Facebook Ads have the capacity to exponentialise your business growth, revenue and reach. If you’re choosing to invest in this avenue, know that Facebook campaigns are a multifaceted process. Due to this, we’ve identified 6 common Facebook ads mistakes people make. To ensure you and your business does not succumb to these, we’ve outlined them below.
1. Not Monitoring & Tracking Ads
Tracking and monitoring the progress of your campaigns is an essential part of any marketing strategy. The effectiveness of the campaign will decrease over time without consistent monitoring and optimisation, as a result causing Facebook ad fatigue.
To ensure the ads are monitored accurately, Facebook Pixels are a MUST in any successful campaign. The pixel is installed in the backend of a website, where it tracks customer behaviour and provides useful insights.
This information is then sent back to Facebook. As Facebook learns from the pixel over time, the platform is able to show ads to people who are most likely to convert. Ensuring your Pixel is set up correctly and collecting customer data will ultimately make or break your campaign.
2. Targeting The Wrong Audience
You wouldn’t sell cat food to a dog owner. Just like you wouldn’t sell glasses to someone with 20-20 vision.
Marketing to the wrong target audience is a very common mistake being made when it comes to Facebook ad marketing.
Jason Keath, CEO and founder of Social Fresh, has dealt with this first hand. Living and running his business from New York City, he found he was receiving a Facebook lead from people who lived in places like Aspen, Colorado. Instances like this reflect the result of inaccurate location targeting, therefore wasting ad spend on dead leads.
On the other end of the spectrum, you could market to a target audience that can be too small or too broad. To ensure money isn’t wasted on people who may not be interested in your product, balancing targeting and size is vital. Thankfully, Facebook has built-in marketing tools that allow you to view audience sizes according to their tracked interests.
3. Not Image Testing
Your images are the first thing potential customers are going to see on their cluttered feeds. They capture, draw attention and communicate exactly what the purpose of the ad is about in a split second.
A/B testing is an effective way to understand what’s resonating with your target audience. Ways to test ads include slight image variation and different ad copy. For more definitive results, keep changes minimal. Otherwise, it will be difficult to distinguish which visual and text elements are contributing to performance.
Once the data is evaluated from the testing phase, switch off certain ad variations that are under-performing and allocate that budget in a more efficient way. Overlooking the importance of A/B testing is a crucial mistake often made by individuals.
4. Poor Budget Distribution
The most common overall goal of Facebook ads is to increase sales. Rather than splitting the budget across all ad sets within a campaign, distributed based on performance.
One symptom of an underperforming campaign is reckless spending. To ensure you are getting value out of your budget, start with a minimum daily budget and increase incrementally, based on success.
5. Targeting Everyone With The Same Message
Depending on the campaign set up, including customers who’ve already bought from your business in the targeting can be a waste of time and money. Depending on how familiar your audience is with your brand, dictates the messaging they see. Therefore it is important to create a “customer” audience and exclude them from ads where appropriate.
Additionally, continuing to show ads to people who’ve already purchased or converted can be annoying and negatively impacts the ad based on interaction and feedback. This can happen in a couple of ways:
– Relevance rating
– Overall performance of the ad
To ensure you are giving Facebook the best chance at optimising your ad, create audiences based on purchase behaviour (e.g. buying a specific product or submitting a lead form).
6. Lack of Strategy
Finally, another crucial mistake that is commonly made is not having a specific campaign objective and concise strategy to achieve your business goals. When it comes to Facebooks, goals aren’t necessarily monetary. They could include:
- New “Likes” and page engagement
- Post-level engagement
- Direct messages
- Brand awareness
- Event Responses and much more
Understanding how the result will impact and align with your business’s goals is crucial in determining the best ad campaign strategy.
If you’d like more help implementing these Facebook ads tips or want to tap into an experienced team for advice on where to begin or how to improve, click here to book your free marketing consultation and discover how we can help.
