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Back in 2020, I had a simple call with a mentor that shifted my perspective and within 90 days helped me to make over $250K in extra sales - all from just one single sentence.

Let me explain…

I was having problems trying to sell more copies of my book - The Business Owner’s Guide to Profit.

Marketing wise, this was my big focus at the time, because I knew a large percentage of buyers would eventually turn into clients.

But there was a problem - I wasn’t profitable.

I was spending $50 on facebook ads just to sell one copy of my book. With the extra offer I had in the funnel my Average Order Value was $60…

But when you account for the cost of the book and the shipping which all together was $20…

I was losing $10 every time I sold a copy of the book.

Now look - this wasn’t the worst situation in the world because as mentioned a large percentage of the people who read my book naturally reached out to me and turned into clients.

But the issue was time. I couldn’t necessarily forecast when people would do that - which created uncertainty and my ads on the front end (lead generation) weren’t profitable.

They were cash flow negative, which is always a hard position to scale from if you’re bootstrapped.

I thought the problem was Facebook Ads and them being too expensive…

So I reached out to a mentor who had originally taught me about Facebook Ads and I booked into 3 months of consulting with him.

In reality all I needed was one sentence.

In preparation for our first call I got all my stats loaded up in Facebook (thinking we would focus on some crazy new FB ads strategy to bring my costs down…)

Instead he said…

“Look you’ve come here for Ads - but most people don’t have an ad problem they have funnel problems. Second to this it’s 5x easier to increase your AOV than it is to reduce your ad costs (CPA) - so I want to start with your funnel… Can you pull up your numbers for me?”

I quickly opened them up proudly stating my conversion on the landing page is 3%, my bumps are doing 20% and my one time upsell is doing 5%.

To which he said… Oh yep - there’s the problem.

“Your landing page is converting 3% which is average. 5% is best in class for my clients. Your bumps same 20% is good but 35% is best - but the big one is your OTO… You should be doing a 10% there.”

Immediately my pride turned into a feeling of stupidity. I wasn’t focussed on my funnel because I thought my metrics were ‘great’ but they weren’t - they were simply average.

I was benchmarking average!

For the rest of the call we spoke about how to improve the numbers - which was super valuable yes - but the most valuable thing was actually knowing where the goal posts were.

Within 7 days - I had fixed every one of these metrics and the funnel was incredibly profitable.

Here was why I felt so stupid — I knew how to get there: I had the skillset to be able to test the right things quickly - I was lacking the mindset - the deep understanding of the goal, and what I was actually aiming for.

Within 60 days - I used the momentum and insights to launch a new funnel that did $240K in sales in sales in it’s first month.

That day I discovered the simple power of ‘knowing what is best.’

And i’ve taken this mindset into every single other area of my business.

I’m of the belief that far too many business owners benchmark; nothing, they don’t set an informed target - they just base it off their opinion which is incredibly stupid or they benchmark; average - they look at the results of the people around them or other people ‘in their industry’ to determine what’s ‘good.’

Both of these are a fast track to mediocrity.

If you want to master business - benchmark the ‘best result possible’ and do everything in your power to create that result.

Since that day I’ve focused intensely on making sure I have access to the best possible information about what’s possible.

And I’ve deepened my knowledge.

Inside this edition of the newsletter I’m going to do deep into advertising and give you the 4 master key metrics and what is average, good and best in these areas.

If you combine them together into a simple algorithm (that I’ll share with you) you will be exponentially more likely to master advertising in your business.

Read on…

Why Advertising is So Powerful?

Being able to run ads to people who’ve never heard of your before - who don’t know you, like you or trust you and turn them into clients is a super power in life.

If you have a message, a product or a service that genuinely helps your clients win reaching more of them and converting them is a massive win - win.

From the fulfilment level, you’ll feel amazing that your vision, your voice, your IP and your message is getting into the hands of the people who need it.

And on the financial side - being able to produce more customers and clients is perhaps the most highly correlated skill to high income and net worth people in human society.

You’ll win and your clients will win.

But here is the problem…

Running ads can also feel like you’re wandering inside a dark labyrinth with new beasts around every turn…

Let me tell you it’s not Facebook Ads, or Google, or Tik Tok that is the problem -it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of your goal and the ensuing principles, strategies and tactics it takes to achieve it.

