Hi Julianna,

That ad looks to be a Newsfeed ad. a good click through rate for a Newsfeed ad is between 3 and 5%, which you are within. However a click on a Newsfeed ad is not necessarily a click to your squeeze page. FB is counting any engagement, be that a like, a click to your page, a comment, anything. So your actual clicks to site will be much less. Looks like about a third of your clicks are making it to your site. You really need to zero out your aweber stats when running a new ad and rely on those as they are more accurate than FB stats. If you did that, what is your unique conversion rate according to Aweber?

Hi Julianna, 

I understand that, My assumption was simply that you were relying on the CTR stat because that is what you had mentioned. Most see that and just assume those are clicks to their site. I'm confused by the statement, I'm happy with the cost per lead but not the conversion rate. All that ultimately matters is your subscriber acquisition costs. And I agree that .72 is good. If you still want to shoot for something better you need to just keep tweaking until you get there.

As for the custom audience question: It is pretty much based on the performance of your ad and your budget. If the ad is getting a good click through rate FB will continue to serve it until you start to hit the ceiling of your max bid. Depending on your daily budget, it may take a while to hit your max potential. Keep in mind that just because someone fits your demographic criteria, it doesn't mean that many other people (in other niches) aren't competing for that ad exposure as well. You may have access to a portion of your audience at your bid price, but competition may be keeping a larger percentage of your audience out of reach because they are bidding more in other niches that simply cross over with your own.

Hope that helps.

Julianna Raye said
Yes that helps, thanks! Just a couple more questions:

1. Any suggestions on ways to tweak the landing page: http://howtomeditatewithmusic......ree-lesson ? I'm sure there are little tricks I'm not aware of that are not necessarily intuitive (like use the color yellow, etc.) Any pattern you've noticed like that would be helpful to know about and try. Or if you can recommend a resource to learn about those types of quirky landing page conversion tricks that would be helpful.

Keeping in mind that 20% really isn't so bad with paid ads, my feeling (and this is just a knee jerk opinion) is still that the idea of mindfulness isn't as much of a home run for people outside of the already dedicated meditation world. Whenever I read your copy I always stick on that word. I realize we've discussed it and you feel differently (and you may be right), but for me that word has no value unless it is in the context of a deeper discussion. I personally feel that someone telling me that they could teach me a little meditation exercise which uses music and just a few minutes a day to give me better health, focus, and productivity would connect more with my existing reality than a conversation about mindfulness, which has no real implied benefit unless you are already educated on the subject. But again, that might just be me. But long story short, I think the conversions have more to do with copy and possibly targeting then they do colors and little details like that.

2. Regarding the competition issue that makes sense. Is there any work around for me to access the rest of my audience, assuming competition is what is keeping me from them at the rate I'm able to pay?

 

Also, when the ad starts to decline, do you let it go until it no longer works for you from a cost perspective or is there some advantage to catching it as it starts to decline? If you catch it as it starts, does that keep your fb score up for example?

I don't personally know of any workaround other than raising your bid. And the second question is a good one. I don't know for certain but I personally think there is a risk of letting it run too long. That said, all I really do is stop running the ad once it has not been performing at an optimal level for a day or two. Because ROI is all that really matters, even if the quality score could be higher, it wouldn't really matter so long as the ROI was there. If that makes sense. So basically I just run the ad and when subs get too expensive I pause it. I sometimes give it two days before pausing as there are occasionally days that just under perform for whatever reason and then bounce back.

Awesome, and you may very well be spot on with your assumptions. It's just a word that always causes me to lose energy when I see your pitches. Not sure why. But that's my feeling. But you can't argue with .57 per lead. That's a fantastic price in any market. So I wouldn't change a thing at that price.

And yeah, yesterday sucked for me in terms of leads. To the point that I almost shut off the ads. Today they are through the roof. Probably just an early summer Sunday and everyone was offline.

$1.50 is a pretty good price for leads in a competitive space like yours. You're likely going to need to look at playing with pricing or changing the funnel to get a better conversion rate. Can you refresh my memory and tell me what your price point is and and what the sales conversion rate was on this? I thought it was $150 but obviously that would leave you with a small profit so I must be wrong here. It sounds like you got less than a 1% conversion rate on sales so there is certainly room for improvement. Your just getting started. It usually takes a while to dial things in. I'm happy to hear that the problem is in the sales arena now though. It's been a long time coming

Not sure I'm following the question about the $20 product. Can you clarify that one?

