, of course, we go through, we look at the copy, make sure it's all still relevant, but otherwise we try not to change anything. And we don't duplicate the campaign, we turn on the exact old one because what this does is reactivate a winner. And because this campaign actually used to work well but then died from creative fatigue, that needs to be the reason why it died. It's been off now for a period of 3, 6, even 12 months, which means the market has forgotten about those ads. They have moved on in their life and the impact of the creative fatigue has effectively lifted, meaning now that same ad that used to work well has a very high probability of working well once again. And so in our case, that was exactly what we did. We found a couple of ads that previously had worked really well. Then they'd fatigued and got expensive. They'd been off for about 3 months. We reactivated them and boom, almost instantaneously they kicked back into gear. And our cost per book call came in at £40 and we got that 60% improvement. Now, the reason why this works so well is because this is an old campaign. Facebook remembers the learnings. And so by pressing one button and activating it, you get results much quicker from this because it remembers what it did last time and it's all set up and ready to go. And because we haven't made any significant changes, it starts delivering quickly. And it hones back into the audience that used to work. And these people have forgotten about all the old stuff. So boom, it activates very quickly because that's one of the challenges with new ads sometimes. Or if you make a new campaign, if you duplicated this, is it enters the learning phase. It has a fresh kind of data set and it can take a little bit of while to optimize and work well. But the Frankenstein is absolutely legendary. And so the Frankenstein will ultimately buy you a bunch of time to then go and film and create new ads and do all the other optimizations that we would do. But it saved the day for us. It got the calendars filled. We started scaling this sucker and we rinse and repeat. So next time you're in doubt, if your ads are getting expensive, deploy the Frankenstein strategy. Go to your Meta ads, go all time, find a campaign that used to work really well, reactivate that sucker and enjoy. A little short-term boost of performance. If you enjoyed this video, drop a comment below. Don't forget to subscribe. I really appreciate you tuning in, and we'll be back next week with more videos. Peace.