What to do when Cost Per Lead spikes in a $3,000 per day Facebook ad campaign

In today’s video, my account manager Graham Connolly goes through one of our ad campaigns that suddenly spiked in CPL.

He talks you through step-by-step what he did to lower the costs and save the campaign.

If you are having issues with a sudden spike in CPL then you should check out this video.

Video Transcript

Hi guys. So today I thought I'd take you through a quick video regarding one of the problems we face as pay-per-lead marketers.

So it's basically what to do when your cost per lead spikes and we've got a real-world experience right now.

We just had it in one of our campaigns.

I just wanted to take you through how we solve that problem.

So just to show you, in the week the 6th to the 10th of July, it was all good.

Our target customer is about 15 pound we wanna get. We don't wanna go over that really.

This is when we were using our best ad probably but after this week, it got disapproved.

We had to try and find a new ad or new ads to try and bring that cost down.

Lemme show you, so the next week, cost significantly spiked. So it went up to about 18 pounds.

Let's see in here what's been...

So we had quite a few ads sets going and we were still trying to test at the same time.

There were a few good ones in there. But pretty much all of them were above our target cost per lead. So what I had to do then, you've kinda got to scramble a little bit. And let's try and get some new creatives up. And also audiences.

So audiences really helped us out trying to get the cost per lead down 'cause we go quite broad in this niche that we're in in there.

So we tried to introduce some new lookalikes, trying to just hit regions as well. If you've got a ad that is applicable to the whole of a country, you can still advertise regionally and change the ad copy to call out that region because in some instances, you can get cheaper traffic because you get put ahead of the broader campaign sometimes.

So it's good to test this kind of stuff. But basically, this week, it was quite an expensive week for us.

We were trying to figure out what we could do to bring down costs. And cost per click was quite high as well.

I think it was about two pound 06.

Normally, we would wanna see that under about one pound 50 for this niche.

So it was important to get to know your KPIs. So yeah, we knew it kind of wasn't a funnel problem per se.

We were still split testing some stuff on the funnel but the funnel had a pretty steady conversion rate but it was the ads that weren't getting cheap enough clicks.

So then the week after that, some of our changes started to work. Bringing it down slightly, still not enough.

We had to keep on working at it as we go into there and as you can see, there's some here that are getting quite good traction for cheap.

This was a new creative but we'd also brought in a few new interests. And some new lookalikes.

So I think it is really important when your cost per lead is spiking is to get new audiences in, as well as new creatives because sometimes it's just you've been showing your ads to one audience for so long, it's not getting that traction that it used to get and it's kind of burning out.

If you show that ad that's been working for you to another audience, you can check cost per leads again.

So yeah, so that kind of is what was helping us is getting the new audiences in, as well as a few new ads.

You can see ad eight, we brought in to try and bring down cost per lead, which worked.

There's a few Instagram ads there as well, which we were trying.

So it's another good way to doing it.

Is if you imagine you've got one ad and you're showing it to all of Facebook, quite a broad audience, sometimes it's quite good to get placement-specific ads.

So just then adjust an ad for say Instagram and Facebook Stories because then there's no real overlap with your other ads and you're just getting that one bit of kind of the heart of the market. And that has kind of helped us a little bit, especially if the offer's applicable to places like Instagram because you can still get quite cheap traffic on there.

So yeah, we did a lot of work last week on it and at the tail end, it started to come down.

I'll show you here.

So they come down by a good five pounds, under our cap-off point.

I'll actually show how it started this week. So again, we've brought it back down underneath what we wanted to be our target CPA.

But we're gonna carry on, always try and carry on to bring it down further because it's so many times where we thought we can't get cheaper leads than this.

I don't think we're gonna do better than this and then we find an ad, we find an audience and suddenly, it just revolutionizes your whole ad account. So we're gonna constantly work on this. Get new ads.

Try new audiences as well. Do your due diligence on like the ads library. See what's out there is working.

But it's looking a lot better this week and we're making a lot more money, which is always good.

So I think the main takeaways from this is to constantly be testing. And know that your tests aren't always gonna work.

As you can see in this one, this week, I've been testing some new stuff.

It's absolutely bombed, which is why I've turned it off and we're gonna go to the drawing board and try some new ads out. Not every ad you write is gonna be quality and I think it's important that you don't feel down if one of your ads don't work because some ads aren't gonna work.

That is a fact.

So you've just gotta constantly go at to the drawing board and just get those new creatives, get those new audiences.

Test it, and it will bring down your cost per lead. You will find that one audience or that one ad that will bring it down.

This is real-life audience.

It's been about a two-week process to bring back our cost per lead back to where we like to see it.

We're almost there.

We're definitely much better positioned than we were before.

But we still wanna shave probably about another two, three pounds off that CPA, which is we've seen on a daily basis but over the rolling four days, that's where you wanna be seeing that CPA that you want.

So yeah, so you've just gotta keep on plugging away and we'll get there eventually.

But just to show you guys, it happens to everyone.

But you can definitely bring down that cost per lead, okay?

Cheers, guys.