8 typical mistakes with Facebook Ads

8 common mistakes when launching fb ads - main image for article

Facebook advertising is undoubtedly one of the best online advertising platforms. You can target specific users based on what they see in their newsfeeds or what pages they like and interact with. But many businesses run Facebook ads without knowing the potential pitfalls, or worse, make the same mistakes over and over. If you are planning on starting an advertising campaign, it’s important to be aware of the common Facebook advertising mistakes marketers make when setting up their campaigns. In this article, We`ve listed the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Targeting too narrowly or not broadly enough

Remember, it’s impossible to cover everything at once, but using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is not the answer either. After all, too wide a coverage is not the same as the target audience. For example, if you work only in a particular city or region, even if your ad will see someone from the neighboring region, he still will not turn to you.

The second option is too many limitations and factors describing your target audience. This leads to the fact that many of your potential users will be “cut off” by the system.

To set up the right audience, do not use the function of automatic audience detection. At a minimum, you should specify such parameters:

Geography. It is advisable to confine yourself only to those territories where you really work.
Age. Many people set the able-bodied audience of 18-60 years old. But this is fundamentally wrong, because here you can identify several subgroups, and their interests are very different. Boldly narrow it down to the most interesting category.
Gender. Here, it would seem, everything is simple – you should specify who your main customers are men or women. But many people have problems with it. Here, you should describe your audience in terms of who makes the purchasing decision. Even if men are 51%, and women – 49%, in the first place is to “work” on the male audience.
Interests. This is where many people make a mistake. Not knowing what to specify, they leave this column blank. And it is with these filters that you can limit the audience.

Incorrectly chosen target

Setting a goal is the first thing you need to specify when setting up an ad campaign, so you need to be clear about what you plan to achieve by running ads. For example, if you want to get new subscribers, then engagement is important. But in this case, the network is not interested in further actions of the users. And if you want to send a potential client to a landing page, then it’s better to use conversion as a goal.

Why does the wrong target reduce the effectiveness of the campaign? Yes, because Facebook chooses those users to show ads who are most likely to perform the targeted action. For example, if you say you’re interested in “Watching videos”, then the social network will select from the following audience those who often watch different videos. But rest assured, the person won’t go any further than that.

Not responding to messages quickly enough

When customers visit your Facebook business page to communicate with you, they expect an immediate response from your company. We live in a world where immediate response is expected.

Customers may feel the need to contact your company via Facebook with any queries they have. Facebook is a tool that can be used for many purposes, one of which is a customer service platform. Many of our clients receive 20-40 Facebook messages in a weekend. People use Facebook to reach out to you.

Not responding quickly enough to user messages can create a negative impression and, most importantly, negatively impact your sales. Facebook has realized how important it is for businesses that have a Facebook page to respond to user posts and messages, and has created a tab on each page to display response times.

Too quick conclusions

Textbooks teach that once an advertising campaign is launched, you should evaluate its effectiveness and promptly decide whether to continue, adjust settings, or stop broadcasting altogether. Yes, you should certainly do this, so you don’t lose more. But there is a nuance here that inexperienced tweakers don’t take into account – it takes time for the metrics to show the real picture.
The thing is that within a few days there is a stabilization, for example, the graph of attendance can go up sharply, and then fall to the average actual figures. Approximately the same situation is with the unit price. So do not rush to make hasty conclusions – let the indicators level off. And it certainly takes more than a few hours or even a couple of days.

Trying to test too many things at once

Each audience is unique, so different people will respond differently to different types of ads. The vast majority of brands invest in Facebook ads displayed in the news feed or ads that appear in the right-hand column. At the same time, the platform’s functionality allows you to create more compelling ads and experiment with different multimedia options (such as videos or GIF animations).

Facebook released the results of an interesting study that says Champs Sports was able to improve the profitability of its advertising spending by replacing ad units displayed for 30 seconds with short videos lasting 6 seconds. The report contains the following information:

“The 6-second spot made the ads more memorable by 11%, thereby increasing the return on advertising investment by 12% and the click-through rate by 271%. This allowed the brand to achieve more effective results. By using 6-second videos, the company was also able to improve a number of other key metrics, including conversion rates, average basket value and click-through rates.”

