In this episode of the Content Amplification Podcast, Shaun Whynacht stresses the importance of trusting data when running Facebook advertising campaigns. He explains why intuition alone can mislead marketers and walks listeners through the key performance metrics they should monitor—ROAS, CPM, click‑through rate, and conversion values. Shaun shows how to assign monetary value to booked calls or e‑commerce checkouts, set up custom conversions with the Facebook pixel, and interpret audience cost (CPM) versus creative effectiveness (CTR). He also highlights common technical pitfalls such as mismatched ad creative and landing‑page messaging, broken booking links, and other conversion‑funnel issues. Throughout, he frames data‑driven decision‑making as a navigation tool—like a ship’s GPS—necessary for scaling businesses, especially as online activity spikes during the COVID‑19 era. He closes by offering a free ad‑campaign review and directs listeners to his agency, Blue Cow Marketing, and the AmplifyMyContent platform.
Welcome to the Content Amplification Podcast, where you will gain insight into real-life tactical and strategic elements to help you scale and grow your business. Now let's get started with today's episode.
Hey everybody, hope you're doing well. It's Shaun here. We'll be back with another episode of the Content Amplification Podcast. Well, in today's episode, I was thinking about what should I talk about? And this is based on experience that I've been having over the last several weeks working with a client of mine. And it comes down to trusting data. And what do I mean by trusting data? Well, there's a lot of times in your business where intuition or opinion, I guess, may feel like it's, it's taking over as the best option when it comes to marketing and advertising and promotions. And there are times when you might launch a campaign and it just doesn't do as well as you would like it to do. Now, more frequently, or more recently, I guess is the better word, with this whole coronavirus that's going around, we're finding that more and more people are online. And for obvious reasons, they're home, they're isolated, they can't go out in social settings, so they're, going online. Now, if you have dabbled in Facebook ads before, you know, you may have had good results, you may have had not so great results. And in most of the clients that I've worked with in the, the commercial space and the business-to-business space that aren't considering themselves as Facebook ads experts, and most people aren't, you know, they're doing very little, very top layer stuff, or have done that layer of stuff in the past, and that might be as simple as just hitting the boost post option that you're posed with on Facebook. Maybe they're going into Ads Manager and they're setting up 1 or 2 ad campaigns with, you know, an ad in each or so forth. That's the most common that I see. But what happens is you don't go back and you don't look at how that ad is performing. And there's a couple things that Facebook reports back to you that will be clear signs that your ad is either good, it's performing well, or it's the wrong audience. And there's a couple things to take into account, and I want to cover those here in today's episode. Now, some of the metrics that you can look at are ROAS. Now, that's R-O-A-S, and that stands for return on ad spend. And the best way that I can explain this to you is if I said to you, if you gave me $1 today and I gave you $2 back, would you give me another dollar? Now anyone in their sane and right mind would obviously say yes, yes I would. If I'm gonna give you a dollar, you're gonna give me $2 back. Now that would be a 2 ROAS. You're doubling your return on ad spend. So as you are running ads and you're doing budgets and you're saying, okay, I'm going to spend $5 a day or, you know, $100 a month, you need to be looking at how much is that spend giving back to you. If you're making less than what you're spending, that is a bad business decision. So how do you do that? Well, a lot of that comes in being set up within the ads platform properly. Now if you have, you know, online booking, so if you're in a consulting or professional services space and you're really running ads to get people to book calls, you need to be able to assign a value to a booked call. And how do you do that? Well, let's say we're gonna get in and do a little bit of math. If an average client is $1,000, okay, we'll use that as an example. So if somebody comes and does business with you, it's about $1,000 on average. And for every 10 calls that you book, you close one of those, right? So the value of a booked call is $100, meaning it takes 10 of those calls to make a $1,000 client. So what you need to do is you need to assign a value to those booked calls of $100, meaning you're willing to spend up to $100. That is your maximum threshold to get one booked call. Now there's parts of Facebook Ads where you can set up what are called custom conversions, which means that once you have your Facebook pixel installed on your website and somebody books and you're sending them to a thank you page on your website, this will fire. And then on the ad, it's tracking those. So you can actually see those metrics, the cost to get that, that consultation and the actual value you get back. Now, if you're in a retail or e-commerce space where you have online products, you can actually get the value of that checkout pushed through so you can get a, a truer return on ad spend. Now some of the other metrics you want to look at are things like the amount of people who see your ad. And there's a metric in Facebook called CPM. That's the cost per 1,000 impressions. So monitoring that, meaning if that cost per 1,000 is getting really high, then that's an audience problem. So you got to look at the targeting in which that ad is being served to. If the cost is really low, it means it's being served to a lot of people and it's a good audience. But not— let's not get ahead of ourselves yet. It's a good audience in the way that it's easy for Facebook to be finding people to serve these ads to, but is the audience really that great? Then we look at our clicks. How many clicks are those ads getting? What's our click-through rate? What's the cost per click? Because you can serve the ads to people all you want, but if they're not engaging with it, if they're not clicking on it, then there's an issue with the ad. Okay, so, so our cost CPM is our, our metric to look at our audience. Then if our click-through rate is low, then there's an issue with the creative. People aren't engaging with it. Now, if you've got a, a really good click-through rate, but you're not getting those add to carts or those conversions, then there's an issue with the destination. So if you're sending them to a landing page, maybe the issue is with the creative on the landing page. They're not getting the value in actually going through and booking. If you're getting zero, I'd go and look and see, is there a technical issue with how they can book? Maybe the booking link on the page isn't active. One of the other things to consider is, is the center of that ad in which you are sending them from in Facebook to the landing page the same? Is the imaging, is the headline, is the messaging carried across into your landing page so that when they get there, they're like, yeah, I'm in the right place, I'm gonna follow through and do this, or I need more information. Is the information there? Those are some things to consider. So the data that is being given back to you after you run those ads is very critical and crucial to you making informed decisions. It's very similar to a captain of a ship. If they don't have the right roadmap, the right GPS coordinates, they're not going to be able to sail that ship very accurately. This is what you need to take into consideration with your Facebook ads and the online advertising that you do. If you would like to actually have a conversation, have me look at your ad campaign and give you some feedback, I'd be happy to give you some time for free. Absolutely reach out to me at shaun@bluecowmarketing.ca and I'd be happy to take that time to do that for you. I want to thank you for listening to this episode. And again, subscribe to our episode to get more of this content as we release it. And if you want more information about marketing your business or some help, you can find me at bluecowmarketing.ca. It's been a pleasure. Thank you and stay safe.
Thanks for listening to the Content Amplification Podcast. If you have questions about how you can amplify your content strategy, Go to AmplifyMyContent.com.
