We Analyzed $1 Million In Sales. Here's What's Working.

Advertising can be such an emotional roller coaster.

Lately, I’ve been seeing lots of business owners, marketers, and advertisers complaining about the HORRIFIC results they’ve been getting on Facebook. I read this morning about how a marketer (who many of us know) has seen ROAS drop to a .8 in campaigns that used to perform in double digits.

I have also seen this performance slip -- this Facebook ad crash -- others are talking about. But I am not as panicked as many others are.

Here’s why:

After a failed attempt at using Facebook to generate traffic (not conversions), I knew that the algorithm was more than broken -- it was dead. How do I know this? We have a series of Top of Funnel ads that are historic winners for driving cold audiences to our website. I am talking about MILLIONS of people over the last several years. These ads and campaigns are suddenly completely ineffective.

They went from rockstar status to a corpse in just a few months.

Campaigns that once drove 14-22 ROAS (from cold audiences) are now getting .06 to 1.1 ROAS. This begs the question, have we spent so much on Facebook that they’ve run out of new, cold, fresh eyeballs to serve ads to? No! And I don’t believe the machine is broken either... I think it’s something many predicted years ago but ignored.

Facebook has become a Red Ocean due to the massive flood of big brands, CPG, and other advertisers with endless budgets and no need for reporting metrics.

Yes -- the small business owners are getting their budgets destroyed and returns damaged by big brands pouring endless money into the Facebook advertising machine.

 Facebook has become a Red Ocean. And for some... a Dead Sea, because your campaigns simply die there.

So, how do we combat this?

For me and my business, it is all about diversity and brand reach. I looked at the market trends and consumer behavior and made a decision to shift our ad dollars into multiple channels. In no particular order, we now have campaigns running on the following platforms.

  • Twitter

  • YouTube

  • LinkedIn

  • Facebook

  • Instagram

  • Google

  • Email

What works? All of it, none of it, and some of it. What?!

It all works, but they all perform differently. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses, but all are solid and fairly predictable -- except Facebook. It is the outlier in terms of performance issues.

Using our last 1 million in sales revenue, I decided to dig in and find the most profitable revenue streams for us. They are listed in descending order:

1. Organic - 451K
2. Direct - 418K
3. Referral - 156K
4. Social - 150K
5. Email - 40K

Now the fun part: let’s break apart the social category to see which of them converts best. You may be as surprised as I was.

Our highest conversion comes from…

Twitter!

I know, right? Twitter converts into sales at a rate of 9.27% from cold traffic. After Twitter comes the following:

Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
LinkedIn

So if Facebook is no longer driving sales the way it used to for you, it might be time to diversify your ad spend and dip your toe in a new ocean, preferably a blue one.

I hope this helps you on your marketing journey. Let me know your thoughts!

P.S

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Creative Advertising, Honesty, Sales, AdsKen 'Spanky' Moskowitz