Inside a $50,000 Meta Ads Campaign for Insurance Agents | Live Lead Generation Strategy

I am so excited for this video because today I am going to be showing you a live campaign where we are spending about $50,000 over the course of 2 weeks. Now, this is a Meta special ad category campaign, and you are going to look inside the account with me and see what our current results are, what the metrics are that I use to track these results, what my overall campaign structure is, and then just the overall strategy that I am implementing for this ad account. I could not be more excited to show you what's going on inside. So let's dive in. In case we haven't met yet, My name is Shauna, and I'm the founder of Social Waves Media. I have been specializing in lead generation since 2016, and in 2022 is when I started working closely with insurance agents and other licensed professionals. Now, I am on a mission to free you from ever having to depend on the overhead of an expensive marketing agency, especially one that if you part ways that you don't actually own your assets, and 2, to break free from overpriced lead vendors. Because the reality, not only are they overpriced, priced, but the best leads that you can generate are going to be with your own branding, with your own name on them. Now, today we are diving into an ad account. So let me tell you what type of account this is for. So this is for a large group that primarily focuses on 2 different products. So they offer long-term care planning and then also Medicaid lookback planning. Now, this specific one that we're looking at is for a long-term care planning workshop that is coming up, and they go back and forth between having an online workshop where people can sign up, like an evergreen one that's actually recorded, to actually doing live workshops where they run their ads in all the different states that they're licensed in and do just kind of a really big live push. And that's what they're doing right now. Now, we have worked together off and on since '23 as I have been teaching them how to kind of take control of their own lead generation. But when they have really big pushes like this, I have more hands-on in it. So let's dive right into the ad account and Let's see what's going on with the results so far. All right, so here we are inside of the ad account, and probably the very first thing that your eyes are being drawn to is just how amazing these campaigns are performing. You can see we've got over 5,835 leads that have registered for this upcoming live online event, and we're only spending about $3.52 per lead, which is amazing. We're gonna break down exactly why those numbers are so extremely low. Now, I do wanna point out, right now I am filming today. It is November 7th, so today is November 7th, just so that way you can be clear of when we're actually filming this. And I'm gonna go ahead and choose maximum results. We first started running these ads on October 27th. So let's kind of walk through what we're looking at here. Now we are inside of the ad set level. Now I do have a video that breaks down the campaign structure of the 3 different tabs. We've got campaign, we've got ad set, and and ads. But as a little refresher, the way that I like to teach this is it's kind of like we're building a tree. So each campaign has a tree trunk, which is the roots of the operation, which is in this tab. And then inside of that tree trunk, we're going to have one or more branches, which is the ad set, and that's the actual audience that we are targeting. And then connected to that are the actual ads, or the leaves that people are seeing. Now, when you're running ads in a special ad category, there are some limitations on what you're able to target and not, but you are still able to add in some interest and you are also able to retarget your warm audience. So let's talk about what that looks like. So this guy right here, A1 Cold CR, that stands for it's a completed registration audience that we're running ads to. So this right here by cold audiences, I mean these are people that have never interacted with this business before. As far as we know. So these are new, cold, fresh eyes that have not been on this business. The A2 where it says warm, that is our retargeting campaign, and that is where we have loaded it with people that have interacted with this business's Facebook page or their Instagram account in the past. I normally do it between 90 and 180 days. For this specific campaign, because we were going so big, I made my net a lot larger, so we're doing it up to 180 days that they've interacted or they've even gone to to this business's website. In addition to that, we have also uploaded their customer list that we've generated off of Meta ads. And this is a list of people that have signed up for a previous workshop, but they haven't converted yet. So we've popped them in so that way we are getting some ads in front of them. And then the third ad set is a cold ad set. And technically speaking, the targeting is exactly the same as A1. So the targeting is the same, but the ads that we are running is a completely different approach that we've never taken before. So typically when I run a campaign that is a lifetime campaign, so we've got a start date and an end date, I will run that campaign based on CBO or campaign budget optimization. So I'll plop the budget at the tree roots of the operation and I'll say, just give me the cheapest cost per lead. I don't care where they come from. I don't care which ad set it comes from. Just give me the cheapest cost per lead. But in this specific example, we wanted to have a little bit more control over this very, very different ad approach that we had because we didn't really know if it was going to convert as well as some tried and true tested campaigns that we had ran before. So that's why we decided to control the budget ourselves and to put it here. But as you can see, it's performing really well, and we're going to kind of break down why these cost per leads are different from each other. Now, as we kind of move through here, you're going to see that Meta has 2 recommendations for me. So I like to always say that Meta likes to serve your ads always in all ways. Meta is always looking for ways to say, just stop trying to control anything that we do and just let us do what we want, okay? And when it comes to lead generation, there are certain aspects that you absolutely need to take control of. So this right here is saying that we should just use an Advantage+ audience setting instead of actually controlling it and having inside of there that we are targeting this specific specific audience that we are retargeting people, so it's a little bit smaller, so they're saying just let us do that. And then they're also going to be saying, on at least some of these, they're going to be saying that we should be using Advantage+ placement, which would mean that we allow them to serve our ads in all the different placements. We don't wanna do that. We never