80% of your ads will fail.
Even if you’re the best marketer in the world, they’re going to fail. And the difference that sets apart the marketers who do really well advertising on Facebook or any other advertising platform, compared to those who don’t, is that they understand this concept.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Therefore, 80% of your results will come from 20% of your people. 80% of your ad results will come from 20% of your campaigns.
So in knowing that, how can we then begin to mitigate our risk so that we can become profitable if we know that 80% of our campaigns are actually going to fail?
Essentially, it all comes down to testing and scaling effectively. Let’s say you have a thousand dollar a day budget and you put a thousand dollars on one particular ad and just 1 ad set, it just makes no sense because you’re leaving it up to chance. Or option 2 would be to spend that one thousand dollar each day gathering data, as much as possible from as many different sources as possible.
Instead of launching one ad you launch 20 or 30 different ad sets instead. We can dive deeper into how to do the actual testing in a different post, but with that a thousand dollars you can gather a lot of data.
For example, you could pick 10 different audience interests to target and choose five different look-a-like audiences to target. Then you could test running ads to 30 to 50 year olds and a different target of 20 to 30 year olds.
That way you’re picking up all this data from a lot of different sources, right? Then knowing that you’re going to be killing 80% of those ads in those first five days and you turn them off. But you’ll also find the ones that are working. When you find that 20% of ads that are working you can go out and scale them.
Pretty simple post but sometimes people can’t get their head around it. I’ve had this experience with a potential client where we wanted to do a test to make sure our account was working correctly. So I just put something out there really quickly, one ad, the whole point of it was to spend 20 dollars just to make sure the account was going to work. We weren’t even focused on conversions at that time.
But because the conversions were like six, seven, eight dollars per subscriber, she decided that the whole thing should be shut down and that she wasn’t confident. Then I wasn’t confident to run ads with someone who was in that scarcity mindset. So I lost a client there and I don’t like doing that but sometimes people are just not ready to understand or to trust in what you’re doing so you need to explain concepts like this to them. That’s probably where I failed on that one and I’m the first person to admit that I should of been the one who mitigated my risk of losing a client in that situation, but I didn’t address it properly and potentially the client wasn’t ready to hear what I was looking to try and say anyway.
So the moral of the story is that 80% of your ads potentially will fail.
Now over time, sure you will probably get a lot better, especially if you are niched in on one particular area. I do virtual online summits for people and most of my ads work pretty quickly these days.
However if you’re trying something new; if you have a new offer, if you have a new landing page, and if you’ve never run ads to that offer before then it’s a high chance that a lot of ads are going to fail before some start working.
At the end of the day, it’s all about testing and scaling effectively. When you can do that, that’s when your whole life can change, your whole business can change, you can get more leads, get more sales, and do more good in the world.