When an ad suddenly stops working, the last thing you want to do is panic and shut everything down.
- Get the 48-Hour Ad Fix Audit
I share with you the exact steps I take as an ads manager to figure out what’s actually going on—usually it’s something simple like comment management, frequency, or a weak hook.
These small fixes often bring an ad back to life without rebuilding anything from scratch. If you stay calm, take the right steps, and make data-driven tweaks, you can stretch your ad’s performance and save a lot of money.
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Please click here to give an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes! Thanks for your support!
Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:
- Get 1:1 Meta Ads Coaching from Kwadwo!
- Say hi to Kwadwo on Instagram
- Subscribe to The Art of Online Business’s YouTube Channel
SPEAKER_00:
So, you’re an online course creator who’s running Facebook and Instagram ads right now, and you’ve noticed that your ad or a number of ads have stopped working. Please don’t turn that ad off yet. You can do some of the following things to diagnose what is wrong with your Facebook and Instagram ads and get more life out of the current ads rather than burning the whole thing down and starting over again. So I’m gonna give you some very easy to follow strategies because I’m a Facebook and Instagram ads manager. Before we do that, though, here’s some context. I was talking to my kids, my son the previous day had freaked out and he was panicking. And I told them, do not panic. And they’re like, What’s panic mean, Quayo? And I’m like, panic is when you get scared and your brain does stupid stuff. Now, you, friend, obviously are smart, or you would not have already built a successful online course business, and you certainly wouldn’t have figured out how to get ads running successfully to, you know, one of the three pillars of an online course business ad, you know, structure, revenue, empire, which would be lead magnet ads or ads that are running to your repeatable launch that you do two or three times a year, be that a webinar, a workshop, a boot camp, a challenge, what have you, and the holy grail self-liquidating offer ads running to, you know, a low-ticket offer that costs between 27 and$30, and has an order bump and an upsell connected to that. So here’s how you figure out how you can rescue that ad that was working, that’s not working. Number one thing is are you managing comments on the ad? Check those comments and either delete comments, hide comments, or respond to comments. This is because people like to know that the course creator or the owner of the business is indeed alive and well and responding, right? And so they might leave positive or even neutral comments on the ad. If you respond to those, they’re like, this person exists, because we all have like this innate distrust of other folks who are online and saying they have the answer or trying to get our info because they say they have the answer. So respond to comments. Now, sometimes there can be negative comments, and negative comments lower performance. Just like a bunch of positive comments will lower your cost per lead or lower your cost per sale. Negative comments have the opposite effect. And so the number one thing is look at those comments. Now, number two, if there’s no crazy comments or your comment game has been on point, super strong, right on. We need to then start to look at some important ad metrics to see which has changed. And then we can decide what to do to change those current ads to fix that metric. Hi, my name’s Quayjo. I’ve been a Facebook and Instagram ad manager now for you know five-ish years at the time of the recording of this, which is at the end of 2025. Yeah, it’s been five-ish years, a little more. We could say six. I used to run ads for my own business incorrectly before 2020, and then I started working in an ad agency after the pandemic and or when it started, and then now I still run ads as my own boutique ad studio for online course creators. So I’m gonna look at the frequency because I can’t look at your ads right now and know how big of an audience you are targeting. The bigger the ad audience, the better. But if your frequency is high, then it’s quite possible someone could just be seeing that ad too many times and thus not responding to it because there that filter is going up in their brain. I’ve seen this before, it’s nothing new. No, I never actually opted into the lead magnet ad, but since I know it all and I’ve seen this thing, I’m not gonna click on it, right? You need to avoid that by adding in more ad creative because your ad already was working. So stick with the messaging and change up the design. You would be surprised how well this can work. Now, what if the frequency on your ads is not too high? And for just a point of reference, and this could differ a lot for your business, right? Here’s the disclaimer: I am an ad manager, I am not yet your ad manager. Just because I tell you things based on my experience does not mean they will work in your ad account. You should test these with a percentage of your budget to see if it works for your ad account. And if it doesn’t, turn off the test and try something else because the name of the ad management or advertising game is testing. Okay. This is not going to instantly make you money. You probably actually will lose money on Facebook ads at some point in time because ads is a testing game and not all TED tests go right. All right, now there’s a disclaimer. Oh, right. Frequency for a cold audience that’s pretty big, I don’t know, one and a half to two million. You would expect your ad frequency to be under 1.5, under two. If it’s above two in a cold audience, that’s pretty high. Maybe you should increase your audience size with targeting or add in some more ads. If you’re targeting a warm audience, you know, people that have visited your website, your Instagram and Facebook followers, the very warm audiences, then you probably don’t want a frequency above, say, three or four any higher than that. And people are seeing your ads so often, maybe it’s time to add in some new ad creative. Now, link click-through rate is another very important metric. Enable that in your ad management columns and then see if it’s at 1% or above. 1% is like bare minimum working okay, right? Below 1% is bad, above like 1.25% is great as a link click-through rate. And for definition, that’s just the percentage of people that see your ad that actually click on a link in your ad to go off the Facebook and Instagram platform and onto your website to opt in. Now, if that link click-through rate dropped, do the following in order. And I should tell you now, you might be like Quayo, I’m too busy in my business. It’s successful. I got a lot of things to do, and I don’t want to troubleshoot ads. Then go down below and sign up, buy an ad audit with me. In two business days, I will look at your ads and give you one, two, three steps that you can just follow in order to begin getting better ad performance. It’s that simple. I look at ads all the time and I would love to look at yours. That link is in the show notes below. Now, if your link click the rate has dropped, make sure that you do have a link in your description in your ad copy, right? Now, you probably want to update the first two sentences of your ad copy and speak to a different pain point and/or a different frustration of a strong pain point if you know that your pain point is really strong. Words matter tons in ads, maybe less so in like an Instagram real ad or Facebook real R-E-E-L ad, but still words matter. Words can attract the right people, and the words should line up with whatever you’re sending traffic to. Whatever’s on that landing page, your words should be somewhat similar. Okay. Now, you could also test a new headline. If you’re running an ad that’s going to an Instagram or Facebook feed, then the headline is that bold text that shows up just to the left of the blue call to action button, you know, the button that says buy now or learn more or sign up. Okay. You could test a new headline speaking, you know, in an intriguing way about the offer that you are promoting or presenting, or just speak to a different frustration or talk about the ad in a different way, right? Test a new headline because it’s the graphic or the visual part of that ad, especially on a feed like Instagram feed or Facebook feed, right? That people are scrolling through. It’s the graphic or visual part of that ad that works in tandem with the top two lines of the ad copy and the headline at the bottom of the ad to get somebody to expand the ad more and read it, or click through and go to your website. So you can get more life out of a current ad without scrapping it just by looking at those three different things and changing them up. And again, if you want my eyeballs on your ads because you would like to do less of the research and more of just getting the quick results, then that link is in this episode. Until the next time you see from me or hear from me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one. Or you’ll see me. We’ll see each other in the next one. Bye for now.
