The 5 Pitfalls That Kill Your Ads (Even If You’re Smart)

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I want to talk about why Facebook ads fail even when you are a smart business owner with good offers. I see this over and over and over again. And if I wasn't a funnel expert, I think I might dive into ads instead because of how many problems I see that I want to fix, that I desperately want to fix in the ads space. But I am, you know, I am not an ads expert, but I definitely know a lot about ads, but I maintain my lane that I am a funnel expert first first and foremost. That said, I work with lots of clients who run Facebook ads or Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram, and they run into the same pitfalls over and over and over again. So I want to talk about them here today so that you can avoid the ditch on either side of the Meta ads conversation. The very first pitfall I see is The pitfall of, I don't understand enough to do it myself, but hiring is too expensive. This is a gap that honestly I haven't seen like a super solid solution to it yet. You've got a business owner who has a validated offer or slightly validated offer. They really wanna run ads. They really don't understand ads. They feel like it's important to have an expert. Help them run the ads so that they're not wasting money, but the cost of the agency is so high that any profit that they would make on that funnel gets eviscerated. And it's a hard, it's a hard problem to fix. Now, a couple of solutions that I have come up with on various occasions. Number one, if you're a business owner and you have a spouse who is good with numbers, you train them to do the ads because no one's going to spend your money the way you'll spend your money. You know, we'll be careful, I should say. So having like a husband or wife that's not in the business, learn how to do it and then do it. That's one option. The second option is to a child or an intern or someone who is not in the online business game, getting them really trained up. That means you have to spend money on training and there are gobs and gobs of training programs and coaches and all of that sort of thing. So you have someone. Now you could do this as well if you want to learn. And as long as you learn the type of ads for the type of funnel you you have, you could probably make that work. There are coaches out there that offer coaching, and they offer curriculum as well. So like, you set it up and then they, you know, can make sure you're on the right track. That's an option as well. But if you're going to hire an agency because you don't want to learn ads, understand that for that time being, you will not have profit on that particular funnel because agency prices are just very, very hard. Now, the only exception to that will be if you have a very high lifetime value, if you have a high-ticket backend and you can afford to spend that first profit that comes in on the ads agency because in the lifetime value discussion, uh, you can make it work. But that is probably the biggest pitfall I see is this sort of quandary that small business owners find themselves in. The second pitfall I wanna address is the urge to scale the minute it works. Right? So you have, let's say you have a webinar funnel or an application funnel or what have you. You get it out there. It, you get some early signals that it converts. Your ROAS looks good. You know, that means return on ad spend looks good. And you are like, okay, let's go to the moon. The minute you scale, you are basically signing up to be a creative ads agency because you will have to produce new creative way, way, way more often than you think. And if you try to scale your budget and you don't create an operating, uh, like an SOP for how you're going to get new creative out every single week, you're going to watch all of your numbers crash and burn. And I see this, you know, we have like, I have a lot of clients that are running webinar funnels and, you know, they're at like $100 a day, let's say, and things are working and they're like, okay, I want to scale up. And then they jump to $200 a day and they don't immediately refresh the ads. And after a week or so they're like, oh my gosh, my cost per lead is going up and up and up. And I said, I know, because you, you gave Meta more gas to spend, but you actually didn't give it the creative it needed. It's a creative platform and ads and audiences fatigue fast. And this means not only different types of creative like reels, posts, stories, all those types of things, but also more angles, right? New objections, new formats, new hooks, all of that sort of thing. If you are going to scale, know that you are signing up for becoming an ad creative machine. All right. Pitfall number 3 is experiential. And I'm sure there will be people that are in the ad space that disagree with me, but if you are running a funnel, like a— I'm going to use a webinar funnel as an example because this is the most common funnel I run into. And then it's working well and you start scaling, and then you decide that you're going to offer a low-ticket offer, so you put in a PLM funnel. You're going to watch your ads most likely tank. Results get harder to interpret, right? And also Meta starts to get confused because it was running looking for this exact type of person that opts in to this webinar, that watches, and then let's say buys a $500 product, and now you're asking it to look for someone who's going to impulsively spend $27. I recommend that you set up different ad accounts under the same— you know, you can run them off the same page and account, you know, that, that sort of thing, that's fine. But you are going to set up one funnel in one ad account and one funnel in another ad account. Now, the exception to the rule on this one is that occasionally I see ad accounts where you're running video views for engagement and you're running opt-ins, you know, for leads, and then you're also running a webinar funnel and everything seems to be fine. Okay, great. But I, I have noticed more than I can count when people try to take these sort of like big dog funnels, right? Weekly webinar funnels, PLM funnels, um, application