That’s why I told you that story earlier. As Seneca once said, ‘If a ship does not know what harbour it is aiming - no wind is a good wind.’

Most business owners simply don’t know what is possible with Ads hence they play to a small and densely localised version of their potential.

What’s harbour are we really aiming at here?

Business Wisdom From Tony Robbins
(via Forbes Magazine…?")

There’s a famous business statement that Tony Robbins used to use a lot in his marketing, which was in turn picked up by alot of business people and also, used…

It’s probably one of the most uttered statements in business.

It feels true.

‘According to Forbes Magazine, 50% of Small Businesses fail in the first 24 months and 95% of them fail over 10 years.’

What’s the reason they fail?

They can’t produce enough customers and clients.

This is the #1 core problem for small businesses.

But let me ask you this how much time, energy, effort and resources have you allocated to try and solve it?

My Journey of Business

Hey 👋, I’m Ben Slater.

If you don’t know me - I’m the founder of Systems for Business.

In 2012, I was 20 years old - addicted to drugs, experiencing psychotic episodes once a week and going no where in life. I was in an incredibly deep state of suffering.

Lucky for me I had a mentor step into my life (who was also a very empowered business person) and he taught me the principles of personal and business development.

Through the power of his teachings, I deleted phone numbers, threw my medication in the bin and I dropped out of my university degree to start a business with my Brother teaching people how to do handstands.

We grew the business to $100K in revenue within 12 months.

We then started a new business building on the momentum of everything we had learnt so far. That business went on to do $83K/month within the next 16 months.

12 years on I’ve launched 5 different businesses - 3 of which have done over 7 figures in revenue and I’ve been able to afford a lot of freedoms as a result.

More importantly I found two people when they were 18 (before they even got a chance to go wild on drugs) and I showed them how to build 7 figure businesses before the age of 22. Just like my mentor did for me.

A completion of a cycle you could say.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have crossed paths with my mentor - because I immediately discovered the power of mentorship. It worked for me so I just kept doubling down on my education.

In my 20’s I invested over $500K of the business income I created back into learning; books, courses & mentorship from people I knew could help me.

That’s why I’m in the position I am today.

From mindset to sales, product innovation, ads & operations - I turned over every stone I could find - because I wanted to honour my mentor for saving my life.

I wanted to see just how completely I could transcend my lowest point.

When Is the Right Time to Start Advertising Your Business?

I’ve seen more people struggle with advertising than you could imagine and there is a reason…

Advertising is not step 1 inside a business. You need to validate your offer first - and it’s simply not wise to do that with paid traffic.

Step 1 is to use organic marketing strategies to get your business to $10K/month at least.

From there you can leverage your momentum into advertising.

Advertising also takes skill - it’s a skill you need to learn - you can’t simply wing it (which is what most business owners are doing unfortunately.)

Both organic and advertising are in essence very similar except organic strategies don’t cost money - they take time and energy to run.

I’ve shared my systems for Organic Marketing here in depth back inside edition # 9 of the newsletter. Click here >

The right time to advertise is anytime from $10K/month onwards - read on…

The Engine of Ad Results

There are 4 and only 4 master metrics that combine to produce your ROI in advertising. You can glean all your high level insights from just these 4 numbers.

They are;

CPM ($)- Cost Per 1,000 Impressions

CTR (%) - Unique Link Click Through Rate
(Of the people who see your ad what percentage click to your website)

CRV (%) - The Conversion Rate on Your Landing Page

AOV ($) - The Average Order Value

The first two metrics, CPM and CTR, are specific to the ad platform you use to run ads. The way to improve them will be; better targeting, better message (copy) & better ad creative.

The next two metrics CRV and AOV are specific to your funnel. The way to improve those will be conversion rate optimisation (CRO) on your landing page and improving your offer.

Einstein once called Compound Interest the 8th wonder of the world…

Notice how these numbers can compound for or against you. By hitting the best KPI on each of these elements VS the poor your results shift by 60x - meaning you earn 60x more for every $1 you invest into your system.

Pretty crazy right.

Now before we dive into this it’s wise to setup a custom analytics dashboard inside your ads manager so you can read all of this data quickly.

Here are the two buttons to click to do that… Just make sure you save it (bottom left corner) once you’ve set it up.

Here is a quick video I just filmed on how to do this to quickly and easily track your ADS Engine!

