Passive Income Streams Using Facebook and Instagram Ads with Natalie Anne Ads

Jeremy Deighan
What's up everyone, thank you for listening to the podcast today. I appreciate you being here. And I have a lovely guest with us, Natalie Anne Ads, who is going to dive us deep into the topic of running Facebook and Instagram ads. And I know this is such a popular topic.

It's a question I get very often inside of our community. And just as I conversate, with other course creators out there, and so I think this is going to be a really beneficial episode of the podcast. And I'm just pleased to have you on the show. How you doing, Natalie?

Natalie Anne Ads
Hi, Jeremy. I am super excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. This is going to be a lot of fun, I think you can give us a lot of insight into how to run ads properly, how to use them, you know, to grow your online course business, or your coaching business, or any kind of business really out there.

And then how we can use that to create maybe some passive income for our online courses. So this will be a lot of fun. But before we dive into some of the strategy, could you just take a moment and let us know a little bit about you.

Maybe what you were doing before you discovered ads, and before you got into online business?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, of course. Before I got into any online business, I was actually a bartender for over 10 years. And then I ended up getting pregnant with my daughter. And that kind of opened my eyes to showing me like, "Oh, I can't be a bartender forever if I actually want to spend time with my daughter and be there to put her to bed at night if I'm working like 12 hour nights."

So when I started my mat leave and got my mat leave, I started looking into ways to work online. And I started doing high ticket affiliate marketing, where I started learning how to run Facebook ads.

And the more I started doing this, I found myself spending all my time learning strategies on how to run the best Facebook ads on how to get the most profitable Facebook ads. And I spent more time learning about ads than actually doing anything else.

And there was a point there where I realized, "Hey, maybe I should just pivot my entire business and start something where I run ads for other people because there's a massive learning curve here."

And there's a lot of technical aspects that are hard to learn at the start. So that's how I kind of got into running Facebook ads.

Jeremy Deighan
Very cool. Yeah. It's interesting to you know, over the years, look at yourself, and what's performing and what's working for you. And then making those pivots. Sometimes it can be a little scary.

Other times they work out very well for you where you realize, like you said, you know, if I'm doing this mostly, and this is what people are coming to me for, then why don't I just restructure my business around that.

So it's a hard pill to swallow sometimes, because it can be a little scary, you know, changing your business model. But it sounds like it's worked out great for you. So that's awesome.

Natalie Anne Ads
Oh, yeah, it was it was definitely terrifying at first. I mean, even just starting my online business to begin with. I almost wanted to go back to bartending and then COVID happened and it wasn't really an option.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, I've been there before. I was doing online business for a while I'd been doing it for like four or five years. I've been doing on my business now for about eight years. And around the three or four year mark, I was just like, "I'm done with this. I'm going back to get a job. I can't take it anymore."

And then like I went back to work for like three months. And my wife was like, "You're done yet?" And I was like, "Yeah, I'm ready to come back and do my own business. I don't want to go back to the work force."

Natalie Anne Ads
Absolutely, there are times where I see like job postings, and I'm kind of like, "Oh, that would be nice." And then I really think about it and I'm like, "No, I can't. I can't do that."

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, I hear you on that one. Very cool. So, let's go ahead and talk about ads. So we'll start at the beginning and then we'll just work our way through and maybe we can start off with some, you know, beginner tips and then work to maybe some more advanced things later on in the interview.

So I guess the first question that I have for you is, when is a good time to start running ads? And the reason why I want to ask you this question is because it's a question I get often, or I see people struggling with ads, and I've seen both sides of the fence. Some people say you shouldn't run ads until you have a good converting offer that you know, is working properly, and then you want to run ads to it.

Other people say that you can start ads immediately. And it's going to give you a nice set of information to really judge what your audience is responding to. So from your point of view, if someone has an online course, and they're thinking about running ads, what would be your beginning advice for them?

Natalie Anne Ads
So there are three things that I look at when it comes to seeing if you're ready to start running ads. From my perspective, at least, I would recommend having a validated offer that you have sold previously.