Marketers using Facebook’s services are wasting money if they don’t do A/B testing. By selecting the advertising format that best fits your unique audience, you will greatly improve the effectiveness of your advertising budget.

As mentioned above, Facebook ads can be a good fit for your marketing strategy, especially with the regular addition of new features: search ads, video ads in the middle of a video ad, and other options. However, whether you use the new functionality or not, you should clearly understand how the platform works.

You will only get tangible results for your business and never exceed your advertising budget if you optimize your Facebook ad campaigns.

image with text each audience is unique, so different people will respond differently to different types of ads.

Not paying enough attention to the preparation of blog posts and creatives

Advertisements should be bright and interesting, draw attention, and evoke emotion. Try to hit the pain of your target audience. You can show the product in detail if it looks attractive.

If you want to be remembered, use branded images. Don’t put too much text on your creatives – otherwise the algorithm will downgrade their priority in the display. Also, according to Facebook Ads rules, text shouldn’t take up more than 20% of an image. There are services that can help you calculate text % on the image, for example Grid Image Checker Tool.

Texts should be short and to the point: you only have a few seconds to grab a user’s attention. Don’t just promise benefits, but provide proof. Do not forget to add a call to action.

Prepare different creatives for different placements: the ones you use for your newsfeed may not look good in Stories (for example, they won’t be properly framed and will lose part of the image). Don’t use Stories as your only placeholder.

It’s better to prepare different versions of creatives in advance: that way you can test them and find the most effective one. Don’t forget that creatives “burn out” pretty quickly, and they need to be changed in time.

Many ads with a small budget

It’s a mistake to think that if you split the available $100 into 20 campaigns, and create a few more ads in each of them, the result will be impressive. It really will be, only with a minus sign.

First, one person can’t effectively track a large number of ads running at the same time to remove unsuccessful ones (and it’s naive to assume that everything you run is insanely interesting to users, and they rush to do what you’re waiting for).

Second, budget breakdown leads to the fact that you have to set a small price per targeted action. And that is what allows (or doesn’t allow) you to compete with other advertisers for the same target audience.

The best option is to group audiences together for similar attributes. So you should form 2-3 groups. Next, for each of them to make up to 6 ads. After that, run them for A / B testing, it will help weed out the ineffective.

As for the price, it is worth listening to the recommendations of Facebook – if it warns that the cost is low in your settings, then it should be increased at least to the recommended. This is the only way for all the algorithms to work fully.

Too many changes in the advertising campaign

Facebook offers a wide range of marketing opportunities, but the platform doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be successful the first time you launch an ad campaign. Facebook uses machine-learning technology, but it takes time for the system to identify user reactions and make adjustments to achieve high performance. Facebook calls this process the “learning phase”, where the system gathers information and evaluates performance metrics. The platform’s website states the following:

“The learning phase is the period during which the ad content display system becomes familiar with your ad campaign. During this phase, the system searches for the best ways to display your ads, so the CPA (price per action) may not be good enough. The learning phase comes every time you add new ads or make significant changes to previously added ones.”

According to research by KlientBoost, it takes 24-48 hours to fully optimize an ad campaign. Impatient marketers who run short campaigns or make frequent changes to existing settings never reach the point of full optimization, wasting their budgets on unoptimized ads.

You may be tempted to make quick changes to an ad campaign, especially when there’s a lot of money at stake. More often than not, however, it’s better to wait or run campaigns at specific points in time to ensure optimal results.

Conclusions

The most important thing to keep in mind, whether you’ve never done Facebook Ads before or are a veteran at it, is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to this platform. Our goal with this article was to bring attention to some of the challenges you may run into as you’re getting started, but your mileage may vary.

image with text let IM4U Marketing Agency take your Facebook Ads to the next level!

IM4U Digital Marketing Agency is here to run your Facebook Ads

Let IM4U Marketing Agency take your Facebook Ads to the next level! Our agency is ready to help you. For more information, just call us, and we’ll help you set up your Facebook ads the right way.

16.02.2023

201

im4udma