Day: June 20, 2024

There’s no such thing as profitable ads. There are only profitable funnels

Micheal O'Neill

There’s no such thing as profitable ads. There are only profitable funnels

Here's what we have for you today

I might as well come straight out and say it. There’s no such thing as profitable Meta ads. As a Meta ad agency owner, that might seem like a strange comment. But the reality is there are only profitable funnels. This is especially true if you’re selling an online course and membership. Having helped hundreds of people launch and scale profitable Meta ad campaigns for digital products, the number one mistake I see people make is thinking their ads are the reason for poor sales. Here’s how I think about ads and funnels.

Your ads are just the start of the journey

The purpose of the ad is to buy you 5 seconds of attention. The goal of an ad is to deliver a potential buyer to your landing page in the right frame of mind. The goal of your ad is not to sell. The goal of your ad is to capture attention and generate enough desire that the person is willing to invest in finding out more. Your ad has done its job if your prospect lands on the first step of your funnel with excitement and an open mind.

Your funnel determines your profitability

Your funnel does all the heavy lifting and selling of your course or membership. The best ads in the world can’t overcome a low-converting funnel and offer. While your ads can attract more people at a lower cost into your funnel, your offer conversion rate will ultimately determine your profitability. This is true whether you are running an evergreen offer or stacking leads for a live launch. Spend more time optimizing your funnel than you do optimizing your ads.

Focus on conversions not vanity metrics

One of the best ways to ensure profitable ads is to make an offer immediately. Making an immediate offer, let’s optimize your ads and funnel for conversions. In this case, the only metric you need to worry about is profit on ad spend. You can forget about CPM, impressions, and cost per click. All that matters is sales. Taking this approach simplifies your optimization and reporting and gets you focused on the right metrics. Ads and funnels are two sides of the same coin. To solve one side, you must solve the other side. That’s why I always take a full-funnel approach with my agency clients. Because running awesome ad campaigns isn’t enough to build a profitable online business.
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What is Loss Aversion and how can you use it to increase conversions and sales

Micheal O'Neill

What is Loss Aversion and how can you use it to increase conversions and sales

Here's what we have for you today

Your customers are twice as motivated to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.

This means they will do as much to avoid losing $500 as they will to get $1000.

This principle is called Loss Aversion.

And I love using it in my ads, online course, and membership sales sequences to get people to take action.

If you’re anything like me you don’t like being negative.

But having generated over $10 million in online sales I’ve seen the power of Loss Aversion.

Here’s how to use it in your campaigns.

Why Does Loss Aversion Work?

The cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman coined the term loss aversion in 1979.

The principle is thought to be rooted in evolutionary psychology. When living on the edge of survival as a hunter gatherer the loss of a day’s food could cause death, whereas gaining an extra day’s food was less valuable when it couldn’t be stored.

But today we can use it to help our audience make a decision and take action.

3 Ways You Can You Use Loss Aversion

There are lots of ways to use loss aversion. From subtle nudges in your copy to the very structure of your launches and offers.

Here are just 3 of the main ways I use it.

#1 Amplify the Pain

Highlight the negative consequences of not taking action. Make it real for your audience by describing what they stand to lose.

#2 Frame Benefits as Losses:

Instead of saying, “Download your free guide” say, “Don’t miss your chance to download your free guide.”

This frames the benefit in a way that emphasizes the potential loss of not acting.

#3 Use Scarcity and Urgency:

Create limited-time offers and exclusive bonuses. People are more likely to act if they feel they might miss out on something valuable if they delay.

Think of Loss Aversion as a spice to flavor your copy and launches.

The tastier your dish the more your audience will dig in and buy your course or membership.

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What is CPM, why it matters and what it can tell you about running profitable ads

Micheal O'Neill

What is CPM, why it matters and what it can tell you about running profitable ads

Here's what we have for you today

If you’re running Meta ads, you’ve probably heard that CPM is a rubbish metric.

I disagree entirely.

Now, don’t get me wrong. At the end of the day, all I care about is Profit On Ad Spending.

AKA – how much is left over after your ad spend and your unit cost.

But CPM can give you a lot of valuable insights into your ads.

What is CPM?

CPM is Cost Per Mille or cost per thousand impressions.

It’s how much it costs you to get your ad in front of a thousand people. We can’t fully control CPM, but it does give us some important feedback. Now, Meta has never defined exactly how CPM is calculated, but with a little reverse engineering, we can figure out what it’s telling us.

And we can use this data to improve our ad performance.

What does CPM tell you?