Because if you run ads to something that you don't necessarily know people will buy, like you think people will buy it, but it hasn't been proven yet, you could end up wasting a lot of money. So you want to have that offer validated to know like this is something that people want to buy.

And I know that because it's proven to work in the past. Another thing is having a funnel or any type of strategy that converts well. So you can have an offer that is validated. But you need some type of strategy in place that actually sells that offer, that you can then amplify with ads.

Because if there's anything in that funnel that's broken, or if the strategy doesn't necessarily convert, well, then ads aren't going to make it any better. They're just going to amplify the fact that it doesn't work.

And the third thing that I recommend, which kind of goes in with everything else is to be generating consistent income in your business so that you have the budget for ads. Because you don't want to be in a spot where you're relying on your ads to be generating all your income. You want to be in a spot where you're generating good income, and you just want to amplify it, you want to scale it with that.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, very cool. Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. And I'm glad you're saying this, because this is something I've talked about with my own audience before, you know, the first part that you said that it's good to have a validated offer.

My analogy that I always say is if you haven't proven your offer, and it's not converting, and you tried to run ads to it, and you're not making sales, you don't know where the problem is, because you don't know, is it the ad? Or is it the offer? Or is it the landing page or the funnel?

But at least if you get an offer that's converting, you have the funnel setup, you know, it's making sales, like you said, then you turn on ads, and you can amplify that process. So I really respect that you said that, because I've said that before. And it's good to hear someone else say it. Very cool.

And then you know, your other point here. So you said you know, make sure you have a validated offer, make sure you have a funnel or strategy that is converting. And then also make sure that you are generating consistent income.

That's also refreshing to hear most people who talk about ads usually don't talk about organic or they don't talk about, you know, making sure that you're only relying on ads, it seems like people are on one side or the other.

And it's nice to hear you say that, you know, it's a strategy that helps grow and amplify your business. But you don't want to be solely dependent on that. So that's really cool that you said that also.

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, exactly. Because my main goal with my clients are to make their ads as profitable as possible. And in order to do so, your strategy has to convert organically because the ad isn't going to change your funnel or your offer.

Jeremy Deighan
So, let's talk about the different types of ads. And when I say different types, we have different funnels in our business that we can run ads to so you could have like a lead generation funnel that we wouldn't run ads to, you could have a low ticket offer that we could run ads to you could have a high ticket booking offer.

So do you run ads for all those different types? Or do you see one that you focus mostly on? And I guess my underlying question here is I've seen people run ads to say a lead magnet or you know something like that before should people be doing that or should we only be running ads when we're focusing on the main product of the business?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yes, so people should absolutely be running ads to a free lead magnet that's like a PDF or something small. The reason for this is because it is a cheaper way to build your audience in preparation for any free masterclasses or free challenges that you're having for a launch.

So, I typically like to run a lead magnet in the background or leading up to a launch so that you're building your warm audience with leads, and you're building your email list. So you can then nurture more people leading up to your launch.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, very good. Yeah, I was wondering about that, I've done all of them before, typically, with a lead magnet, you might be able to get a very low cost of conversion to get them to sign up. And it can be if you have the money to invest a very, like you said quick way to get people into your funnel immediately, which is pretty nice if you can afford to do so. Right?

So if someone comes to you, and they haven't run ads before, let's say that we have a course creator out there right now who's listening. And they've sold their course, organically.

They know that they have a nice little funnel setup that is making some sales or maybe it's an evergreen funnel that's helping you generate revenue. And they come to you and say, "I would like to start learning or start using ads for my business, what are the first steps that they should take?"

Natalie Anne Ads
So the first steps would be to set up your business manager on Facebook, if it isn't already set up. I mean, if you haven't run ads before it might not be and get your pixel onto your website as soon as possible.