funnels, and they try to scale them both in the same ad account, and usually everything goes sideways. So you can set up a second ad account if you are going to go ahead and do that. Really important. Uh, okay, the fourth pitfall is the emotional budgeter versus the mathematical budgeter. And this is where people, they think, okay, well, I don't want to start big because I don't know that the offer converts, so they start small, thinking that that's less risky. But what happens when you start small is that you're giving Meta less to work with. And so if your funnel isn't like a comp— like a total, like, bang-on top funnel, it's going to struggle, which is emotionally going to send you into either panic or like, oh my gosh, this isn't working. And I actually think that the people who do really well are emotionally ready to spend decent money right out of the gate because that gets them data faster. So let me give you an example. Again, gonna use the weekly webinar. Let's say you have a weekly webinar and you wanna spend $30 a day on ads. What's gonna happen is you're gonna have an extremely small number of people opt in. Okay. And yeah, $30 a day will work for opt-ins. Like you can technically get 50 conversions a week, uh, which is what Meta requires if your cost per lead is good. So it's not like it's an unreasonable budget, but what will happen is you'll get maybe, let's say 50 or 60 people registered. You'll get maybe 4 or 5 people to attend. And if it doesn't work and you don't sell, the emotional disappointment is going to be extremely high. And you're going to keep doing that week after week after week. And you're really not going to get a room large enough to test how am I closing, and you're going to be spending whatever it is, $30 times 7, $200 a week, and your nervous system is gonna like tap out before we've got the data that we need. Why not instead make the funnel as absolutely bang on as you can, right? Hire a coach, get it right, get the presentation right, and get enough creative, and spend $50 or $100 or even $200 and do that for 3 weeks. Say, okay, I'm going to spend 3 grand on this funnel and I'm going to run it 3 weeks in a row, and this is what I'm going to do, and then I'm going to see how much it converts. Now, 3 weeks, set budget, you are sure as to where the funnel needs work. I think that that's easier on the nervous system than the drip, drip, drip. There's also just the fact that if you're running certain types of funnels, the budget needs to be high enough to get you 50 conversions a week. And so the absolute minimum you want for a webinar funnel is $50 a day. And the absolute minimum you want for a PLM funnel, which is usually like a low-ticket funnel, is somewhere around $200 to $300 a day. And, um, yeah, so that's, that's the other, that's the fourth pitfall. And the fifth pitfall is that, ah, this is a hard one. You, decide that ads are not for you because you had a bad experience in the past and you're attributing your failure to the ads platform, the ads manager, your offer, how you are, instead of understanding that you were probably just extremely misaligned. And the truth is that a lot of people who I work with, we get information pretty quickly. And it's not that like ads don't work for you. I hear that all the time. Like, ads don't work for me. Meta's ad platform is like one of the most advanced platforms ever in terms of targeting. There's a pretty good chance it does work for you. What doesn't work is an unclear offer, an unclear message, like a funnel that hasn't been optimized. Like, those are the things that are probably unclear. But if you, if you take the time and energy to really say, okay, this is a fun— this is not just like a throwaway funnel I'm going to do here. This is an asset I'm building to sell this product for the next 2 or 3 years. I mean, think about that. If you're building a product right now, a coaching program, a course, and you're expecting that offer and that product to make you 6 figures a year, It would stand to reason that spending $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 to net you six figures a year for multiple years is a good investment. But I think people get really turned around because they buy into fluffy courses or scammy coaches. It doesn't work. They panic. They think it's not me. But if you were to like go set up a bakery on the corner store, you would understand I have to go get a small business loan so that I can, you know, set it up, maybe $100,000 to get started. And I know that, that, you know, that bakery is going to net me a certain amount of money each year. It's the same thing for the funnel, same thing for the offer. And if you start seeing your PLM funnel or your webinar funnel like that, instead of just this throwaway experiment, you're going to be more likely to do a really good job, make an investment, spend more on ads than maybe you would have if you were just drip, drip, dripping and get that data really, really fast. For most people, if they stick with it, they can figure out how to break even on their funnel and get money on the back end or get profitable on the funnel. And that is the goal. That is literally the goal of online business and internet marketing. And if you don't want to play the ads game, that is totally fine. You do not have to play the ads game. You can do organic traffic. There's lots of different ways, but the ads game is is honestly the fastest way to scale. And people throw that word around all the time and they say, I wanna scale, I wanna scale. And if you're not gonna use ads, you are going to need some other engine that's very, very powerful because a lot of people can't replace what an ad can ultimately do. And as annoying as Meta can be, if you avoid these 5 pitfalls, you are on your way to having a successful funnel. So. As always, if you need support building your offer, building your funnel, building your online business, please hit me up on email julie@juliechenell.com, or you can DM me on Instagram and we will get you sorted. Talk soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, Harness your grit and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.