Great Cost Per Lead But Still Not Making Any Sales With Your Facebook Ads? Read this.

What Do You Do When Your Facebook Ads Cost Per Lead Looks SUPER Good, But You Still Aren’t Making Any Sales? 

If you’ve been pulling your hair out asking yourself this question, you’re not alone. Running Facebook ads and getting great Top of Funnel (TOF) results without any sales to show for it is an issue that many people are struggling with, and it’s one with a couple of possible solutions.

First of all, let’s define what Top of Funnel, or TOF, really is. It could be a webinar, a PDF, a MasterClass or whatever constitutes as your initial touchpoint with new users in your audience.

Secondly, let’s figure out what a good Cost per Lead, or CPL, looks like. A good CPL can cost anywhere from $1 to $8, depending on your industry and the price point of your product or service. It’s important to understand that the cheapest CPL doesn’t always guarantee success. Just because you’re saving money by bringing in leads at a low cost doesn’t mean that every lead, or even most leads, are going to be high quality. You can have all the $1 or less leads in the world, but if no one is buying, your campaign wasn’t a success. 

This is especially true if you are selling a high ticket item that costs $2k or more. And actually, if that’s the case then you have a lot of room to spend more money and bring in higher quality leads at a higher CPL, which have a higher chance of converting! Remember, the lowest CPL at TOF doesn’t always win or spell success.

Now let’s address the problem. You’re getting a great CPL at your TOF (#marketingacronyms — ya with with?), but you’re still not making any sales. What’s the issue? And more importantly, how do you fix it?

When this happens, the issue often lies within one of two areas. Either there is something off with your audience (possible) or something off with your funnel (more likely).

Examine Your Audience: Are You Attracting The Right People?

If you have a low CPL but no sales, there’s a chance you’re attracting the wrong types of people or the wrong quality of people into your funnel. Maybe your CPL is low because this audience loves your free stuff — but doesn’t have the means or resources to become paid customers; meaning you’ll never turn a profit on your ad spend.

This is one of the first things I would look at. Check your audience and consider adding modifiers to your targeting (e.g. college educated, affluent zip codes, affluent interests, etc.) to ensure the people you are paying to reach are actually top quality leads!

Check Your Funnel: Does It Make Sense? Is Your TOF Content Actually Valuable?

When there’s an issue with your funnel, it’s usually not because you don’t have the shiny new sequence from ClickFunnels or that your email sequence is missing some magic ingredient.

Rather the issue is more often a big picture thing: that the steps you’re trying to walk people through (i.e. your funnel, or your customer decision journey) are not the steps that someone would actually take on their own.

Basically, the customer decision journey you’ve outlined doesn’t match up with how someone would naturally go from not knowing who you are to wanting to buy from you. You’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. (#notgonnahappen)

To get a little more tactical, ask yourself: Is your TOF content actually valuable? Sure, maybe you’ve put together a webinar, a PDF, or a MasterClass — because that’s what everyone else was doing. 

But is your TOF offer something that people want? Does it naturally move them to the next step in your funnel?

And how about your email sequence and/or retargeting ads? Are you giving this audience a chance to get to know you, understand what you do, and learn something that they can benefit from?

A Deeper Look Into Your Funnel

A funnel issue could also mean there’s potentially a bottleneck that can be solved with FB custom audiences and retargeting ads.

For example, many coaches often use a traditional Webinar to Sales Call funnel. Broken down, the aim is to drive ad traffic to a webinar registration page and encourage users to register for a webinar. The next step is for them to actually watch or attend the webinar. But this whole system breaks down if the users who opted in don’t attend the webinar, because then they can’t move to the next step—booking a sales call.

We can solve that issue using FB custom audiences and retargeting. How? We simply run a replay ad retargeting anybody who has ever registered for the webinar, and link them to a static replay page that won’t expire (more people actually seeing your content and experiencing YOU, trumps deadline funnels and InfusionSoft timers, ALWAYS). This ensures that the content is super accessible. These users can watch the ad whenever is most convenient for them without any time sensitive limitations.

Using this tactic, we guide people through the funnel and can fix any bottlenecks that would otherwise have the funnel break down.

Long Story Short…

So, what do you do when you have a low CPL in your TOF but aren’t making any sales? Check your audience, check your funnel and check where you can use and leverage Facebook custom audiences and retargeting ads to plug any holes that funnel might have. 

Need help turning your Facebook Ads into a revenue-generating machine (and not just a TOF success)? Click here to apply for a FREE Facebook Ads Audit with yours truly.