Hello and welcome to episode number 75 of The Shine Show. In today's show, we're going to look at the five numbers that tell you if your ads are working.

Recently, my family and I went on a two week vacation and I have to be honest and say that the first few days was pretty hard for me to relax. I have already told you, if you've listened to some of the episodes, I've told you that in the month of August, I kind of felt like my brain was broken and that I could not string two words together properly. I couldn't string two thoughts together.

I knew I needed a holiday and I knew I needed to relax. I also know that before COVID happened, I never ever used to read the news or listen to the news. And then as COVID started to unfold, I started craving news and I think it's just our brain's way of trying to control things, raving information, searching out information in an attempt to have all the facts so that our brain can fool itself into thinking that it is in control, which of course we are never in control.

I found myself struggling to relax while I was on holiday. And I made a decision to delete Instagram, to delete Facebook, to delete my email app. I was even considering deleting Safari off of my phone so I couldn't get hold of the news.

Luckily, my self discipline kicked in and I prevented myself from checking the news. But I found myself, even though I deleted Insta and Facebook and wasn't checking news and wasn't reading emails, I still... It's like it left a ginormous gap in my mental space which I kind of slowly needed to ease out of. And it felt like torture sitting there next to a beach, next to a swimming pool, sitting there. I would read my book for a while and then my brain starts going, "How about we check the news?" And I'm like, "Nope, we're not going to check the news."

"How about we check Facebook?" "No, we're not going to check..." "How about we check Instagram?" And then I would watch something on TV and then my brain goes, "How about we check the news?" And it just continued like that for about a week. I made a decision that I'm just going to ease myself into it. So I downloaded one of these quest games.

I downloaded a game called Murder in the Alps and I started playing the game. And initially I felt incredibly guilty for lying on my back playing a silly game on my phone, but it was exactly what I needed to keep my brain from jumping back into work mode and jumping back into searching for news mode.

Now, the way that murder in the Alps work is you are the main character and you arrive in a hotel in the Alps in the middle of a snow storm. Don't ask me how she got there, but she got there. In the middle of a snow storm, she arrives at a hotel only for the hotel owner to tell her that a murder has just been committed. It's a little bit Angela Lansbury, Murder, She Wrote because this lady is like everywhere she goes, people get murdered and she has to figure out who did it.

So she has to follow the clues and figure out who's the murderer before more people get murdered and every single morning she wakes up, there's been a new murder. Now, the thing with this game is you don't have all the information at the start. Each time before you get another piece of information, you have to go to a scene and inside this scene, play a little hide and seek game. Like you get a list of 10 things and you have to find these hidden objects in the scene.

And once you have found all 10 of the hidden objects, then one of those ten things is going to be useful to you in uncovering who the murderer is. This was perfect for relaxation and I spent hours playing and eventually I started relaxing and my craving for news and social media started to die off and I was able to switch off.

I highly recommend that by the way. Take Facebook and Instagram off of your phone and stop checking news. It's a mind bugger for the first few days, but I feel freer than ever and more relaxed.

The reason I'm telling you about my game is because I think Facebook ads can be a little bit like a murder mystery game sometimes. You watch as the blood flows out of your bank account but you haven't yet found all the clues to know exactly who it is that murdered your leads.

Am I right? You need to solve a few mysteries before you're going to know exactly why your ads are tanking, which results in your bank account getting drained like blood flowing out of one of the murder mystery characters.

You need to find the clues first and to die on the show, I guess I am going to share with you these clues so that you know when you look at your ads and you see a murder has been committed, you are able to go and search for the micro clues to figure out what has gone wrong.

The first micro clue, the first number you want to look at is what we call the CPM. The CPM stands for the cost per 1,000. Apparently, M is the number, the Roman numeral for 1,000. I didn't know that until I started working with ads. So CPM stands for cost per 1,000.

And here's the thing about CPM, is Facebook is kind of protective of their newsfeed. And they only make impressions of ads in people's newsfeeds if they believe the ad is good quality. If Facebook feels that your ad is not great quality, then you pay for it in terms of your CPM because they simply don't show it to as many people.

