Should you stop poor-performing Ads?

Hey,


When you see poor-performing Ads, whether they be Facebook Ads or Amazon Ads, your first instinct can be to turn them off that very moment, because they are clearly draining your budget and providing little to nothing in return.

However, these campaigns can sometimes still be saved.

Let's dive in...

Poor-Performing Amazon Ads

With CPCs (Cost-Per-Clicks) being that much more expensive with Amazon Ads compared to Facebook Ads (generally), Amazon Ads are usually an author's first choice to cull.

Before you go in with a canon ball, however, it's important not to just look at the surface-level metrics (i.e. the CPCs, CTRs, Orders, Page Reads, etc of the entire campaign).

You need to dive in a couple of layers deeper.

Specifically, look at the individual keywords and ASINs your budget is being spent on.

It could be that one individual keyword or ASIN is sucking up 99% of the impressions, clicks and budget, but just not converting. And this one keyword or ASIN is making the whole campaign look like it can't be saved.

However, if you were to negate that keyword or ASIN, all of a sudden, the campaign is freed up to spend money on your other targets.

When you find a scenario like this and it's a keyword or ASIN you think will convert one day... don't get precious about it. The data doesn't lie. Negate it or turn it off and move on.

If you're seeing poor-performing Amazon Ads, it's likely not the campaign as a whole that's the issue; it's one small element of that campaign. So, find the problem, deal with it, and let the campaign continue to roll with this bad egg out of the picture.

Poor-Performing Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads can be a little trickier to diagnose because there are more variables at play than with Amazon Ads; namely:

– Audience

– All the different assets of the Ad Creative

Since the introduction of Amazon Attribution, however, diagnosing Facebook Ads has become 100x easier, because you can actually track the Orders and Page Reads that come from specific Ads and audiences.

The number of variables with Facebook Ads, however, is precisely why I prefer to test one variable at a time, whether that's:

– Audience

– Image

– Primary Text

– Headline

– Call-To-Action button

If you wanted to test 3 audiences, for example, you would show the same 2 or 3 Ads to each audience, rather than showing different Ads to the different audiences; otherwise, you won't know whether it's the audience or the Ads that have generated the good or poor results.

So, if you have an audience that isn't working and it's been running for at least 5-7 days, but generated zero Orders and/or Page Reads and yet other audiences you're testing have generated Orders and/or Page Reads in that same timeframe, with the same Ad creative, then personally, I would turn that poor-performing audience off.

The Ad creative clearly works with other audiences, so the Ad creative likely isn't the issue. It's the audience.

Now, that's not clear-cut by any means. It could be that a different Ad creative would work better for this current poor-performing audience.

So, if you have the time and the budget, create some new Ad creative to test with this audience if you think it's worth pursuing. Otherwise, move on to test a new audience with the winning Ad creative.

You could also run into the scenario that, when you have multiple Ads within an Ad Set, Facebook favors one specific Ad creative over another. And the Ad creative it's focusing on just isn't converting.

So, turn that Ad creative off and let the other Ad creative in the Ad Set (that hasn't received much in the way of budget yet) run for 5-7 days to see if it performs any better.

Conversions are what really matter in advertising. You can send a bunch of traffic to your books, but if nothing is converting, there's likely an issue with your book product page that just isn't resonating with readers.

As the saying goes, "never judge a book by its cover", the same goes for advertising, "never judge a campaign by its top-level metrics!" Dive deeper!

To Your Success

– Matt