Ep #196 From Chaos to Clarity: Organize Facebook Ad Data for Profit
You are listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast, with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 196
Hi My Strong Friend “Are you leaving money on the table by forgetting what worked in your Facebook ads?” If you’re like most Business Owners, you throw some money at ads, feel the surge of excitement similar to buying a lottery ticket. Results start to come in, but not as many as you wanted. As your disappointment sets in, you take a step back to process. After a few months you feel better. You’re ready to try again. You remember that your ad did work. You got results. Its a great starting point. You got something to work with. You just need to find that ad.
Let me ask you—have you ever gone into Facebook Ads Manager to repurpose ads from your last launch, but you get inside and just see a hot mess? I mean - Campaigns everywhere, ad sets with weird names and a random assortment of ads. It’s like opening a messy garage. Everything’s there—you just can’t find what you need. I’ve seen clients so overwhelmed with the chaos, they just delete everything and start over. Yikes! They flushed money down the drain.
That data was gold. It contained all the answers they needed to create a Lottery Ticket ad.
This ad mess was not their fault.
Here’s the problem: Facebook Ad Manager gives way too much data. It’s noisy. You forget which ads were for visibility, list growth, sales, or just message validation. And if you let Facebook’s AI take the wheel, you might get results but you won’t know why.
Remember in High School math class? The teacher didn’t want just the answer. She wanted you to show your work. There’s a reason for that. It's to show YOU know what you're doing. Facebook’s AI might give you an answer, but you didn’t see the work. You can’t learn the process if you can’t see the work.
Some business owners want to say good riddance to their old ad data, especially if a bunch of ads didn’t create the desired results.
That’s where the gold is lost.The insight into what’s actually working, and more importantly what isn’t working.
Failed ads are your teacher. They help you develop your ad skills.
Failed ads didn’t waste your money—they bought the answers that save you from wasting big money.
You need to be able to find and use the data if you ever want to have a winning lottery ticket ad.
The Solution: Workbooks (3 minutes)
This is why I started creating Facebook Ad Workbooks for myself and my clients. These workbooks take the chaos of Ad Manager and organize it into something clear and structured. My clients rave about them because suddenly they know what they’re testing, what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next.
It takes ads from feeling like gambling to feeling like science. You’re in control. You have data you can use again and again.
In fact, many business owners reference ad workbooks from other offer campaigns.
They repurpose the insights to develop their next offer or campaign. It fast tracks them to success.
The 4 Workbooks (8 minutes)
I’m going to walk you through four types of workbooks I’ve created. This is to give you inspiration on how you can organize your Ad data. It’s important to note that Facebook Ads can be used to achieve a variety of results. They are not limited to just lead and sales ads. With Facebook Ads, you can increase Brand Recognition, Grow followers of your Facebook Business Page, Validate your Offers and Messaging, and so much more.
When you create an Ad workbook, its helpful to design it with your specific outcome in mind. My 4 workbooks will be introduced to you from simplest to most complex.
The Niche Hero Workbook helps you nail your niche, value proposition and messaging. Facebook’s audience targeting makes ads a great Market Research Tool. We use $4 Facebook Poll Ads for inexpensive, fast market research for new businesses and those exploring a Niche pivot. The workbook has multiple tabs. It starts with the Testing Plan Overview that lays out the rounds, metrics and metric targets. Each of the next tabs is specific to the testing round. Each round is testing something different. By having 1 tab per testing objective, it helps you stay focused and organized. Within each tab, the user can upload the creative, copy and transfer over specific metric results from FB ad manager. So instead of looking at 30 different metrics in FB ad manager, your focus is on the 4 that matter. It cuts out the noise and confusion. My client’s favorite part? The metric boxes automatically color red or green based on the result. Understanding the data is fast and clear cut.
There are 2 workbooks for Irresistible Offers - one for freebies one for paid offers. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “sell it before you build it”. If you’ve ever done that, you know how nerve wracking it can be to frantically create something on a deadline. Yikes. Why do the gurus say “sell it before you build it?” Simple answer - To find out if people want it. The Irresistible Offer Labs do that, but in a different way. We use the $4 Facebook Poll ads to validate the offers. The data proves the offer has high demand.
For both types of offers we’re testing pain points, desired results, offer format and features, and messaging that converts.
The workbooks help keep it all organized per Offer. If you only had Facebook Ad Manager, all of your offers would be jumbled together and hard to find. And since your testing specific aspects of the offer, the volume of campaigns and ad sets will grow quickly, which can be overwhelming.
Ad workbooks eliminate overwhelm. Organization and structure always feel better.
Similar to the Niche Hero Lab workbook, these workbooks have multiple tabs. There’s a Testing Overview Plan with metrics and targets. Then round specific tabs with metrics, targets and color coding. These workbooks also include ChatGPT prompts, messaging formula reference guides and website layout guidance for plug & play adoption of ad results.