You might end up paying $20-30-40-50 to reach a thousand people. So in other words, to get your ad shown to in a thousand newsfeeds, whereas if you have a good ranking in your account and you have a good ad, then Facebook will show it to more people because they see people respond to this ad, people react, it gets a reaction, people like it. And so then they are more eager to show it to their audience because remember their audience are the eyeballs that are watching and they don't want to show bad ads to their audience.

So how does Facebook know if an ad is good or not? There's a few ways. One of those ways is engagement. Now you have heard me talk about engagement so many times that by now you should understand that the currency with which Facebook measures the quality of our ads is always engagement.

Because remember, Facebook wants content from friends and family, which means they want content that invokes emotions, that people like, that people share, that people comment on. So they want engagement. That's how they measure it. That's one way.

And there can be engagement on your actual ad and that will help you, but there's also building engagement on your account. And you do that simply by running engagement ads to your cold audiences, which then stimulates the engagement on your overall on all of your pages, your Facebook page, your Instagram account, stimulates the engagement on your account, brings up the quality of your account and Facebook goes, "Yeah, this person creates great content. Let's put this in front of more people." So you're using engagement ads to build up your account mojo.

What you should be aiming for in terms of a goal for your CPM is somewhere between $10 and $20 and make sure that you're giving Facebook large enough audiences to find people who will convert. So large enough, I mean, 2 million and more.

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You will find that when you're running ads to your warm audiences, your CPM might be higher. It might be $40-50-60-70 and that's okay, because remember now you are looking for leads in a much, much smaller pool so Facebook has to work harder in order to get you to a thousand impressions.

If there is only a thousand people in your audience and you're trying to get conversions, you're going to pay a lot more to get in front of all those people than when there's millions of people and the algorithm can literally easily find thousands of them to put your ad in front of. Keep that in mind, your CPM will be higher for warmer audiences but aim for the cold audiences to get it between $10 and $20 and try to get your audience bigger than 2 million people.

That way, the algorithm has a better chance to get those people for you. Number one is your CPM, your cost per 1000. The second thing you need to look at is the cost per unique link click. What that means is if we talk about link clicks, it means Facebook is measuring the number of people who clicked the link in your ad either on the call to action button or in the copy of your ad.

We look at unique link clicks because it's possible for someone to click multiple times in the same ad and that's not useful to us. And we also ideally don't want to pay for people who click on our stuff over and over. We want to look at unique link clicks because that tells us how many unique people clicked on the link. So they read the ad, they responded to the ad and then they took the action that we wanted them to take.

Now, in order to see cost per unique link click, you may need to customize the results you're looking at in the ads manager. Facebook defaults to showing us the cost per link click when we sort our information to show us performance and clicks. But we are not looking for cost per link click because it includes anyone who clicked multiple times. We want to make sure we're looking at cost per unique link click and your goal here is to aim for anything between 50 cents and $2 really.

It's harder here to say exactly how much you should aim for because it's possible that you could pay $2 to get someone to click on your ad, but it's the perfect person. And if your landing page converts at 80%, you end up paying maybe $2.50 for that lead but your click is more expensive and that's okay as long as you know you have the right audience.

The second number to pay attention to is your cost per unique link click.

Number three is your link click-through rate. What does that mean? That means that out of the 1,000 people who's newsfeed Facebook put your ad in, so in other words, out of the 1000 impressions you got, what percentage of those people clicked through from your ad to your landing page? That number to me is more important than the cost per unique link click.

The link click-through rate should be at least 1%, because what that means is out of a thousand people, at least 10 of them clicked on your ad. You can imagine if you're paying to get in front of thousands and thousands and thousands of people and only 1% of them are clicking on your ad to go to your landing page and then your landing page is converting at 50%, that means if your CPM is about $10 and 1% clicks on the ad, that's 10 clicks you get. So now you're paying a dollar per click.

Then you hope your landing page converts at 50% and now you're paying $2 per lead. That's how you can kind of work it out. But if this is to you just remember link click-through rate is the percentage of people who saw your ad, who is also clicking on the link. And keep the numbers in mind, you want it to be above 1% because 1% out of a thousand is only 10. That's not a lot of people.