(no opt in needed - it’s just a loom video)

Click Here >

1. CPM - Cost Per 1,000 Impressions - Dream KPI = < $15

Most people don’t track this number but let me show you a quick example.

My Journal Funnel overall has a CPM of $23.99

My Checklist Funnel overall has a CPM of $59.01

An impression is every time my ad is served so it’s costing me $23.99 - $59.01 for my ad to be seen 1,000 times.

Now - jumping out of the gate my checklist traffic is costing me more than 2x as much than my journal…

This is like running a marathon with a weights vest on - it’s simply going to slow me down…

But the key question…

Why is it happening?

1. I haven’t optimised it yet to bring it down. My journal funnel is 4 years old - so I know the levers to pull to bring it down.

2. The journal is naturally a product that Meta likes more - hence I’ll get charged accordingly.

3. The Journal Ad is more ‘Native.’ It feels less like an ad.

4. I’m being very direct with my offer in the checklist ad to drive maximum conversions which Meta doesn’t love.

Here are the results from the intial testing I’ve done to try and bring this down.

And you’ll notice here that the overall (bottom line) out performed my average CPM by $9 and 15.03% and thumbnails was the clear winner inside the test bringing down my CPM by $20.13 or 34.11%

I can now go deeper into this concept.

One thing to be very careful of is to default to the setting that Meta or any other ad platform suggests for you.

They mostly don’t work. Remember we’re not benchmarking the average here in any of these metrics - we’re trying to achieve mastery.

The reason I’ve been paying 34.11% more for my ads over the past 6 weeks was because I had selected ‘automatic thumbnail’ instead of selecting my own and testing the best one.

AI is powerful - but it’s still not more powerful than a well trained marketer at this point in time for copywriting, making ad creatives, writing headlines or choosing thumbnails - act accordingly.

AI is useful for ideas and grunt work right now in advertising - I’ve not seen one ad outperform one I’ve created - yet.

2. CTR - Unique Link Click Through Rate - Dream KPI = 3%

The Unique Link Click Through Rate = the number of unique link clicks / impressions.

How many people who see your ad click on it to your website or offer?

This has everything to do with your targeting, creative and your message.

It’s all about the Ad itself.

Here are the results of the same test broken down to the ad level.

And the winning ad…

Again there are 5 main variables that I’m testing here in order to bring the CTR up.

1. Thumbnails - The Image on Top of the Video Before the Play

2. Headline Overlays - Putting a Headline Inside the Ad Creative

3. Ad Hooks - The First Line / Sentence of the Ad Copy 🔥🔥

4. Video Hooks - The First 20 Seconds of Your Video

5. Headlines - Bottom of the Ad Next to the CTA Button

Finding the right combination, of these variables can improve your ad results by 5-20x so it’s really worth taking the time and effort to test these variables.

The great thing is that once you have a good understanding of the principles and you can build yourself some templates you’ll massively increase the hit rate on your tests.

//

The combination between your CPM and your CTR give you the cost per click that you’ll spend to drive someone to your website.

The whole game of advertising is to make more profit per page view on your website than it costs you to drive the click.

I’ll dive into this a bit more in a moment but for now the simple algorithm to understand CPM, CTR and CPC is;

CPC = { ( CPM ÷ 1000 ) ÷ CTR }

Obviously this stat means little to nothing without an understanding of the CVR & the AOV which is why ‘most ad problems are funnel problems.’

However if you can drive good quality traffic with great ads onto your landing page that’s converting over 5% with a great AOV…

You’ll certainly be able to sell over $1M worth of product.

3. CVR - Conversion Rate on Your Landing Page - Dream KPI = > 5%

In my opinion this is probably the hardest one to master because it requires the deepest level of understanding of marketing.

Most people just simply don’t get the subtlety here. Every single word, image and element is important.

In my opinion this comes down to your offer more than anything else.

I’ve tested hundreds and hundreds of landing pages over the years and my favourite thing that I’ve discovered so far in my testing is;

Simplicity scales.

The landing pages that have consistently scored more than 5% for me have been incredibly simple with nothing out of place.

They also haven’t had ‘the most beautiful branding’ - I’ve wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars investing into branding to try and make high performance funnels with tremendous branding - all of them failed.

There are 11 primary elements and 14 secondary elements that I’ve discovered that add basis points to your CVR.

