Hi Nicholas,

My apologies... I'm having a little trouble remembering all the details and following exactly what the issue is. Are you saying you tried a new combination and it didn't perform or that you tried an old combination that used to do well but no longer does? If the former, then it may just mean that your targeting didn't work and you need to explore other audiences. If the latter, then it's possible you just ran into some bad luck, or that you have run through your audience with this creative and it's time to try something new.

One thing I noticed on the ad you linked to... The image looks a but odd, like it's stretched slightly or something. The perspective just looks a bit odd. Could that be an issue? 

When I say "run through the audience", I don't mean the entire 1.7 million people. I just mean the top 1% of the most targeted people. $600 gets you a lot of impressions and ads do have a lifespan. You may find that changing up the creative on the Joe Bonamassa ad gets you good results again. Depends on a lot though. 

I'm very surprised that the lookalike didn't do well for you. I still think it's really worth trying that again. One thing you might do though is create a lookalike of only people that have "clicked any link". You can run a search for those people and export them, then upload into a new lookalike. This will exclude all the people that signed up when you had confirmed opt in turned off. 

All you can really do is test things. Now that you are branching off into new audiences you'll either need to test many new audiences to make your current creative work, or you'll need to test your creative on the new audiences with new rounds of dynamic creative.

Hope that helps.

Nicholas Hammon said
I misunderstood when you said, "run through audience." After reading your previous reply I went and started a new campaign targeting Joe Bonamassa with all the same creative and I was seeing 57% conversions on the http://www.johnyriley.com/freemusic squeeze page. Subscriber cost is $1.06 which is within my budget.

With the confirm opt-in on I need to be getting at least 40% conversions rates to have a chance at being profitable.  So it seems I ran into some bad luck there. I have noticed that overall the marketing isn't doing as well as it was before and for the reasons you mentioned. 

That's awesome. A 57% conversion rate is stellar! Bad luck certainly happens. Especially when you turn ads on and off (I don't recall if you did any of that).

With regards to the lookalike I will try that again. I thought I needed to change my approach because I expected to do well with a lookalike audience. I'll put it on the shelf for now because I still have plenty of targeting options still. So far every blues audience I've tried has done very well and I have a lot of new options from a survey I sent out. I'm going to try targeting Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn since I have a lot of fans who reported those as their favorite.

Cool. I'd expect your blues audiences to work as Johny's USP is blues related. I would not expect things like Jimi Hendrix to work because that's a bit more off brand, but you never know. We often see surprising results with targeting.

 

With all this new targeting I'm concerned that it could affect overall funnel performance. Especially since I am still split testing email headlines. Do you think I should just stick with one for now until I get it sorted out? My sales conversion is still really weak and I'm mainly focused on improving that because people get discouraged when they are throwing money at something and not seeing returns.   

My thinking would be to focus on your best performing audience and focus on sales. But also remember that you may need to add an additional promotion or two before you reach profitability. Often people break their backs trying to squeeze an extra couple of percentage points on the initial offer, when all they actually need to do is try selling something else a little deeper in. It's not uncommon to profit on the second promotion. There are also things you can do to squeeze additional sales out of your funnel on the primary offer. I have a training lesson on that coming soon.

That all sounds good.

Video can definitely do well. However, it's one of those things that varies dramatically from artist to artist so I tend not to focus on it in my training as I am more focused on one size fits all solutions. The thing with video is that it makes the experience less subjective. People really get a sense of who you are and less is left to the imagination. This is fine, and often good, if you have a lot of charisma, but if you don't, it can cause you to lose people right away, whereas with a blog post the reader applies more of themselves to the notion of what your all about.

Have you ever read a book about a place and had it seemed extremely cool, romantic, or mysterious, only to actually go to the place and have it seem a lot less exciting? That's kind of the risk with video. But Johny has a great image so I'm not surprised that's working well.

But if you ask people what they prefer they will almost always say video. Doesn't always mean it will perform best. But it also might.