I actually recommend people to have a pixel on their website long before they're ready to run ads. And the reason for that is because the pixel will then be constantly collecting data about who your audience is, and who has been on your website. So the longer that you have it on your website, the more data that Facebook has to work with to be able to understand who your audience is to then be able to deliver your ads to the right people.

And so there is a lot of technical things to set up in your business manager. So I do recommend either having a course or an ADS coach or having someone do it for you, and then developing a strategy that will work for your course. And when it comes to strategy, I like to start off with a very low cost strategy, like sometimes a video view campaign just to be able to test out different audiences if it is a business who hasn't run ads before.

So then they will be able to have a better understanding on which audiences to use without having to spend too much money. And then kind of working up in the campaigns to more expensive campaigns and then doing a campaign to a free masterclass. And then after the masterclass some retargeting campaigns.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, so the first thing that we want to do is we want to make sure that we're setting up our business manager, this is the part of the dashboard that's going to allow you to create ads and and build your creatives and so forth.

We're gonna get the pixel onto your website for anyone who's listening who has not run ads before is unaware, Natalie explained this. The pixel is a piece of code that you'll stick on your website, and is collecting data based on the people who are landing on your website, as she said, so that Facebook has that information.

And as you begin running ads, we it uses that pixel to narrow down your audience and find the perfect people for what you're trying to achieve. Then we figure out the strategy, usually starting with maybe a low cost ad campaign, where we're testing different audiences.

Then we work up to the more expensive campaigns and then we do retargeting. So the the technical things in the beginning, setting up business manager, getting the pixel on your site, I'm not going to focus too much on those right now. I believe that, you know, like you said, you want to have someone help you out with that.

I'm sure at the end of this segment, Natalie will have some great resources, maybe on her website that she can share with you if you need help doing that. But let's move into the actual creation of the ads and the strategy.

One of the first things that you mentioned is testing different audiences. So, I've run ads before and just for anyone listening, when you go into the ads manager, you have the option to set up different audiences and they can be based on demographics, the things they like the things they click on and so forth.

So how do we test different audiences? Is it better to test individual specific audiences? Or is it better to clump multiple types of audiences into one what what is your thoughts on that?

Natalie Anne Ads
When it comes to just testing audiences, I typically rent it to either a video view campaign or a free lead magnet, something that's low cost. And it's not a conversion campaign so that you're not wasting money testing out what's working or not.

And it depends on your budget. So when it comes to creating the audiences, that is actually a very lengthy process, it takes me at least an hour to do all usually longer to do all the audience research when it comes to figuring out which interests to actually use for a specific client.

But once you have those interests, you can kind of play with them and see what the different audience sizes are. And depending on the budget, I like to test at least three different audiences at a time.

So three different ad sets, and test them against each other to see what kind of performs the best. And when it comes to using like either one interest or clump of interest. It really depends on the size of audience within these interests, because some interests are going to be like 100,000, and then some are going to be like 100, for example.

So it really depends on the size of them to understand if you're going to clump more together or just use one.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, do you have a minimum that you try to aim for?

Natalie Anne Ads
It used to be around 1-3 million where I would aim between but now it's, since Facebook has released some new updates, where they actually prefer more broad audiences. They do prefer larger audiences now.

So it's hard to say exactly where but around 10 million, like, you really just have to test it out and see, because these updates have been rolling out quite often. And things are changing constantly. So I don't like to say a specific number. But seeing like the broad data behind it.

Jeremy Deighan
Gotcha. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's an important part of ads is the testing, right? But it's good to hear it's a larger number. So if you're putting in an interest, and it's only got like 10,000 or 50,000 audience size, then you're probably going to add some more interest to that to bulk that up to a higher audience, correct?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay. Just wanted to clarify that. Now, when you said that you spend about an hour an hour doing audience interest research before you even dive into the ads? What does that process look like? What are you using? And how are you doing that research?

Natalie Anne Ads
When a client signs on to work with me, I give them an in-depth targeting questionnaire to fill out, which has a whole bunch of questions about their business and their ideal clients and things about their business and their ideal client.

