Facebook ads top of funnel message vs what you sell

I'm not going to pretend this went smoothly. This time last week I thought it was amazing, and then I hit a realisation that was hard to take: all those people who signed up, hardly any of them crossed the line, because they'd put in a fake card. That's the reality of it.

It makes you properly angry, because it's your own money going out the door on ads while this is happening. But I know what it's like building a business, and I've become successful in my own right from learning lessons, not from avoiding them. This one cost me, and it's fairly expensive, but I'm not giving up because I believe in it.

What it meant was going back to the drawing board on messaging. Not the product. Not the targeting. The words.

When the ad that's converting really well doesn't relay what the product actually is, you get exactly this. People see something that sounds good, sign up because it's a low-friction click, and a fake card is the honest version of that: it's someone who liked the ad enough to try, not enough to pay.

If I'm being honest with myself, the ad I was running, the one converting best, was top of funnel: you only get a small chance to impact someone with a message, and that message didn't relay to what Underway is. I'd looked over the fact it didn't align because it was performing. I thought, if they convert, who cares. But then they don't convert, and you go: wait, lesson learned.

Your ad says this. Your landing page says this. Your product feels like this. You might get synchronicity between two of those, but not all three, and that's what was happening to me. This is the lesson, if you're building something and running ads on it: write out, in one line each, what your ad promises, what your landing page promises, and what the product actually delivers the moment someone opens it. If the three lines don't read like the same sentence, that's your problem, not your ad spend.

This isn't a new lesson to me either. It's something I already knew, but when it's you doing the work yourself and not a marketer, you have to learn it yourself again, the hard way, with your own money. In our business, in sales and marketing generally, we come across this constantly: we run ads, we get loads of calls, really cheap calls, and you think this is great. Then they don't turn up. It's nearly always because the messaging is misaligned to what you're actually trying to achieve.

Cheap leads are a trap dressed up as good news. You run ads, you get loads of calls, really cheap calls, and then they don't turn up. It isn't a scheduling problem or a reminder-email problem. It's nearly always that the messaging promised something that doesn't match what the call, or the product, actually delivers.

The same test applies whether you're measuring leads, signups, or booked calls. A cheap number is only good news if the person on the other end of it is the person your product is actually for.

When I looked at what Underway is and the essence of it, yes, it helps you, it clips your videos together and puts a thumbnail on it. That's commoditised, lots of people do it. But the unique aspect of it is the whole it knows you. You need to document, and I've made that easy. That's what it is.

The ad that was performing well wasn't saying that. It was leaning on the commoditised bit, the clipping and the editing, because that's an easier, cheaper message to sell at the top of funnel. It just doesn't convert into a paying customer, because the person clicking it isn't the person who needed the thing Underway actually does.

Write your ad's promise, your landing page's promise and your product's actual first-use experience as three separate one-line sentences. Read them one after another. If a stranger reading only those three lines would describe three slightly different products, that's the gap.

Look at what's converting best right now and ask, honestly, whether it's converting because it's true or because it's easy to click. An ad that performs well on cost-per-lead can still be the wrong ad if the thing it's promising isn't the thing that makes people stay.

Separate the commoditised part of what you do from the part that's actually yours. For Underway that's the difference between clipping and thumbnails, which plenty of tools do, and knowing you from what you've connected, which is the part nobody else has. Lead with the second thing, even if it's a harder sell in three seconds.

This costs you real money before it costs you time. I was already running quite a few ads, paying for signups, before I noticed the ad converting best didn't describe the product. That's money spent on the wrong message, not a wasted afternoon.

This matters most if you're the one doing the work yourself rather than handing it to a marketer, because you don't get the benefit of someone else's distance from the product. You built it, so you already know what it does; the hard part is noticing when your own ad has drifted from that, because you're too close to see it drift.

It doesn't matter if your numbers are small. The lesson is the same whether you're running one ad or fifteen: a cheap, well-converting ad that misdescribes the product is worse than an expensive one that describes it correctly, because the first one spends your money buying people who were never going to stay.