wanna use Audience Network, and we never wanna use some other specific placements when it comes to lead generation. They just don't convert very well. So let's scoot on through. Now I'm calling these leads, but technically this is a campaign running for website completed registration. So these ads are all running to a landing page. Now fun fact, when I first started working with this group in the beginning of '24, we were running ads and we got some ads that were performing really well, but it was their landing page that was lacking in the conversion rate. And they made 2 changes that I recommended and it completely changed how their landing page converted. And the biggest change that they made was when someone lands on your website and they land on mobile, the button to sign up should be above the fold. It should be up where we've got the headline, the subheading of what it's actually about, and then a button that they can click on. They don't have to scroll down to actually find the button. And that really helped with their landing page conversion rate. So we are running these to their website technically, and let's kind of look at what these numbers look like. So here's kind of an interesting fact. I am looking right here at the CPM, their cost per meal, or the cost per 1,000 impressions. And this ad account is getting killer CPM. It is absolutely possible for you to have a really good CPM, which is the price that they're charging you to get in front of the audience. It is still possible for you to have that even in the Meta Special Ad category. And one of the biggest ways for you to affect your CPM is for you to have ad creatives that look native to the platform. So when you are using a reel placement or a video placement, you don't have any text or logos or phone numbers or anything that would be in the way when the button pops up for the ad whenever it shows up, for you to have anything that's overlaying like that. That's a big one. Other ways that you can reduce your CPM is by being a very predictable ad account. So we're not sporadic, we're not constantly making lots of changes, so it can be really reliable of what we're doing, and then also just a history of us running ad campaigns. But if you look here, this guy right here is much more expensive than this guy right here, yet the cost per lead for the warm retarget is much lower. Why is that? Well, I can see, and that's because the link click-through rate is so extremely high. Now, this is probably, my favorite ad metric to really focus on, and that's the link click-through rate, because that tells me if our ad is getting people to click on the link and actually go over to the website. So if this is super low, then I know our ads aren't getting people to click over, and that's what I need to fix. But if my link click-through rate is really high but no one's converting, then I need to figure out, one, if there's something wrong with the landing page, or 2, if there's not enough synergy between the messaging on the ad to when they got over to the actual website, 'cause those 2 things need to play nicely together and really be able to have some synergy between the 2. So you can see here, this link click-through rate is just amazing. My goal is for this to be above 1%, especially in a regulated industry. I would even say like a 0.85 is something that I would be like, okay, that's looking pretty good, but I like for it to be around 1%. Then I scoot down and I look at the difference between the reach and the impressions. So the reach is the individual people that have seen this ad, and the impressions are the number of eyeballs that have seen these ads. We're gonna scoot on down. We're gonna take a look at the clicks and also then the link clicks and then the landing page views. So clicks just means how many people have clicked on the ad, how many people have interacted with it in some way. The really cool thing is all of these people, so all 20,000 clicks that we've had on this ad right now, those individuals are now going to fall into our retargeting campaign and they're going to get retargeted with an ad if they didn't convert. Because of course in our warm campaign, we've made sure that we include anyone that we wanna retarget, but we have excluded anyone that has converted for this specific workshop. Then we're gonna scoot down, we're gonna see how many actually clicked on the link. And versus how many landed on the landing page. Now, this is a beautiful number right here. So the difference between a link click, a link click means they clicked on the link. A landing page view means that they waited for the content to load and they actually were on the page enough to absorb some of the content. Like they at least waited for the top part to load. So when I'm teaching agents to very first take control of their lead generation, I typically teach them to start with a lead form. Because it is native to the platform. You don't have to be tech savvy to set it up. It's already optimized for mobile. It's going to— you're not going to lose a lot of people between the click and the form actually opening up. Because when we have a landing page, we have to worry about so many other elements, and some of those are just the speed at which it loads up. And then the next thing that we have to worry about is the landing page conversion rate. Now, this is a custom metric that I created on the backend when you can customize your columns to make sure that I'm tracking to see what percentage our landing page is converting. And this one is pretty good. I like it to be above 20%. So the way that you get your landing page conversion rate is you take the number of conversions. So we would take, there's 1,500 right here, 1,546. And we would divide that by how many landing page views that we got, and that would give us what percentage of those people who got to the landing page actually converted. So if this number was, I would say, under 20%, then that would be our hole that we need to be really making sure that we patch up in order to make sure that our entire campaign is working and converting the way that we want it to. So that is what is going on inside of this ad account as an overview. Now, I don't anticipate there being many other changes that we need to do. We just need to sit back, relax, and let the algorithm do its thing until our end date that runs out here in about 10 days. Now, I like to always say that marketing or lead generation is truly the science of data mixed with the art of intuition with the skill to execute. And what we primarily talked about here was the skill to execute, so understanding the platform, And also what we really focused on was the science of data. So I hope that in us breaking down these metrics, you're able to understand how actually looking at the data and knowing what metrics to look at are what's going to make the difference in us making good decisions and moving forward to continuously be able to optimize this ad account and be able to generate consistent results.