Every one of these was running on Facebook when I wrote this. I go through the Meta Ad Library most mornings, because it’s the fastest way to learn what a market already sounds like. The businesses aren’t named, because none of them asked to be an example.
A chimney sweep in Texas, three identical ads
The oldest of the three has been live since January 2024.
That line is there to create urgency and it now does the opposite. Anybody who has scrolled past it before, which after two years is most of the people he’s paying to reach, has learned that his deadlines aren’t real. Once a reader knows that, no future offer of yours gets taken seriously either.
There’s a second problem sitting on top of it. In October, the word pre-season tells a homeowner that the smell coming off their fireplace can wait, in the exact week it stops being able to wait.
Same offer, same money, same business. The ad is now about what the reader is worried about rather than about his calendar, and the urgency in it is true, because the weather doesn’t negotiate.
A chimney service in New Hampshire, five ads
All five ads carry that identical headline, and it isn’t a headline at all. It’s the title tag from the website, pasted into every slot.
On Google it works, because the person searching already typed “chimney sweep Manchester NH” and wants to see those exact words come back. Facebook is the reverse of that. Nobody went looking for you. They’re on their phone between two other things, and a headline that lists your service category gives them nothing to stop for.
Five ads is five chances, and all five were spent on the same wasted line.
Or: Manchester homeowners, when did your chimney last get swept? Both say what the business does. The difference is that they start a thought in your reader’s head instead of closing one.
A cabinet refacing company, five ads, running since November 2022
Every one of the five ads ends with that button.
Get Directions asks a stranger to put your address into their car and drive across town. That is a large request to make of somebody sitting on their phone at nine in the evening, which is when most people look at kitchen ads. The ones who were genuinely interested don’t drive over. They keep scrolling, and you never find out they existed.
The same person will happily do something smaller.
Either one costs your reader nothing and leaves you a name and a number, and then you’re the one making the call instead of waiting for somebody to turn up. It’s one dropdown in the ad settings and it costs nothing to change.
A kitchen refacing company in the American Midwest
The ad has been running since June. The number is still 150.
A number like that is put there to feel like a countdown, and the first time somebody sees it, it works. The second time, four months later, still sitting at 150, it tells them one of two things. Either nobody signed up, or the number was never real. Both of those are worse than having no number at all, so the line you added to create urgency is now the line costing you the sale.
There’s a smaller thing in the same ad. The web address is typed out in the body text, immediately next to the clickable card. Nobody copies a web address off a phone screen by hand, so that line is occupying the space where a reason to click should be.
It does the same job, it stays true on its own without anybody maintaining it, and it never teaches your reader that you make numbers up.
A turf installer, live right now
That’s the price showing on the ad. It’s a placeholder that never got replaced, and it’s an easy thing to miss, because you look at your own ads as the business rather than as a stranger seeing them for the first time.
A homeowner who has never heard of you doesn’t think “typo”. They think something is off here, and they scroll. Two minutes in the catalogue field fixes it.
The ad has a bigger problem than the number, though, and it’s the kind that only shows up when somebody reads it cold. It opens by calling competitors addicts peddling garbage turf, in capitals, and it’s almost certainly a fair complaint about a real problem in that trade. But the reader doesn’t know him yet, so the first thing they learn about him is that he’s furious, and they quietly decide he might be difficult to deal with. His anger is protecting the people he’s trying to warn them about.
Now he’s the one who knows things rather than the one who’s upset, and the comparison does his arguing for him.
Send me the web page those clicks are landing on and the one job you’d most like more of. I’ll tell you what I’d change and why.