Entry #92: Live webinar updates; Facebook finally profitable. How to scale?

This is the 91st post in a series. The first post can be found here.

Progress report:

It’s been a few days since the last post, and I didn’t do much webinar related work in the past week. But, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy.

First, my wife and I (mainly my wife) had a baby girl this past Thursday morning … so that’s fun!

I’ve been adding content to the Agency Overdrive membership, and of course, running AdVenture Media.

I started going to the gym 4 morning a week (not that anyone cares), but I feel good about that, and I want to mention it.

Now, let’s back to business.

Looking at the past 30 days of FB ads data, this is what I’ve spent:

$22,964 in total spend. A lot of that spend was for the live webinars, but one campaign was for a recurring webinar (the shorter version with a better conversion rate, but I’ll get to that in a second).

Facebook shows $18,750 in revenue, but that’s not entirely accurate.

Taking revenue from ThriveCart, it’s really $15,605 in revenue.

Facebook is still tracking each sale as $500 in revenue, when in fact the webinar bundle is now being sold for $350. I need to change that.

Since reworking the webinar, I’ve done three live webinars.

Here is the data from those live webinars:

No, it’s not pretty.

I’m struggling with very high CPA (for registrations), and a low attendance rate. Conversion rate is healthy, especially the first one.

Here are the learnings I’m confident about:

1. Morning webinars are better for my audience.
2. Shorter webinars with less personal backstory are better than longer webinars with more backstory. In this new webinar, I’m getting to the sales pitch at around the 45 minute mark.
3. The countdown timer on the sales page is a big conversion booster. I’m leaving the sale open for about 25 minutes, and the price goes up to $500 from $350 if they don’t buy within that window.

I’m still going to continue to experiment with live webinars, but I’m going to revamp the ads …. the main goal is to get cost per registration way down.

Recurring webinar is profitable

Over the past 30 days or so, I’ve been running one campaign on a small budget ($50 / day) sending traffic to a recurring webinar.

Over the past 14 days:

• 73 registrations
• 6 sales
• $2,100 revenue
• $927 spend
• $1,173 profit
• 2.1X ROAS

So, that’s good news. At an average CPA of $12.69, the recurring webinar is profitable.

But as you can see from the above spreadsheet, my average CPA for the live webinars was about $40.

That is in large part due to the live webinar campaigns having a much higher daily budget, and it takes time for Facebook to bring down CPA. Also, just in general, Facebook campaigns tend to do better when they are running at lower budgets (lots of clients run into this issue).

But it is good news that these campaigns are profitable, even though the ads aren’t that great.

Next steps

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to revamp the ads, using the ad video to actually show how effective improving conversion rate can be for an online business. I’m going to be stress the value of the strategies, and I’m going to stress what will be lost by “not knowing these 5 strategies I’m going to teach you tomorrow”.

I’m going to continue to work on improving the webinar delivery, using some ideas I picked up along the way watching some other webinars over the past week.

I’ll probably aim for another live webinar this coming Friday morning (or Thursday morning), and then maybe turn this webinar into a recurring webinar.

I’m stretching these posts out to hit 100, so I’ll probably wait until I have a more substantial update to post again.

I’m very determined to continue this project.

I’m still in the red, and I will do what it takes to make this profitable.

I’ve spent $70,072 in ads since the start of this (with probably close to $10,000 in other fees, software, etc), and total revenue from sales is currently at $30,284.

We’re at $78,000 / year in recurring revenue from the Agency Overdrive membership, so that’s something which takes the bite out of this, but still, I’m very much in the red and need to remedy that fast.

Thanks for reading, and keep on truckin’

Off to give the baby a sponge bath.