Ads 2025: what I did and the overall results

What I did in 2025:

I want to start this diary out by saying that I started running ads for the first time in years in February 2025. Here are some highlights, though you can read the full reports in Real Reels and other Week in the Life logs.

1. The "Tripwire Price" Pivot ($7 vs. $17)

The Experiment: For the first half of the year, I ran ads to a free challenge funnel with a $7 tripwire. While it generated leads, it wasn't profitable on the front end. In July/August, based on mentorship advice, I tested raising the tripwire price to $17.

The Result: This was the turning point for my ad profitability. By increasing the tripwire price and adjusting the bump offer (changing it from a membership to a $39 one-time payment), I finally achieved a 2x ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) on Day 1 of the funnel.

What I’ll Try in 2026: On February 1, 2026, I upped the tripwire price again, this time to $37. I want to see if I can make this funnel more profitable on Day 1 and get higher quality leads. I also increased the bump offer from $37 to $77. More details on the results below.

2. The "Advantage+" Audience Test

The Experiment: After months of micromanaging custom audiences and interest targeting, I tested Facebook's AI-driven "Advantage+" targeting and just basically used a wide open audience and let Andromeda find the right people.

The Result: This significantly lowered your Cost Per Lead (CPL) to around $1.14, outperforming my manual targeting efforts.

What I’ll Try in 2026: I’m basically only doing this in 2026, way less work for me and way better results.

3. The Retargeting Goldmine

The Experiment: During my Q4 live launches (MBA Anniversary and Black Friday), I ran specific retargeting ads to warm leads (email list, site visitors, ad engagers) rather than cold traffic. The MBA ads sent people straight to the sales page and the Black Friday ads were very general and just sent people to the main deals page, rather than a specific offer.

The Result: This generated my highest ROI of the year.

• MBA Anniversary: I spent $273 on retargeting for ~$3k in revenue (approx. 11x ROAS).
• Black Friday: I achieved a 12x to 25x ROAS (depending on how you calculate the booked revenue) on retargeting ads.

What I’ll Try in 2026: I want to set up more retargeting ads, but using Advantage+ so it won’t only be to my warm audience. I’m going to do this for my Core 3 offers: MBA, The Room and $1k/Day.

4. The "Invisible List" Video Strategy

The Experiment: Late in the year (and moving into Jan 2026), I began testing Laurel Portie’s "$5/day" strategy. This involved running video view ads to build an "invisible list" of people who watched 25%+ of the video, creating a warm audience to retarget later, rather than asking for a conversion immediately.

The Result: I set up 4 videos with "Replient" automations to capture comments. This is a newer experiment aimed at lowering lead costs over time, and I don’t have enough data yet to report on it, but it will be included below in the 2026 diary debriefs.

5. The Platform Split (Instagram vs. Facebook)

The Experiment: I noticed Meta was allocating most of my budget to Facebook, but I suspected my ideal clients were on Instagram. So, I duplicated a winning ad campaign to run exclusively on Instagram to test performance.

The Result: This was a late Q3 experiment to see if forcing the spend to Instagram would result in higher quality buyers, despite potentially higher lead costs. It didn’t work as well as I had hoped and eventually I turned the ads off and just kept my same campaign that has been running since July going instead, which technically delivers to both IG and Facebook. It gets the best results, so I just decided to scale that instead.

What I’ll Try in 2026: I’m going to continue scaling this ad, though I duplicated it and added some fresh creative in December and that ad is running alongside the original ad now (with some overlap in what creative is used) and every week I’m basically just adjusting the budget up or down depending on how it’s doing. It’s stayed profitable through this point (February 2026), so I’m touching it as little as possible while working on the backend of the funnel (mostly increasing pricing).

6. The "Ugly Ad" Creative Test

The Experiment: Instead of highly produced graphics, I tested a simple black-and-white text ad.

The Result: It became my "top performer." This validated my suspicion that "boring makes bank" and that over-designed creatives often perform worse than simple, native-looking text, because they look like every other coach/course creator ad out there.

What I’ll Try in 2026: More simple text based ads, plus I’m trying some simple video ads that I repurposed from clips of a webinar that converted really well (used descript, which made this super easy to do) and I’m also playing around with some NotebookLM designed ads which are much more complex, but hoping they really stand out as they don’t look like anything else out there. And they take me .5 seconds to make because AI does all the work.

7. Instant Forms vs. Website Conversions

The Experiment: Early in the year, I tested Facebook's native "Instant Forms" (where users sign up without leaving the app) against sending traffic to my own landing page.

The Result: While Instant Forms often lower Cost Per Lead (CPL), not being able to present a tripwire offer immediately after signup with Instant Forms was a huge drawback and significantly cut my profits. Since the tripwire is essential for my self-liquidating offer (SLO) strategy, I prioritized website conversions despite the potentially higher CPL.

8. The "Leads vs. Sales" Objective Battle

The Experiment: I frequently A/B tested optimizing my campaigns for "Leads" (cheaper) vs. "Sales" (higher intent).

The Result: I found that "Sales" objectives brought in higher quality leads who were more likely to buy the tripwire, even though the CPL was higher (4.40vs 2.00). So I ultimately decided that ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) mattered more than CPL, pushing me toward Sales objectives for all future ad campaigns.

9 . Webinar Direct vs. Challenge Funnel

The Experiment: For your MBA Anniversary sale, I compared running ads directly to the Webinar Registration page vs. relying on leads coming through your "Beyond the Scroll" Challenge funnel.

The Result: The Challenge funnel won. Most of my ad sales for MBA actually came from people who entered via the Challenge first, not the direct webinar ads. This confirmed that the Challenge warms people up faster and more effectively than a cold webinar invite.

What I’ll Try in 2026: Interestingly, I want to try running a monthly live webinar (that if it works, might turn into a bi-weekly or even weekly thing) where I send mostly paid traffic to the webinar, rather than inviting my email list. But I also want to create a better funnel for MBA for my challengers since they were my top buyers in the live MBA sale. Also makes me want to test out a few other lead magnets and compare conversions.

2025 Overall Results

• Total New Leads: 7,127

  • Lead-to-Customer Rate ≈ 12.1%

• Average CPL: $4.13

• Total Purchases: 865

• Amount Spent: $29,451.56

  • This comes out to an average of $86.37/day in ad spend

• LTV Amount Earned (via Kartra): $79,035

  • $7,293 from the tripwire

    • = 429 sales/5630 leads = 7.6% conversion rate

  • $8,532 from the bump

    • = 233/429 = 54.3% conversion rate

  • $4,224 from the upsell

    • = 8/429 = 1.9% conversion rate
  • • other purchases from these leads

  • Revenue per Lead ≈ $11.08

  • Revenue per Purchase ≈ $91.38

• ROAS: 2.68

• Average CPM: $27.01

• Average CTR: 1.86%

Some other important things to note:

• You can see I tested 46 different campaigns in 2025, so I did not give up just because my first few tests didn’t get me the results I wanted.
• This gives me some room to play with higher prices in the funnel, and follow up email sequences to recover non-buyers.
• I could call out my specific audience identity more in the creatives to help cut costs
• An average of ~$11 per lead back on the front-end while only paying ~$4 per lead is exactly the kind of math we want.
• My main leverage now is optimization (offer, emails, retargeting) rather than “fixing broken ads.”
• I especially want to spend some time in 2026, tightening nurture sequences based on behavior (clicked, purchased tripwire, bought bump but not upsell, etc.) and building specific campaigns to ascend these buyers into my core program/coaching.