Facebook Ads can be an effective marketing practice for your business, but one that can be easy to get wrong – especially if you haven’t run ads before or aren’t familiar with the platform. It’s easy, if you’ve had a bad experience with Facebook Ads in the past to think that the platform simply doesn’t work for your business – but that’s not the case.
Here are 5 common Facebook ad mistakes and how you can fix them to ensure your ads work best for your business.
Mistake 1: Using Too Much Budget
One of the biggest mistakes some businesses make is using too much budget too early on into their campaigns. Many believe they need a big budget for Facebook Ads to work for them, but Facebook needs time to gather data about your ad and who responds to it – allowing their algorithm to deliver it correctly. Using too much budget can see you burn through money you can’t afford to lose – resulting in your ad being switched off before it can really deliver.
Fix: Starting off small with around £5 a day allows you to test and scale in tune with the results that are being delivered. Having a small budget doesn’t mean less results – it can in fact bring in a lot of business and a lot of money, allowing you to consider adding more budget to your ads overtime once they begin bringing in the numbers you desire.
Mistake 2: Poor Targeting
Targeting is often the ‘make or break’ part of your Facebook Ads – and it’s where business often fall in their strategies. You really need to familiarise yourself with your target audience before you begin running ads – if you go too broad or too niche, it can often leave you with little audience engagement.
Fix: Instead, target what you know (and what Facebook has available) about your audience. If you’re targeting parents, but only those with young children for example, Facebook allows you to select those who are listed of having children in specific age ranges. From demographics to jobs and even such things as engaged shoppers, there is an abundance of targeting options that will work for your businesses – so elect the right people and let Facebook’s algorithm do the rest. When the data comes in, you can refine your targeting if needed – learning as you go where your core audience lies.
Mistake 3: Choosing the Wrong Objective
One of the main reasons that Facebook Ads often fail is due to the wrong objective being chosen. This is the beginning of any campaign creation – forming the basis of your campaign and helping Facebook to understand your desired outcome – if you want sales, then you’re looking for a sales campaign, not awareness or engagement.
Fix: There are Traffic, Sales, Engagement App Promotion, Leads and Awareness objectives, all offering different goals to help bring in the best interaction with your ad. As an example, you’d use a Lead campaign if you want messages, calls, sign ups or an instant form whereas Traffic is good for link clicks and landing page views. Knowing exactly what outcome you need from your campaign will help select the correct objective, giving Facebook clear instructions and you clearer results.
Mistake 4: Weak Ad Creative
For some, the ad creative can be the part that trips businesses up with their Facebook Ads. Either you have a great creative but the setup is poor, or you have a great setup and the creative is poor. If you’re falling into the latter category, then this is where you’re making a mistake. Common issues with ad creative include:
- Unclear or an absence of a call to action
- No clear benefit conveyed to the audience
- Generic images that don’t stand out
- Confusing, overloaded graphic design
- Multiple messages in one ad
You have seconds to grab the attention of your audience member – remember they’re not on Facebook to buy, so your ad needs to stop them in their tracks whilst scrolling through posts from friends, family and pages they engage with regularly.
Fix: Once you know what it is you want to promote, ask yourself 3 things: Who is the ad for? What problem does it solve? What benefit does it provide?
Stick with one message, one offer and one goal – use high quality imagery, branded, simple designs and make your customer feel that they need your product or service. Touch on their pain points, solve them, and then direct them to exactly where they need to go. Pair this with a great set up, and you’ll be on track for success.
Mistake 5: Ignoring Results
You can’t build and run an ad and then ignore the results, leaving an ad that may be using a lot of budget but getting little results running in the background or stopping an ad that is bringing in results. Facebook Ads require regular results tracking, so you know what is and isn’t working so you can tweak and scale correctly. There’s also the case of focusing on the wrong data - likely you’ll be looking more towards likes, comments and shares, which, whilst important, are vanity metrics – you want to be looking more towards the things that actually matter such as your actionable metrics like conversions.
Fix: From the start, make sure your tracking is set up correctly so that you don’t run into any issues, and then focus your attention on the metrics that will align with your goals such as – in a leads campaign – the amount of leads, the cost per lead, and even cost per link click and click through rate. Getting this data tracked on a weekly basis can help guide you with the future of your campaigns, giving you the chance to see how your campaigns improve over time and giving you an indication of when to make those crucial changes to allow your ad to perform at its best.
Facebook Ad issues often aren’t often down to the complex or advanced settings but rather the simpler tasks, that whilst seemingly straightforward, also leave room for small errors that can change the way your campaign performs. By fixing these mistakes, you can run an ad that works for your business – allowing this to become a key part of your marketing strategy.