When you log into Facebook and see all those ads popping up in your newsfeed, you probably think all those advertisers are making a ton of money. But the truth is that most advertisers aren’t making any profit because their ads aren’t working. Only a small percentage of advertisers are turning huge profits and making millions of dollars from their Facebook ads. So why is making money from Facebook ads so hard for some yet so easy for others?

The One Facebook Ad Problem You Need to Fix

All struggling advertisers are making the same mistake: focusing too much on the ads. In my business, I get a lot of people asking me for feedback on their Facebook ads. “What sort of copy should I create? What image should I use? Which format works best? Should I be using video/images/bots?” But while all of these details do matter, they’re not the most important part of the ads. At the end of the day, running Facebook ads is a simple system of money in/money out. If you earn more than you spend, you make a profit. If you spend more than you earn, you lose money.

Regardless of which format you use, you’re going to spend money for every Facebook user who sees your ads. You can put all your effort into decreasing that cost, but what will happen if the ad prices rise? You can only lower the cost so much. On the other hand, there’s no limit to what can happen after users click on your link. You can multiply your revenue per user by ten if you do it right. I’m not saying it will be easy, but if you’re willing to put in the work, your ads will have limitless potential to convert on the backend.

Why You Should Focus on Conversion Instead of Ads

I’ve been focusing on Facebook ads for a long time. I’ve tested and tweaked to improve my ads’ conversion rate. I’ve tried out all kinds of ad formats, but I was never able to turn a profit from the ads alone. It was only after I tweaked my funnel that I started to see a difference. This is the mistake I see most advertisers make: they put all their effort into their Facebook ads when the real problem is that their website can’t convert enough users. As long as that’s the case, there’s no way you can make your Facebook ads profitable.

Maybe you think you can make your ads work on a small budget. Let’s say every day, you spend $5 and make back $10. That’s a profit. But as soon as you start scaling up your Facebook ads, the average cost per user will go up. And if you start with a small margin and a low budget, you won’t make any profit once you start spending more, which you’ll need to do if you want to make more than $5 a day.

So if you really want to make a profit from Facebook ads, you should focus twice as much time and effort on your funnel and your site as you do on the ads themselves. For example, if you’re spending an hour a day on your Facebook ads, you should spend at least two hours a day on improving your site’s conversion rate. Don’t just write better ads; test better conversion techniques.

How to Improve Your Conversion Rate

Here’s an example of how I improved my conversion rate. For a long time, I’d been driving traffic into a video sequence that required people to opt in. They would enter their name and email address, then they would receive a video sequence, at the end of which I would send them an offer to purchase something. But the campaign wouldn’t convert because it took users a week to receive all the videos, and by the time I sent them an offer, they had already lost interest.

The problem was that people were only clicking over from Facebook ads. They had no clue who I am or what my business is. So after seven days, only a handful of people watched all the videos and bought what I offered while most people lost interest. I tested and tweaked to see which audience would be most interested in my offer. That’s when I figured out that the problem wasn’t with my audience; it was with my funnel.

After I switched the funnel to a couple of hours of content and an immediate purchase offer after clicking the ad, everything changed. Of course, it took testing out several funnels before I found one that converted, but once I did, I was able to adjust my Facebook ads accordingly, and everything fell into place.

So keep in mind that only after you find the right funnel should you go back and test out Facebook ads: which ones will convert, what kinds of videos you should create, what kind of copy you should write, which images you should use, etc. Remember: the most important thing you should focus on is making sure your website actually converts. After that, your Facebook ads will be much more profitable.