Facebook Ads Courses: Worst Strategies and Tactics Taught to Students

What I’ve found in many Facebook Ads Courses in general is that it looks like this; 95% of the course material is very basic “here’s how to make an ad” and “this is what a lookalike audience is”, “how to create a retargeting campaign”, “step by step: how to install your Facebook pixel” - stuff you can find for free through Facebook Blueprint Training.

The remaining 5% of the course is just a 12 minute video going over a couple of scaling strategies.

It seems like they want to have the benefit of saying “over 30 hours of video content!” when it’s cushioned with long videos of basic tutorials.

Going through courses that are structured like this makes it nearly impossible to improve your knowledge of Facebook Ads beyond anything more than a beginner level. I believe the best way to increase your knowledge of Facebook Ads is to do it yourself, and learn from hands-on experience, but that’s beside the point.

Sometimes as I am going through these courses, I’m thinking “why in the world are they teaching this stuff? Do they want their students to fail?” and this is just my speculation - I believe they benefit from people failing because if you fail then you feel an incentive to buy into the next thing to get more help. Or “Course 2.0” that’s more expensive.

Back in 2017 when I started running Facebook Ads, I learned how to from a few basic courses. Then I focused mainly on hands-on experience for the next couple of years before going through more courses. What I typically found was that I learned nearly everything in the courses by doing it on my own, and then some.

At this point I have over $310K in Ad spend experience, helping many businesses scale using Facebook Ads. I know what works and what doesn’t.

Now, a lot of these strategies taught in the courses make sense in theory, but in reality they have reasons why they don’t work. Online advertising in general is a very complex system that requires critical thinking and taking into account multiple data-points to see success instead of black and white or binary thinking. 

Here’s what I mean by that. Binary thinking would be “video Ads = good!”. Critical thinking would be “video Ads can be effective if they are high-quality, have a strong message, and are targeted to the right audience, but they might not work as well for every product or demographic.” It’s this kind of nuanced understanding that is often missing from these courses.

Let’s dive into the list of bad strategies taught in Facebook ad courses.

Bad Strategy 1

The first bad strategy I will cover is one about testing creatives. Going back to the binary thinking, what is taught in these courses is “highest CTR = best creative”. The bad strategy is to validate creatives by adding them into a traffic campaign first, then determining the winner by the one with the lowest cost per link click and/or highest CTR.

Where this theory falls apart is that you could have a video where the first 3 seconds is a cute dog, getting a high CTR and engagement rate. Then the rest of the ad is like “get a free car insurance quote”.

From personal experience, I’ve seen many times where the ad with the highest CTR is not the most profitable. And also running traffic campaigns in general puts very low-quality data into your custom audiences. So many reasons not to implement this strategy.

Bad Strategy 2

I often say this in my posts and even in my lectures too, when I launch a new campaign, I let it run for 5 to 7 days before making changes. The approach that I am seeing taught in courses is to make changes every 3 days to new campaigns, or all campaigns in general.

Here’s the reason why (from personal experience) I believe this is not a good strategy. There have been many times where after 2 or 3 days of a campaign running, it’s still not generating optimal results. Then around days 3 or 4, oftentimes closer to day 5, the campaign really starts to get better results.

To give you the shortened version of why I don’t recommend this; 3 days is too premature.

Bad Strategy 3

When it comes to structuring your campaigns, a general rule of thumb is to avoid spreading your budget too thin. It can cause elements in your campaigns to be less profitable than they appear. For example, if you spend 500 INR on a video ad, and it gets a 3000 INR sale, the ROAS on that is 6x. Binary thinking would be “This video ad is a winner” and critical thinking would be “It’s a good sign so far, but we haven’t spent enough on that one element to say that it is really a winning ad - it could be luck so far”.

The strategy that I’ve seen taught in courses (and I also got a message from an old business acquaintance last week saying he’s in a 2,25,000 INR course that is teaching this as well) is to have 20 different ad sets at INR 500/day each to test out 20 interests at the same time. The business acquaintance says he is not seeing good results from this and is doing better with more budget per ad set and less ad sets in general.

I could write a whole post on my thinking behind testing interests but to give you the shortened version of it - I prefer to test out 3 to 5 interests when launching new campaigns, and I diversify interest types so that they are not all the exact same. I’ll do something like 1st AdSet is just the actual product (hair oil, hair growth oil, etc.), the 2nd ad set will be a competitor (NatHabit, Kama Ayurveda, etc.) and so on and so forth.

Bad Strategy 4

This bad strategy I would consider a “half bad strategy” because I’ve seen it work really well for some brands, but it’s something that only works for some brands and not with others.

When it comes to writing ad copy, this is one of the most crucial times to utilize critical thinking instead of binary. The catalyst of requiring critical thinking in ad copy comes down to the brand tone and quality of the product(s)/service(s) that they sell.

Ad copy strategies that I am seeing taught in courses as an “across the board” implementation is that of using a lot of emojis in the ad copy. Sure, this will work if you have a cheap product targeted towards impulse buyers. But I’ve worked with many brands with a high-end tone to them or have a very expensive product where we see much better results with little to no emojis to keep the professional look.

Using critical thinking with this strategy is very simple - “use emojis when it makes sense and fits the tone of the brand and is synergistic with the quality of the brand”.

And that’s it.

Just some final words of wisdom, I must stress the importance of critical thinking instead of binary because it is what really allowed me to start seeing much better results with Facebook Ads over the years.