The ads are uploaded to keep everything visible at a glance. It makes comparison really easy. This is especially important for testing the messaging. Sometimes the only thing that changes is 1 word. When you have to dig deep in Facebook Ad Manager to find the images and copy, you can’t do a side by side comparison easily.
The separation of the tabs keeps the specific type of information organized. You can go right to a specific testing round to extract information to use throughout your campaign materials. Not only do you see all of the messaging that can be used on your pages, promotion material and emails, you also see what NOT to use.
Just like any great science experiment, you need a lab notebook. The data reveals the winning formula.
Are you starting to see how data organization with an Ad workbook is so much better than Facebook Ad Manager?
Now let’s talk about the official Lead and Sales ads. I created the Ad Genie workbook for these. The objective is not just to create an Ad that gets results, it’s also to ensure the ad is profitable. This helps you get the highest revenue return on your Ad Spend. This process uses different Campaign Types to protect your budget. I’m sure you can imagine how confusing it could get inside Facebook Ad Manager with multiple campaigns, with each having multiple ad sets that have different purposes. The Ad Genie workbook includes spaces to record the exact Campaign and Ad Set names, so its easy to find them in Facebook Ad Manager.
Getting a profitable ad requires extra metrics called Drilldown metrics. Basically, we’re getting into the weeds to eliminate the fluff and only keep the gold.
For example, we analyze carousel and video drilldown metrics. In a Video ad, we can determine which scenes and lines of script are gold and which are fluff that cost you sales. This helps with swapping out scenes. We do the same with Ad Placements. There are 24 different placements across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Partner websites and apps. Out of the 24, only a handful are profitable. We’re able to cut the placements that are wasting your money.
The workbook has the overall testing plan, specific metrics and targets. Each testing round has a specific tab. That tab includes metrics that are specific to it. Even the creative type has a different tab. This allows scene to scene (or carousel card to carousel card) comparison to find the gold.
If you relied on only Facebook Ad Manager, you’d have to rely on your memory to compare video to video metrics.
Ad Genie gives you a structured path to test creatives, audiences, placements, and timing. Instead of wasting thousands, you can do this systematically with small budgets and end up with ads that actually bring a strong return on ad spend.
Organization saves you money.
UNEXPECTED BENEFITS
I love helping my clients use Ad workbooks. It lets me see the unexpected benefits for them and their business.
One of the most important is the ability to quickly refocus after a break.There are 2 reasons Business Owners take a break from Facebook Ads.
#1 is Marketing Budget. Sometimes the marketing budget gets used up for the month. They have to wait until next month to resume. Or if the market quickly changes or the rest of the funnel or campaign didn’t convert well, budget dips.
#2 is competing priorities. They may need to pull away from ads to complete a project and then come back.
When there’s an organized Ad workbook, it’s clear and easy to see where they left off and what to do next. There’s no digging and sorting through Facebook Ad Manager. Everything is in the workbook.
The next unexpected benefit is protection from accidental data loss. Did you know, if you delete something in Facebook Ad Manager, it’s permanently gone? I learned this the hard way. I accidentally deleted a Campaign with 6 months of testing data. My heart dropped like a rock. I had checked the box next to the Campaign name. I was trying to select an action from a drop down menu. My mouse moved right as I clicked. Delete was accidentally clicked. So much money down the drain! I was so grateful I had already transferred all of my data into my workbooks. Even if you accidentally delete a Google workbook, you can recover it.
The final unexpected benefit came from validating an ad for a multi-day Workshop. I was using a Carousel ad that laid out 5 topics, one per carousel card, that would be discussed. Remember I mentioned Breakdown Metrics? It turns out 1 carousel card received 70% of the clicks. That revealed market demand for something I didn’t offer. That led to creation of a new offer that worked exceptionally well.
All of your data in your Ad workbook can be repurposed. It can be repurposed for creating other offers. It can be repurposed for messaging for Speaking Engagements, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing and copy on your website. Your data reveals what works, and what doesn’t.
Wouldn’t you like to know what to Never Include in your messaging because it tanks your sales?
With Ad workbooks, your ads stop feeling like a gamble. Instead, they feel like repeatable science experiments. That builds confidence. That builds capability. And over time, your return on ad spend goes up because you’re not starting over—you’re building on knowledge
So, my friend, don’t lose your ad data. Organize it. Learn from it. Use it. Win big.
The workbooks I mentioned—Niche Hero, Irresistible Free Offer Lab, Irresistible Paid Offer Lab, and Ad Genie—are all available inside my online courses, in the Unshakable Business Co-Lab, or when you work with me 1:1.
Schedule a free consultation, and let’s explore the best path for you. I’ll help you run ads like a pro scientist—not a gambler. Until then, happy testing, and I’ll talk with you soon.”
