Shauna Thoreson audited an agency ready to kill their ads, only to find they were generating clicks fine. The real problem: a 2% landing page conversion rate caused by a mismatch between ad messaging about protecting families and a landing page focused on wealth-building. Fixing the disconnect, not the ads, was the answer.
Chapters
There was this one time I was doing an ad audit for an agency and they were convinced that their ad campaigns were not working. They were wanting to turn them off. They were gonna relaunch with new ads and they had scheduled an ad audit with me just to review their new ads and then look at the metrics of their old one. And what I uncovered was actually that their campaign was actually performing really well. Instead, there was a specific part of their customer journey that was a huge black hole that sucked people away before they ever converted. And this is a mistake that I see lots of new advertisers make is they don't actually dissect the data to see where the actual black hole or the problem is that's sucking people away. And for them, their ad was getting clicks, it was getting interactions, it was getting landing page views, but the landing page was not converting. Their landing page conversion rate, so the number of conversions divided by the number of landing page views that they received, was abysmal. It was like 2% or something. And here's the thing that was missing the disconnect between their ad and their landing page, because their landing page, In and of itself, if I showed you their landing page, you'd be like, that looks pretty good. It was professionally done. They had a lot of things correct to make it mobile optimized. They did not have a menu bar at the top. It looked pretty good. But here's where the problem was. There was absolutely no connection between the ad and the landing page. The synergy wasn't there. The ads that they were running were going to truck drivers, and we were focusing on IUL, right? So their ads were all about when you're a truck driver, you need to take care of your family. You need to make sure that they are protected. Here's how we can protect them. When they clicked Over to the ad, the headline said something like, let's start building a wealth that you own, or let's build your own personal bank account that you can withdraw from and have living benefits. Okay, both are applicable to IUL, but the difference is when they got the cold traffic from the link click, that was people that were truck drivers that were interested in protecting their family. And the moment they landed on the landing page, now we're talking about a completely different benefit instead of solving the pain point that attracted them over. This is what you need to do. Decide on what approach you're going to be testing and make sure that there's complete synergy whenever it comes to bringing in cold traffic. If we're going to use social media and we're going to disrupt people and we're going to get in their face and say, here's something that's been bothering you, right? You like want to make sure that your family's protected, or maybe it's something else. When they click over to the landing page, it needs to have the exact same feeling and it needs to let them know I'm at the right place so that way we can just inch them down the line of actually getting their contact information. And then yes, maybe a new selling feature of talking to them about different IUL policies would be that they could build some wealth that they could pull from whenever they are still alive, or living benefits, but that's not the thing that got them down the path. When you know how to read the data, you know how to find exactly where the black hole is that's actually sucking your prospects away, and then you get to make that one change instead of just throwing spaghetti on the wall and just starting over from scratch.