Basically, once they're done filling that out, and I get it back from them, I take all the information in there, and I put it into a Google Doc and kind of sift through it, I go through the ad set level of your campaign. And then I enter some of these interests in to see if we can even use them.

Because there are only certain interests that you can target within Facebook. Once that is narrowed down. I then research similar interests to the ones in there, and then do some more research on like businesses that are similar to my client and like things that their ideal client would be interested in, etc.

And there's a lot of just like Googling and seeing, is this something that they hit their ideal client with? Like, yes, no, okay, put it in, go into Facebook, see if it actually can be targeted. So it is a whole process.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, so you're first starting out by getting the information from your client, which is pretty awesome. So if someone's listening, they might want to take a moment and write down all the interest is that your audience would be familiar with.

So if it was a sport, maybe it's you know, top companies top brands top, you know, celebrities in that sport, that kind of stuff? Is that what you're talking about?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, for my coaching clients, the people that I coach with ads, I recommend them to, if they don't already have an ideal client avatar to create one and then write down everything ask as ask yourself as many questions about this person as you can think about, where do they shop? Where do they spend their time online? What do they like to do? What are their hobbies etc.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool. Cool. Yeah, that makes a lot sense. So we're taking those interests, we're putting them into the ad set. And Facebook is now going to use that information to go out and try to find those people. Now, when you say that you try to run, say, three ads at a time, how are you separating those ads out?

Are you doing it by demographics or specific interest? Or like, let's use me, for example, you know, I'm in the online course space. And I know that I might want to run ads to people who like Gary Vaynerchuk or Tony Robbins, or Russell Brunson. So what I run those three people as individual ads, or would I put them all together?

Natalie Anne Ads
They would be three separate ad sets. Okay. So the kind of like the hierarchy of the campaign is that the campaign is your kind of goal. And then within that, you have your ad sets, which are the the audiences, and then within your ad sets are all your different ads.

Typically, each ad set has all the same ads within them, just duplicate it over? If that makes sense. I just wanted to clarify that. But when it comes to actually like what type of audiences to like, split out, when you're just testing in like, a cheaper campaign, I test out, yeah, different types.

So I would go by category sometimes. So like, sometimes it'd be like influencers, just playing interests, and maybe publishers, etc. Like I kind of clump them into different categories and untested that way. And sometimes we'll just have like, one that's completely rogue with a bunch of different ones.

And when it comes to like the campaign for the free webinar, or a free challenge, then I would have ad sets where it's like the interest but I will also include ad sets where it's your warm audience. So basically retargeting and then also look alike audiences.

Jeremy Deighan
So we've set up these ad sets we have these audiences and interests set up. And then the next thing that we need to do is to do the creative. So the actual ad itself, for anyone who's unfamiliar with the term, this is what the ad looks like, and how it's written and so forth.

So what are some tips or strategies that you use when we get into the creative aspect after we've set up all these interest and audience insights.

Natalie Anne Ads
So before you get into even starting any creative, I highly, highly, highly recommend to go into Facebook advertising policies, and read all of that just to make sure that your ads are going to be compliant. And if you get any rejected ads, you can understand what changes that needs to be made to make sure that you're compliant.

So that is like the number one thing, go and read the Facebook's advertising policies. Because those are super important to have an understanding of if you're going to be running ads so that you're not breaking any rules.

And when it comes to the like actually creating them when it comes to the copy, obviously the hook is what matters the most. So the very first line of your copy, either dig into a pain point of your ideal client or just really grab their attention.

And then obviously at the bottom of your copy, you're you're going to want a called action. So that's kind of like a short version of that when it comes to the images/ video or GIFs. I like to kind of play around with it.

I like to test at least one video, at least one GIF. When it comes to, like testing, and images, I like to put a benefit driven headline on the image and kind of test it out without it and see what kind of performs the best.