Let's see... There are a bunch of questions in there...

1. If you can't easily get your lead costs down or your conversion ratios up then you might try bumping your price point to $147. It may not effect your conversion rate and you'd be in the profit right out of the gate. But before you can really think about improving your conversion rate you need to get a better handle on what it is with a more qualified lead, meaning US and CA leads.

2. I probably wouldn't focus on adding another freebie to the funnel just yet but rather would look at the emails you have and the pitch of your offer, in the email as well as the sales page.

3. The clickbank order page shouldn't be too much of an issue. I personally get a little turned off when I see something is a clickbank product but that is probably just me as a marketer. Also, my understanding was CB now allowed you to add custom colors and headers to your shoppingcart page.

4. As for the $20 product... I think you are a little ahead of yourself on this one, purely because you don't have your primary funnel down yet. There are many online businesses out there that use a high impact, cheap product to get people into the customer funnel and then upsell either recurring, a high ticket item, or both. You could try that, but it's a little bit harder and usually takes a little more marketing experience to pull off. My feeling is that you will do better focusing on the moderately priced ($99 - $149) course and upselling a recurring product. If you want to do something with the product then I would put together an LTO of some sort and offer it to your list, either as an add on to the autoresponder that comes a few weeks after the main series concludes, OR just as a stand alone promotion that you run a few times a year. That's up to you. Whatever you do, don't complicate things too much right now. Focus on selling your main product and making more than you spend on leads, and then get a recurring upsell in place. 

A bunch of unconnected answers...

What are your opt in rates? I don't remember.

I wouldn't wait until the program concludes to try and upsell the membership. The whole point of the upsell is to strike when the iron is hot and they are in a purchasing mood. Do it right away after the order is complete or you will not see many sales by comparison. 

I would probably use the $20 program to follow up with all the people who don't buy the $100 program. I'd come back a week or so after the funnel concludes and address the price issue and give them this cheaper option. I'd still uspell the membership site on that.

Less targeted cheap leads is NOT a better way to do it. I don't think you have enough data for statistical significance here. But I'd say your targeting is just off. Less targeted never works better. But there could be something in your new settings that is throwing things off.

My personal feeling is still that the place to start is general meditation because it's a big audience, and focus more on how music can be a pain free way to get the benefits of meditation. As apposed to focusing on "mindfulness". But that's just my feeling and you should trust your own instincts as you know the market better.

I find FB interests to be fairly decent. Not perfect, but pretty good. You just need to sort of use some common sense and think about how the term might be used by people not interested in what you are ultimately after. For example with MMM, if I target the Music Business, that can be all kinds of people, even people just talking about how the music business sucks, regardless of whether they are even musicians. If I target people who are interested in CD Baby the likelihood goes way down that a person talking about or engaged with CD Baby is not my target audience.

If you are paying $1.27 per click then your problem is your ad copy and/or targeting. That's way too high. What is your CTR and is this a right column or newsfeed ad?

And yes, the buying mood trumps that. Give them a special deal that they can't get later that will enhance the purchase they just made.

I wouldn't jump ship just yet. 7 clicks tells you nothing.

Custom audiences are great, the issue is that they are hard to sustain. I tend to use them more for retargeting. But I have no problem with the idea of using them for more than that. They definitely will tend to be more targeted. However I'm still 100% confident that you can find interests through FB interest targeting that will work for you.

Looking at your targeting in the ad I still think you are going way to broad. Obviously I can only see your audience labels which only tells me so much, but I would not have personally targeted many of those people. I also would not have grouped them together like that as one group is going to do well, while another will not. Just like interests.

My feeling is that it's still in part a targeting issue. That said, if you're getting a decent click through rate and a low sub rate, it could also be the squeeze page headline and/or video.

Typically the higher the CTR the lower the cost. It can take 24 - 48 hours for that price to settle but that's typically how it works. Looking at those numbers that's still just $2.34 per sub. That would mean that a 3% conversion rate gets you well in the profit with no upsell. Bump the price to 150 and if it holds you would only need a 2% conversion rate. None of those numbers are out of reach. And then there is the fact that cost per click could still come down with better ads and the sub rate could go up with better targeting. Just need to keep sliding things around until you get there. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it takes time.