This Advertising Mistake Cost Me Over 30k

Years ago, I would have strapped him to an office chair and shoved him down the steps into a tan car..

Leaving in the “tan car” meant you were basically fired when we had our office on Madison Ave. This was before I changed how I approach relationships, management and life in general. It was before therapy and major life changes.

I was a very fiery guy and probably extremely difficult for people to work with in many regards.

Recently, a team member made a mistake. It didn’t cost the company much, but it was an oversight on his part.

One of my team leads caught the mistake and brought it to his attention. He came to me directly and said he was depressed about his mistake, so I shared some wisdom and praised him for all the other things he’d done to help our company.

– The End —

Jk… It reminded me of all the mistakes people who worked for me made and how I reacted.

Employees will make mistakes. It’s going to happen. If you want it to keep happening, then make sure you freak out on them and frantically hire and fire people.

If you want to be broke and only make money when you work, then you don’t have to worry about other people making mistakes. Just fire your team and never hire anyone ever again. Your wish will come true.

And if you currently can’t find or keep good people then you’re strategy is broken.

One mistake in particular from the past stands out to me right now, and I want to make sure you or someone on your team isn't making it when scaling. It cost my company a small chunk of change.

As you may already know, I have an advisory business where I work with clients and their teams 1 on 1, a mastermind where entrepreneurs and their teams can work with me in a group setting, and I have an advertising agency. 

My client was working directly with my ad agency. We were on fire, spending budgets as high as 500k profitably over the course of 5-7 days for live workshops.

Every single one we ran did excellent until I got the call from a panicked media buyer. 

The results were terrible, and we only had a couple of days left.

I examined their work and found a mistake that many businesses and marketers make.

It will cause your CAC to spike, your ROAs to become abysmal and your lead quality to go to shit.

The creatives had been used too many times, and it wasn’t just “creative fatigue.” Most don’t realize that even if the creatives aren’t fatigued, if you use them too many times, the ad AI (specifically on Facebook) will form a bias against you. 

To the AI, you’re a bad advertiser who poses a threat. The idea here is that if you show buyer audiences the same stuff over and over, they won’t want to be on the platform, look at ads, or take action on ads.

The platform knows who the most qualified buyers are. So, not only could you be showing your current ads to your audience too many times, but the AI could also ‘think’ that you’re a problem and start showing them to lower-quality audiences. 

You can prevent this from happening by always putting 10% of your budget toward testing. You can also take your winning creatives and stretch them. Just update fonts, filters, colors, backgrounds, etc.

Managing this is very simple. 

Someone on your team will report on the testing budget percentage every day. Your media buyer will do an end-of-day report that mentions some of the recent tests, outcomes, and insights.

Your team will share a weekly bulleted plan for your account that includes what happened last week and what the plan is for this week. If we’re using a funnel where any kind of calls are conducted, the application quality percentage will also be reported on daily.

Sometimes, the cost of the target KPI stays the same, but the quality takes a nose dive, which is a sign of AI bias.

It can also indicate that data is not passing properly to your pixel or that there is an overall account problem. For example, someone on your team could be making organic posts that the AI doesn’t like, which can impact performance.

When this mistake occurred, I did not have this system. I had a great team, and we were on a winning streak. I just trusted them. So, it took several days to understand what was happening. 

By then, it was too late.

It cost us over 30k because we missed out on a performance bonus, and I also called to deduct money from our client’s next payments because it also cost them.

That being said, the client still made money.

It was just one of those mistakes I lost my cool over. I didn’t realize that people do make mistakes. Before that, my team was on a winning streak, and we were having our best months. If I could go back in time, I would have handled it differently. 

You fire over some mistakes, but when someone on your team goes above and beyond what they’re asked to do and makes your company millions of dollars 99% of the time you don’t throw them away when they have an issue 1% of the time.

So the lesson here..

1. Have a process where you can check things at a glance, even if you’re entirely out of the loop. This process will make your team self-manage with checklists and reporting, so if there’s a mistake, multiple people will immediately see it. Budget allocations for previous days should be shared every morning. Knowing that 10% of the budget was spent on testing the past seven days is key in this case.

2. If you plan on getting rich, you need people to help you. Hire the best, and when they make mistakes, have grace. We all make mistakes. When you’re forgiving and mentoring your people, they will appreciate it, it will help them grow, they will correct faster and in the end, you reap some of the financial rewards. They will go out and do good things in the world as well as a result. If you really want to impact the world, guiding your children and team the right way significantly affects that.

3. Ensure you have a playbook for requesting, testing, and stretching new creatives. Have your team put winning copy, audiences, and creatives in a swipe file for future projects and hires. The goal with testing is to prove the test is a winner so you have enough winning copy and creatives to scale. At higher budgets, they will fatigue faster, so you need more. If done correctly, your team will have a ‘conveyor belt’ system.

4. Use an issue log to track mistakes so that the same mistakes aren’t made repeatedly. An issue log will help you put systems in place and make decisions like firing someone for repeated mistakes due to negligence. Your team can manage this.

5. Have your tech audited regularly. Specifically, everything that helps your pixel and ad AI become smarter. This will help you get better cost and quality.

Over time, I have learned that losing your mind, blaming, and scolding doesn’t help people get better. They will make even more mistakes. 

They will be slow to implement out of fear of failure. They will always want your approval on things and make you the bottleneck.

Your employees will make mistakes that will cost you, yes even the really good ones.. (and so do your kids)

If they can take care of things that grow your business for you, and you can still scale and profit despite that.. Without working 80 hours a week wearing 100 hats.. 

…And you can go away for a month and all of that still happen? Then that’s the goal.

–Lance C. Greenberg