How ad targeting wrecks conversion rates even when you have great copywriting

If your ad targeting is out of whack, your funnel conversions will absolutely suffer. Yep, even if you’re doing everything right on the copywriting side. Here’s why:

Transcript:

If your ad targeting is out of whack, your funnel conversions will absolutely suffer, even if you’re doing everything right on the copywriting side.

Hi, I’m Paige. I’m a conversion copywriter, and right now, I’m optimizing a lead-gen funnel for a client who sells a high-ticket investment product.

Now, the funnel I wrote for this client is outperforming the original funnel, but it’s not quite yet seeing the results that we expected to see, and there are still some metrics we’re looking at improving.

Here’s how this funnel works.

It starts with an ad that leads to a webinar-style training, which leads to the opportunity to book a call to speak to my client. There’s also a series of follow-up emails for people who watch the webinar, but then don’t book a call.

So, we actually have 2 conversion events for this funnel.

The first one is on the front end when someone signs up for the webinar, and the second one is on the back end when they schedule their free call. It’s converting extremely well on the front end, but not as good on the back end. So, I’ve been digging into the data to see where we could continue to optimize.

The primary hypothesis that I have at the moment is:

Because this is a high-ticket investment product, we are likely attracting people into the funnel who are interested (and we know this because they’re actually signing up for the webinar, and they’re being pulled in by the messaging that we have around the investment product)… So they’re interested, but my hypothesis is they just can’t afford it because it is so high-ticket and has a minimum investment amount of $100,000+.

This investment/pricing mismatch is something my client is also hearing on some of his sales calls.

Now, keep in mind, that we’ve already solved for this through copywriting inside the funnel. We’re very clear on what the minimum investment is and what the average investment is to see any results from this investment product.

But still, we’re potentially getting a lot of people in the funnel who just aren’t a fit for that level of investment.

Now, how much money someone has to invest is not something we can really solve for with our copywriting. They either have it or they don’t.

But what we can influence is who we put our messaging in front of.

Which means:

If we’re seeing a lot of pricing objections, and the root cause of those pricing objections is that, fundamentally, we’re attracting people who just don’t have the level of investable assets that they need in order to take advantage of this product, it’s really a traffic problem.

And so that’s what I discovered when I dug into the data was that the way that the ads were targeted was not in alignment with whom we were trying to attract into the funnel itself.

Even though the funnel was converting on the front end, it wasn’t converting that well on the back end, because even though we were pulling in people who would be interested in the investment product and what it could do for them, they just weren’t the right fit because they didn’t have the right level of investment.

Modifying the ads to put our messaging in front of a more relevant pool of people is likely to improve the results for this funnel, even though we don’t change anything on the copywriting side.

Which goes to show:

Even if you have great messaging, if you put it in front of the wrong people, your funnel is not going to perform that well.

The quality and, better said, the fit of the traffic that you’re sending into your funnel matters a lot.

To get any of your campaigns to convert, you have to put the right messaging in front of the right people.

So if you have a funnel or a campaign or a user flow that’s just not converting as well as you want it to, and you know it’s built to your ideal buyer, and you’ve done that research, you have data to support your decisions, and you feel like you’re doing everything right, then it’s time to look at…

  • your lead sources,
  • your traffic sources,
  • the way you’re building your email list…

depending on how your campaign is set up, and evaluate whether or not you’re attracting good-fit or fundamentally poor-fit leads into your funnel.

On a side note, it could also be how you’re nurturing those leads when they first come into your world.

And as always…

If you’d like help getting to the root cause of your conversion problems and then figuring out what you need to change to fix them so that you can start seeing more leads, customers, and clients, we should chat.

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