You want to make sure that you pay attention to these numbers and get them as high as possible. And the way that you increase your link click-through rate is in two ways: either you are going to improve your copy so that your copy is clear and tell people exactly why they should click on your link or you're going to look at your targeting. Your targeting and your copy should be a match.

If you're targeting the right people with the right message, you're going to get a link click-through rate higher than 1%. If you have the right message and the wrong audience, that's not going to work. If you have the wrong message and the right audience, you're still not going to have a match there.

Link click-through right, 1% or more and it's an indication of the match between the copy in your ad and the audience that you're targeting. It's an indication of how well they respond to it.

The next number you need to be paying attention to is the landing page conversion rate. This is the rate of people who clicked to your landing page, what percentage of those ended up as leads. And you work this out with the calculation, the number of leads you have over the number of landing page views.

And again, you can go into the ads manager and customize the columns where you're viewing the results of your ads and just type in the customization lending page views. And Facebook brings up the actual number of people who looked at your landing page so long as that page has a pixel on it.

So then you're just going to go, "How many people opted in for my freebie or my lead magnet?" And divide that by the number of people who clicked on your landing page and you have the percentage that your landing page is converting at. And your goal here is to aim for about 45 to 50%.

I have a landing page that is filled with testimonials from happy clients and that landing page converts at 80%. It's so good because we have a retargeting ad set up to re-target people who did not opt in and that retargeting ad is not even getting any traction because that landing page converts so well.

So here's the hot tip for you, if you want to increase conversions on a landing page, include some testimonials from some of your happy students in there.

Then there's finally two other magic numbers that I want to share with you that you need to make sure that you're checking. The one is $25 per day. If you're running any kind of list building ads, any kind of lead magnet ads, you need to be spending at least $25 a day. And here's the other magic number: three days.

You have to leave the ad alone for three days. Make sure you don't touch it. Don't come in and check it every time because you are going to drive yourself crazy because it goes up and then down and then up and then down in those first three days and by the end of the three days, if you have spent $25 each day and you have the right audiences, you should have a favorable result. But don't make a call about your ads until they have run for three full days.

Now, if you are using campaign budget optimization or CBO, as they call it and as I teach my students to use, then also make sure that you only have one ad set per campaign. And the reason we do that is because when Facebook is distributing that money from campaign level and you have multiple ad sets in that campaign and those ad sets are not all created equal, then the money from campaign level is going to be distributed into the ad set that will get the fastest result. You are no longer creating a split test, you are in fact just making the algorithm choose a winner faster.

And we don't always want that to happen. Sometimes we want to make sure we are comparing one audience to another one and you need to compare them for a full three days, each one in its own campaign with its own budget set at campaign level so that you can actually compare apples with apples.

All right. That was a lot of stats. I haven't done an episode where I go through geeky numbers like this in a while. I hope you've been taking notes and if you haven't that's okay because you can go always go to our show notes page at shineandsucceed.com and you will find the show notes where we have all these numbers for you there.

To recap, you're going to look at your CPM, your cost per 1,000 impressions and you want to aim between $10 and $20 there. You are going to look at your cost per unique link click and anything between 50 cents and $2 is acceptable.

You're going to look at your link click-through rate, which should be higher than 1%. You're going to look at your landing page conversion rate, which you want at least 45% but aim for more and then you're going to make sure you run your ads at $25 a day for a minimum of three days.

Now, remember just like all those little clues I had to find inside my murder mystery game, it's not the micro games inside the game that matters most, it's finding the killer that matters.

Just like with ads, I want you to use these micro numbers to tell you the bigger story. Let it help you narrow down where the problem can be. But if you're happy with your lead cost and you're getting a good result, then you have no problem. Then don't mess with it and don't get too bogged down on finding clues for things that are actually working really well.

Now, I hope that that is going to get you started with your list building ads. I want you to go and create your own list building ads, get them up and if you don't know how, you can use the free five day video training we have to show you how to get your first list building ad up in just five days and you'll find that at shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. Or you can just go to the show notes of the show and you'll find that link there as well.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.