Simply put, CPM is a combination of the advertising competition for your audience and how much Meta likes your ads.

Meta lives and dies by it ability to get people to come back to the platform as often as possible and stay for as long as possible. To do this it has to make sure it’s a nice place for it’s users. As ads are a big part of a users feed, Meta peanilises advertisers who’s ads don’t add value to the user experience.

That penalty is in the form of high CPM’s.

What to do if your CPM is high?

If your CPM’s are high it’s time to look at your ads and your funnel.

Refining your message and more importantly your creative is key to reducing your CPM. Also ask yourself the question – Does my target audience really want what I’m offering? If it isn’t a top of mind problem for your audience the chances are they aren’t going to get excited about your ads.

We can’t control how competitive the advertising auction is but we can control how engaging our ads are.

The key to successful ads is creating content that your audience finds useful and interesting.

Instead of focusing on you and your offer think about your audience and what they want and need.

This is a surefire approach to profitable ads.

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AI Agents: How to grow your online business on autopilot

Micheal O'Neill

AI Agents: How to grow your online business on autopilot

Here's what we have for you today

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been geeking out over AI Agents to automate as much of my business as possible.

Most people are on board with using AI for ideas and content generation.

But that’s just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

So, what is an AI Agent?

I look on AI Agents as a digital assistant I train to perform a specific task.

With a little imagination and a lot of process based thinking there aren’t many processes that AI Agents can’t assist you with.

Here are 3 ways I use AI Agents to grow my online business.

Use AI Agents to free up time for high-value activities

AI Agents are great at automating mundane tasks.

If you can define a process for a task, you can build an AI Agent to complete that task. This applies to everything from customer service to social media management and repurposing to data entry. Not only will this save you time, but it also ensures consistency and accuracy.

With the repetitive tasks taken care of, you and your team are free to focus on the big stuff, like lead generation, sales, and fulfillment.

Use AI Agents to simplify data-driven decisions

AI Agents can process lots of data quickly.

Whether that’s pulling data from your ad account and reporting on your best-performing creatives or analyzing member surveys to identify key pain points and frustrations, you can build an AI Agent to summarize and suggest your best next steps.

This is one of the areas I’m getting the most value from AI, especially after the launch of ChatGPT-4.o.

Use AI Agent to improve your customer’s experience

We need to be careful with this one.

There’s nothing more frustrating than talking to a Chatbot that doesn’t understand our problem. BUT we can use AI agents to give instant and real-time support 24/7. The key to making this a valuable experience is to give our customers the power to switch to human interaction whenever they want.

Watch this space. Customer service will be one of the first areas that Ai will truly revolutionize.

Remember we are still very early in the AI game.

It’s a matter of taking simple and consistent steps to integrating AI into your business.

But there are only two options.

  1. Sit back and wait until your competition forces you to adopt AI
  2. Embrace it and get early movers advantage
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The 3 lead levels and the one you need to profitability grow your online business fast

Micheal O'Neill

The 3 lead levels and the one you need to profitability grow your online business fast

Here's what we have for you today

I’ve been talking about lead generation for years, but I’ve just realized something.

I’ve never defined what a lead is.

Or worse still, the type of lead you need to grow your online course or membership fast.

Over the past few years, I’ve generated hundreds of thousands of leads.

But all leads are not equal.

So here are the 3 lead levels and the one you need to focus on.

Level 1 Leads – A person you can contact

A lead is anyone you can contact directly.

This means everyone in your phone book, friends on Facebook, and followers on Instagram. When you first launch an online course or membership, these people can be invaluable. But it’s impossible to scale an online business based on these people alone.

And remember, not all contacts are equal: phone no. > email address > social follower.

Level 2 Leads – An engaged lead

The next level up is an engaged lead.

Engaged leads have interacted with you and expressed interest in you and your content. These are people actively seeking a solution to a problem they have. These will typically be people who have given you their email address in exchange for a lead magnet.

Engaged leads are a step up from Level 1 leads, but they aren’t what you want.

Level 3 Leads – An engaged perfect fit lead

Finding engaged, perfect fit leads is the key to quickly scaling your online course or membership business.

Perfect fit leads aren’t just looking for a solution to a problem. They know, understand, and want “your solution” to their problem. They also have an urgent motivation to take action and solve the problem right now.

Every lead generation action you take is to find and cultivate these people.

Anytime I’ve seen lead generation go wrong, it’s because online business owners have generated too many Level 2 leads.

Every lead is valid. No one signs up for a lead magnet without some level of interest.

But if you want people to hit your list and buy, you need to focus on Level 3 leads.