Using Templates as Inspiration for a New Facebook Ad

Hi there!

Thanks for checking out my blog!

After failing to copy my well working Facebook Ad I decided that it was time to try creating a completely new Ad 🙂

Template

A little while ago I bought a document with templates of 100 high converting ads. I had been struggling a bit with coming up with a good Ad copy and corresponding target audience so it was great to have something to look at for inspiration!

Of course, not all these templates are related to my market niche, but it still helps a lot to just have a look at how other people are doing it. And it wasn’t just ad templates for Facebook, but also for Instagram which is even more amazing because I’m completely unfamiliar with Instagram (must be the generation gap!).

So I took a long look through my new examples and found one template that really fit within my niche! I decided to use that template and tweak it until it completely fit my product!

Let me highlight the two sentences that really spoke to me:

“Let’s see if you qualify.” “See you on the inside!”

As a reader, that would really make me think that there might be a limited number of spots in such a program, or that you have to be very serious about becoming successful online to qualify (which in fact is the case for the program I’m in). But it also leaves the reader with hope when he/she reads the last sentence! I would definitely be interested after reading the final ad copy I had written, but I was going to have to wait and see if that was the same for my target audience.

Target audience

Unfortunately, the target audience corresponding to the template I had chosen didn’t really fit my own target audience since the template was mostly about Shopify and e-commerce and I’m really looking to target people who are interested in affiliate marketing.

For my last Facebook ad, I’d included many different interests for my target audience but that didn’t really allow me to determine which one of these interests was what made my ad do well. So this time, I decided to just choose one interest related to affiliate marketing and decreased my age interval to not make the target audience too big.

Creatives

Then it was time to find the perfect image for my Facebook Ad! Something that really fit with the Iceberg Effect book I’m promoting. You may have guessed what I searched for: that’s right, I wanted to have an image with ice or icebergs on it! Maybe that’s not the most creative thing I could come up with but it was all just so beautiful and really fit with the image of the book as well!

I found so many beautiful images, and not just from ice or icebergs because I found some amazing northern lights and night sky pictures as well once I got into that rabbit hole haha. I saved all of them because you never know when you might need them!

But I wanted to use one of the iceberg images for my new ad, so I asked my husband to photoshop the image of the book in there (it’s a good thing he did that because I’m horrible with photoshop!). After he’d done that for several images, I picked the one I liked the most and voila! My new ad was done 🙂

Time to test it out!

The results

I gave my ad about five days to do its work, but unfortunately, the results weren’t really great… They were definitely not as good as my previous ad!

I’d sold 2 books in those 5 days. Although I’m happy that I did sell some books, compared to the advertising costs it should have been 5 books. So, unfortunately, I had to admit that the ad was not working well enough. Or at least, the combination of ad copy, image and target audience was not the right one.

Then I thought back to what Dean said: creatives are everything! I figured it must be my image then (because the ad copy was adapted from a proven template, so it at least couldn’t be that!). I figure I have to change the image to something more popping and colourful. Something that really catches the attention of my audience and makes them stop to actually look at the ad copy! So I’m definitely going to use this ad again with another image 🙂

However, I’ve decided that I’m first going to focus on the organic Facebook strategy I talked about in my last few blogs! Facebook Ads cost a lot of money (especially if you’re still testing and tweaking). Furthermore, because of everything going on with the US elections Facebook has been extra strict and I’ve heard that a lot of accounts have been shut down because of the smallest things and I don’t want that to happen! And, of course, the Holiday season is right around the corner which means that I would have a lot more competition, which would drive up my costs even more.

Besides that, I love connecting with people on a personal level, so I really want to work on getting better with the organic Facebook strategy as well and that only happens through lots and lots of practice! So expect to read more about my journey with this strategy in the coming weeks 😉

If you’re doing Facebook ads, do you think you will continue? Or will you take a break for a bit until this all blows over?

Until next time!

Sandra