Backend sales plummeted, and my stomach churned as I watched the numbers decline day after day.
The client, understandably panicked, wanted to stop the ads and fire the agency. But the COO convinced her to run ads for another month where we improve our metrics and bring back the good days.
After much convincing and back and forth, she finally agreed to keep running the ads for the next 4 weeks. But she slashed our ad budget by more than 70%.
Suddenly, I felt the weight of the entire campaign—and perhaps my career—on my shoulders.
Every morning, I woke up with a knot in my stomach, dreading to check the ad performance. The fear of failure consumed me. What if I couldn't turn this around? Would I be known as the media buyer who lost a crucial medical education client? The thought of letting down not just the client, but potentially impacting the quality of healthcare through our training, kept me up at night.
- Dramatically reduce the spiraling CPL
- Secure high-quality leads that would convert to sales
- Rapidly diagnose and fix the cost issue before it was too late
- The clock was ticking, and I could feel the client's trust slipping away with each passing day.
Market Insight Epiphany: Obviously I wrote more new ads. But nothing worked. The copy was great, the creatives looked amazing that could stop the scroll, and based on the previous data with this client and this industry, I was writing the perfect ads and designing the perfect creatives.
But still the lead cost wasn't coming down. And another problem was, the leads that I was bringing in, the feedback loop was slow.
That is, we only had 1 live webinar a week, so even if I spent more to bring leads, I only had one shot --- 1 webinar a week --- to see if my leads bought the backend product. So the leads that came in with these new ads I wrote, they didn't buy at all.
This is where I realized that the market has shifted.
According to Eugene Schwartz, there are many different awareness levels to the market. I looked back at my previous controls, I was primarily writing product and solution aware ads.
I felt as we churned through the entire Top of the Funnel market – that we circled around the Most aware, product aware, and solution aware market.
I noticed that none of the ads I wrote were targeting problem aware people. I pursued this idea.
Pivot to Problem-Aware Audience: With renewed hope, I crafted new ads targeting problem-aware prospects.
Creative Testing: Racing against time, I poured my energy into testing emotionally engaging images. Every day felt like walking a tightrope, balancing between innovation and the fear of further failure.
For the first week of running these problem aware ads, I saw no lift in the number of leads or reduction in lead cost. Another webinar came and went by no major movement on the ads front, BUT we did get a few backend sales.
After about 7 days, I saw lead cost decrease from $5 to $3. Then a couple days after, I saw a CPL of $1.8 then CPL of $1.5 then a CPL of $1. I knew I've found the right audience, and the new control ads.
But the CPL wasn’t stable. So that was my next goal, to stabilize the CPL. And this is where I wrote new angles for ads, and designed more images that appealed to the Problem Aware market.
We achieved a CPL reduction from $8 to $2—a 75% cut that seemed impossible just weeks before.
Backend sales stabilized, consistently delivering a 4-6X ROAS.
The client's trust renewed and which brought me professional validation. And this case study became a testament to perseverance in the face of adversity.