When I’m testing a Landing page - I’m playing first playing with these variables to find the right mix that will get my page up to 5%.

Most of the pages I see and advise on are simply missing these time tested and proven variables.

Do you have a guarantee? Bonuses? An abundance of social proof? Are you urgent in your copy? Do you give a discount when they take action now?

Etc…

4. AOV - The Average Order Value - Dream KPI > $200

In my opinion this is one of the fastest and easiest areas to optimise. At least today I do… I’ll take you back to my story at the beginning of this email…

The shifts I made there were specifically adding an extra $20 to my AOV by improving my offers.

The two primary elements you can use here are;

1. Bump Offers - These are offers that are presented at the time of the checkout that the customer can quickly and easily add to their cart.

2. OTO Upsell Offers - These are special upsell offers that you can present after the order for the customer

I’m currently working with my Client Tess who is a business coach living in Iceland and serving Europe.

Last year we worked together to build her a lead magnet funnel that she used to increase the size of her audience by 20x.

This year she just launched a new ‘front end product funnel’ modelled off my own journal.

When I’m working on an advertising system we’re always focussed on the area that is the furthest away from the Dream KPI… Which for this specific case was the AOV.

Over the past week we’ve implemented 3 x new bump offers with the goal of improving the AOV up to €90… Well guess what she sent me yesterday…

Within just 7 days we were able to shift her AOV from $60.98 to $98.75 meaning her funnel is now insanely profitable.

She’ll probably be able to scale this funnel beyond 7 figures as a result.

A basic rule for your AOV is that you want to double whatever your cart value is by using bumps and OTO’s.

An Example of ROAS.

The ratio between your Cost Per Click and Your Earnings Per Page View gives you your ROAS.

For example;

Let’s say you run an ad with the following data;

$35 CPM.
1.5% CTR.
3.5% CRV.
$98 AOV.

And you spend $1,000.

28,571 people will see your ad.
428 of them will click to your page.
15 will become customers for $98 each.

You’ll make $1,470 which is 1.47 ROAS.

But - If you tweak you CTR up to 2% your CRV up to 4.5% and your AOV up to $120… (with the same CPM)

And you spend that same $1,000 again…

You’ll make $3,085 which is a 3.09 ROAS.

Now we’re talking.

** Not sure if I need to say this - but may as well - your ads aren’t broken you’re just not using real data, which in turn keeps you inside the dark labyrinth. The data allows you to turn on the light.

💡

The Power of Advertising

What I’ve shared inside this newsletter is an approach I’ve been using for the past 10 years to grow my businesses.

One of the things I love about this approach is that it’s incredibly scientific. If you understand these variables and you find a good mentor who has more ‘testing under their belt’ to speed things up for you…

You’ll probably be able to become a millionaire.

In fact I’m certain of it. Learning how to run ads into funnels that convert is one of the most certain ways to build wealth.

It’s not really based on what happening in the economy or some volatile stock market movements. It’s based on human psychology that you can test and understand by changing the elements in your ads, your copy, your creative, your landing page and your copy.

You can take control of your business if you truly understand it.

This is why I believe Peter Drucker once said… “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that ads won’t work for you. That Facebook is against you or any other self limiting belief.

Marketing is and will continue to be one of the two most important things to understand about business.

Don’t fool yourself.

Put in the work to master marketing and be flexible enough to listen to and follow the data… The market know’s the truth and you’re only one inexpensive test away from the truth.

Now - If you want some help to master this journey, just like my mentors have done for me.

You can click the link below to book in a FREE ADS Mastery Call with me.

You’ll be in one of two positions.

1. You haven’t started yet but want to launch your ads - If this is the case I’ll help you to map out your strategy on the call.

2. You’ve started and have some data but you’re not getting the results you want. Here I’ll help you to improve your CPM, CTR, CVR and AOV for free!

Now let me mention, to qualify for this free call you must;

1. Be over $10K/month in your business so you can test quickly.

2. Fill in a quick form before the call that gives me context for your business and situation.

3. Show up with any data you have from previous ad tests and your funnels accessible.

So if that’s you head to the link below to book in now.

> Click here to book in >

I have 6 spots open this week and once they’re gone - that’s it.

If you’re in the right position this is a great way to get some help.

Have a great week!

Ben.