John Parkes, Vice President of Traffic at ClickFunnels, who runs half a million dollars in ad spend per month, has a highly effective and simple one page ad formula and a method to make your retargeting ads last forever. What if you could have sales rain down upon you like cats and dogs?

John likes to use the analogy of cats and dogs. Dogs are fast, they are loyal and efficient. Cats on the other hand are different, they are curious, cautious and flighty. They hunt and are so focused, but as soon as they hear a noise, they take off. They also get bored really fast.

Ads are easy enough, right? There’s engagement ads, video ads, story ads, dynamic ads, gifs, content ads, etc. Yikes! Don’t worry, John has cracked the code for you, he says there are only two kinds of ads – prospecting ads and retargeting ads.

Prospecting

Prospecting ads are when you are attracting brand new people. This is for people who are looking for solutions to problems, they are like cats. You need to think of them as cats because they are skittish and run away if they think anything is off. If there is anything incongruent in your ads, if there is anything that looks off or weird, they go away.

The other thing about cats is that they get bored and need variety. The #1 secret to scaling your ad spend is to put more ads out. Also, the more variety you have, the more hooks you have, the more you can figure out which one is working, the more you can hit the same person from various angles. Too many of us find our favorite ad and stick with it, but you should always be testing with options.

Your people are curious, they are interested. Why do videos go viral? People want to know what’s up because people are sharing. That’s why curiosity works. Don’t scare the cats off – be congruent and make sure you have some variety. They can successfully feel like they are on the hunt and bought the right thing. Remember, these audiences are curious, easily tempted, easily scared and quickly bored. 

Retargeting

Retargeting ads – this is you taking people to the next level of conversion. When done properly, these will account for the bulk of your success. 

Think of it like dogs. Speed is a big requirement for this. Retargeting is like the dogs are after it, not the cats. You’ve got to keep the retargeting windows short. People keep retargeting windows for 90 days and they wonder why it is not working. There’s no way people will remember it 90 days from now. 

Loyalty – if they stick around, you keep moving them up. Tom Breeze talks about this, he calls it “the naughty list”. If they are looking at your ads for a while and don’t take action, exclude them and don’t run ads to them anymore, put them on the naughty list. If they click through and go farther, keep them. 

Efficiency – use the right campaign objection. Every penny counts, we need to make sure every dollar we spend goes towards the right kind of buyer. One way to be inefficient is by “double filtering” people. For example, when you require that they opt-in on your website, then they see your sales page before they move further up the funnel, you already have a significant amount of filtering. So you don’t need to pay Facebook to help you to “filter” anymore, you are increasing your costs if you are paying for that extra filtering.

If you have a campaign objective that’s really picky, for example, you only want to purchase conversions, that’s saying you only want the 10% off the top. If you have already super filtered your audience, why are you not saying you want to know who they all are. You want all of them and you want them cheaply. Save that for prospecting.

If you want to be efficient, choose someone in reach, where you are asking to show it to everyone on this list as cheap as you can. With efficiency, you get to choose how frequent, you can say you only want one impression per day, that audience only lives for 5 days, and so the most they will ever see it is for 5 days, cutting down on your ad spend. 

It’s simple, if you spend less money, your costs go down and your results go way up.