Jeremy Deighan
So the first thing is checking out the advertising policies super important, because people get their ads rejected all the time. And they don't know why. And if you take a moment to go through there. They used to have like a little, like course, do they still do that? That kind of walks you through the process?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, it's, um, Facebook Blueprint. Yeah, they have a course on there. And it's a free course.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, if you're going to do this yourself, even if you're going to have someone else do this, it'd be beneficial to go go through that. Because if your ad start getting rejected, or your account gets shut down, you'll you'll know why that happened.

And then when we go to create the ad, so we want to have an attention grabbing headline or focus on a pain point, we need to have our call to action, which is going to lead them into the lead magnet or the online course or wherever we're sending them.

And then you test one image with a benefit driven headline, one image without and then one video and when GIF at the minimum, correct?

Natalie Anne Ads
At the minimum, yes.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay. And each one of those, let's say there's four that we're testing at the minimum is for one ad set. So if you're running three ad sets, you would have a total of 12 ads running at one time, is this correct?

Natalie Anne Ads
Correct.

Jeremy Deighan
I've run ads quite a bit. So I kind of understand a lot of what you're saying, I know some people in our audience has probably never even ran an ad before. So I just want to make sure that I'm kind of breaking it down a little bit and making sure I'm clarifying with you so that we can help those people who want to try this out. So we test these ads.

Now comes the golden question. How much money should we be testing with? I know this is going to be the next thing. If you have 12 ads running? How much money do you put behind them.

Because this is where a lot of people fail is they don't feel like they test enough and spend enough money to really get a good data set. And I think this goes back to what you said in the beginning is make sure that your business has enough cash flow to pay for ads, because again, you don't want to be solely dependent on them.

So yeah, if you could give us any tips or advice on how much we should be spending or what we should be looking for, that'd be great.

Natalie Anne Ads
So, when it comes to budget itself, it totally depends on so many different factors that it's hard to like you can't really just put a number on it and say this is how much I'm gonna spend with ads.

Say I'm running a free masterclass for someone, and they've run this in the past organically, then I would take their conversion rates from their organic launches, and put them into this math that I do to figure out their budget. So say their goal is to make $10,000 in a launch.

And their course is $2,000. That means they have to make five sales. I'm making this easy for me. So I don't/ They need to make five sales on the master class and say that their conversion rate on the master class is 10%. So that means they need at least what 50 people on that show up to the masterclass right, and say their show up rate was 25%.

That means that they need at least 200 people to sign up. So then we do the math there. And we kind of work out what the average cost per lead would be in their industry, because this can vary completely. But let's say it's $10.

Just hypothetically, that means they know they need to spend $2,000 on ads to make their 10 grand in their launch. So that's how I work out the budget when it comes to like free master classes that lead into a launch when it comes to what after you press publish and seeing like, is this working or not.

You do have to give time for Facebook to collect the data before you just freak out and turn things off. I typically like an ad run at least three days before or I even touch it. So that Facebook has time to collect that data.

And especially these days after the iOS 14 update, the data comes through later than it typically does. So you need to accommodate for that time to have the data completely come through and for Facebook to understand who wants to see this ad.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, yes, this makes a lot of sense. We won't go through the numbers. But if anyone is listening to the podcast, and didn't get a chance to go through those numbers, I do provide a script on the show notes of this episode.

So at the end, grab the episode number, head over to that episode, you can go down and read the script, and you can listen back to all the numbers that she gave here and see the calculations there.

So yeah, three days, that's typically what I think I've seen in the past three to five days is a good enough time to start judging, you know, if this ad is performing or not. So what are some some metrics or what are some things that you look at to see if the ad is doing well, or if it should be turned off?

Natalie Anne Ads
Well, one of the first things that I look at is the link click through rate. So that is the number of people who have clicked on the ad, compared to the number of people who have seen the ad, I like this to be above 1%, at minimum.

And if it's lower than 1%, it's showing me that something needs to be changed within the actual ad. So I will work on the creative change up some of the copy or change the imaging depends on what's going on in there, what I feel like needs to be changed to get that click through rate to increase.

