Just like other aspects of digital marketing, the best practices for coming up with a successful Facebook advertising campaign is always changing.
No marketer is immune in committing these mistakes, especially in a field that’s so dynamic. The good news is, businesses of all sizes can achieve these goals through Facebook advertising if done properly.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the seven Facebook Ad mistakes that can ruin your business, and how you can avoid them:
#1: Not developing a clear strategy
You have to be strategic. This means that you should have the right mental awareness around particular KPIs or key performance indicators.
You should also have the know-how to explore multiple areas to achieve your high priority objectives, as well as the steps that can help you attain it.
Yes, advertising is indeed a faster way to improve your conversions, traffic, and in other cases, your sales. However, the best approach that you need to adopt in Facebook advertising is thinking that it’s a marathon and not a sprint.
Meaning, you have to think about the long-term.
But it’s quite difficult to develop a Facebook Ads strategy if you don’t have a solid understanding of what your Ad Objective is.
What’s your end goal? What do you want your audience to do? Do you want them to visit your site, learn more about your brand, sign up on an email list, or convert to an offer?
Knowing what’s the end goal of your ad will help you pick the right objective. Picking the wrong objective will not only send you to the wrong path on Ad Manager, but it will also force you to spend on something that you hardly want in the first place.
#2: Assuming Facebook to convert like Adwords
Facebook doesn’t convert like Adwords. In fact, it’s doing the opposite.
On the platform, PPC attribution matters more. You simply couldn’t just jump ahead and get all of those users that show any purchasing intent. What you need to do is to recreate the entire sales funnel, particularly top of the funnel campaigns to help you generate new audiences.
This means running content campaigns so that you can bring more people to your site and track them down with a pixel made for retargeting.
As a result, you’ll have a more engaged audience wherein you can send more targeted offers like webinars, ebooks, free trials, checklists, and so on.
#3: Running too many Facebook Ads
Another most common mistake that a lot of marketers make is running too many Facebook Ads.
The thing about running too many ads is that it eventually leads to confusion, high costs, inefficiency, and poor results.
Here’s how you can get on track if you have a complex ad account:
Consolidate your audience into ad sets with bigger budgets. Doing so helps you give Facebook more data, get the desired CPA quicker, and scale much faster.
After you’ve consolidated your best audiences in about 2-3 ad sets, place your best 3-6 ads in every ad set. Then, test out your images and video, as well as the ad copy via true split testing in various campaigns.
That’s why it’s crucial at this point to have a Facebook advertising agencies list. Doing so can make it easy for you to look for professionals you can work with and help you achieve your goals.
#4: Not creating video-based ads
There is a rapid decline in the engagement of various types of posts. According to data by Facebook, as much as 15,000 pieces of content can appear on a user’s feed each time they log in. There is a lot more content than the time to really absorb it.
Although, BuzzSumo found out that there is a rapid decline of engagement with images and links, it isn’t true with video posts. But surprisingly, video posts aren’t as prominent as other kinds of posts on the platform.
Marketers can tap into this resource by creating more video-based ads.
#5: Bidding against yourself
Facebook ads are like an online auction bidding for a chance for users to click on your ad. Meaning, you’re only paying if a user completes an action, like clicking your ad for instance.
So you shouldn’t worry about bidding against yourself unless you run ad sets and campaigns that are targeting precisely the same audience.
When you target the same audience twice in various ad sets and campaigns, on precisely the same period, you’re bidding against yourself.
You’re putting out there two different ads in the same place, same time, and showing it to the same set of audience. Once this happens, your campaign will underspend and underperform.
In some cases, you’ll find out that your ads don’t deliver at all. Why? Because you’ve placed your ads in a bidding war against each other.
#6: Poor audience targeting
There are US-based ad campaigns that target approximately 20 million people. It’s no surprise that a significant number of users don’t see those ads favorably.
That’s why, as a marketer, you have to be realistic about which people you want to target with your services, products, or brand.
The platform’s interface can also help you by giving suggestions about the prospective number of people that you can reach depending on a specific amount of ad spending.
If you have an audience that’s too big, or too broad, then better narrow it down, and target specifically by geographic location, gender, interests, age range, and so on.
#7: Not A/B testing your Facebook ads
If you’re not A/B testing your ads, then you’ll have disappointing results.
A/B testing is an excellent practice wherein you’re exchanging various elements on your ad to know which version performs the best. You can test it out with image against image, CTA against CTA, targeting against targeting, and copy against copy.
You’ll actually be quite astonished on how much you can learn by just making a simple A/B test. The more that you can come up with an ideal Facebook ad for your campaign.
Final Thoughts
As a marketer, you should be smart and flexible as much as you can to avoid committing drastic decisions. Creating individual Facebook ad campaigns are no different. Most people just simply pull the plug if they’re not getting immediate results. Having the patience and applying a couple of tips on this article will eventually lead to larger payoffs in the end.