Facebook ads for a health coach certification program

A certification business had taken courses on Facebook ads and still could not tell which ones were working. Getting that clarity took the business off in a big way.

Steve, Health coach certification. Recorded April 2021.

Steve runs a certification program training health coaches to build businesses in wellness — holistic coaching, juice bars, delivery, farmers markets. It sits between B2B and B2C, which makes the audience less obvious than either.

He describes the state of the ads before as chaotic, and he had done the work: courses on how to run Facebook ads, time spent learning the platform. The problem was not effort or intelligence.

The specific gap was reading the data. He could not tell what was working, what was not, or which campaigns to continue and which to stop. Without that, every decision is a guess and budget drifts toward whatever looks busiest rather than whatever sells.

Once the account was being managed and the numbers were legible, the business took off. Return on investment reached the point where they had more money to reinvest in ads, which is the compounding loop every advertiser is trying to reach.

The thing he is candid about is the founder trap: he had assumed he could figure everything out himself and would not need to bring anyone in. Most capable founders assume that, and it is usually true of most things — advertising is one of the places where it stops being true, because the platform changes faster than part-time attention can track.

If you have taken the courses and still cannot say which of your ads make money, the missing piece is measurement, not more learning.

In Steve’s words