And if the click through rate is above 1%, then I look at the landing page conversion rate, the landing page conversion rates is the number of people who have opted in compared to the number of people who have landed on that page. I like this number to be above 30% at minimum.

And if it's lower than that, then that shows me that the ad is doing its job. But there's something going on, on the actual landing page where they're not converting. So that's when I will work with my client to kind of say give them suggestions on what changes could be made to increase that conversion rate.

Another metric that I like to look at is the CPM. So that is cost per 1000 impressions. This is kind of showing you how expensive your actual audience is. So if your audience is super expensive, it could be driving up your costs.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, very good. So we have our link click through rate that shows us how well the ad is doing itself. We have the landing page conversion rate to see how well our landing page is converting.

And then we have our CPM or cost per million to see how expensive the audience is that you're actually going for that CPM. How expensive the audience is, if it's a really expensive audience, like what what would you do to adjust for that?

Natalie Anne Ads
It depends.

Jeremy Deighan
Charge more?

Natalie Anne Ads
So it depends. If the ad is doing well, and if I'm happy with the cost per lead, cost per conversion, then I would just leave it. But if that audience if that CPM is really driving up your costs, then I would change up the audience.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, okay, cool. Go back to the audience and do some more testing and see if you can find another audience where we can get that number down?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool. Final questions here is, if you could just briefly describe for anyone who's kind of new to this, you know, what is you mentioned retargeting and look alike audiences and some of these fancy terms that we've never heard of before.

So could you just briefly describe like, what is retargeting? How does it work? And then how does running a look alike audience fit into that kind of plan?

Natalie Anne Ads
Yeah, of course. So retargeting has to do with your pixel. So your pixel collects data from your website. So with retargeting, you are able to run ads to anyone who has landed on your website at all.

You can also retarget to anyone who has interacted with your Instagram account, or your Facebook page and you can retarget anyone on your email list. So these retargeting ads are super valuable because this is your warm audience. They already know who you are.

Sometimes they've already purchased from you. So these people who have already seen your brand before are more likely to make a purchase from you. They have already built that know like and trust factor.

And when it comes to look alike audiences, it's basically what it sounds it's look alike audiences of your warm audiences. So you can create an audience of anyone who's been on your Instagram account in the past 365 days.

And you can create a look alike audience of that to be a bunch of people who are super, super similar to everyone in that audience. And it's the same with all the other audiences alike. You can create an audience of your entire email list. And then you can go ahead and create a look alike of your email list.

So you have this awesome audience who is exactly like the people on your email list, but they don't actually know who you are yet. So I find it just like such a valuable tool that Facebook has implemented into their advertising platform, which I think is super cool.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, those are, that's when you really get into the really cool, fancy techniques and things that can really drive great conversions. Because you can do so many, like you said, neat things with it, it can be based off your email.

If you have videos on your page, you can do it based on people who have watched those videos. So you know, know that if they're watching the video, you've built a little relationship with them, and they might be warm and ready to buy.

So yeah, this has been great. Thank you for all this information. I feel like I could ask you 100 more questions about ads. And I'm sure that our audience wants to know a lot more about running ads and how to do it for their business.

So if people just had more information that they wanted to know from you, where can you send them online to just help them out.

Natalie Anne Ads
So you can find me on Instagram @NatalieAnneAds. I also have a free Facebook ads checklist for building your email list completely on autopilot. You can either find that link, like in my bio on Instagram, or you can find it at natalieanneads.com/free-ads-checklist.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool, we'll make sure that we also linked that up in the show notes, along with any other resources that were mentioned today.

And Natalie, this has been great. I know that everyone listening, we got a little technical with some of this stuff. But go back and listen to it two or three times if you have to. I do provide the scripts on there.

And I'm sure that if you you know reached out to Natalie on on Instagram or through her website, she can be more than happy to talk with you about your ads and maybe how she can help you.

So thank you so much today for all this great information and knowledge that you have provided for us. And I just hope you continue to have great success in the future.

Natalie Anne Ads
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.