5 Mistakes Startups Make with Facebook Advertising
Startups are always struggling to allocate some budget for their online marketing activities, especially the early stage ones, it is important that they optimize their small budgets and spend very carefully. I have worked directly with over 30 startups for the past few years I noticed a trend in mistakes when it comes to managing Facebook campaigns. Here’s a list of the top 5 and I urge everyone to read until the end and share it with your friends who would benefit from this information.
1. Spending money on social objectives instead of business objectives. (For example; page likes, engagement instead of app installation, conversion)
Many startups and companies believe that the starting point for their Facebook marketing activities is acquiring fans, this is a huge misconception. This wouldn’t be a major issue if you are a huge corporation with enough money to go around, but it becomes a serious pitfall if you have limited budget and you make the decision to spend it here. You need to identify your business objectives as a startup. The page likes is just a number, if they’re not your target audience who engage with your brand and use your service, you won’t reach them not even a small percent. So start spending directly on your business objective, whether it’s a website conversion or app installs, if the audience like your service, they will eventually connect with you on Facebook without you having to pay for it, but you can’t judge the performance of your campaign based on how many page likes you acquire because this is not the objective, which brings me to the second mistake…
2. Multiple objectives in the same campaign.
If your objective is website traffic you should monitor the link clicks and the Facebook referrals from your website analytics, that’s it, if you’re getting the traffic you’re looking for, congratulations you have a successful campaign. The mistake campaign managers fall into is assume that campaign is not doing well because the engagement on the ad is low or you’re not getting page likes, this is not what you’re optimizing for and you should only have one objective in each campaign. If your website offers different “services”, for example you want to increase the number of registered users on your website and you also have a blog that you want people to visit and read without registering, this mean that you have two objectives and you can’t successfully achieve both in one campaign, so you have to run two campaigns; one for the website traffic and the other for website conversions.
3. Not integrating Facebook (SDK and pixels) to measure their campaigns performance.
It’s very important to evaluate the performance of your campaign all the way to the end of the conversion funnel, sometimes the numbers on the advertising analytics dashboard look impressive but the users could be dropping off after the first or second click, therefore, you must integrate your website/app with Facebook and measure all the important events on your website that comes from the Facebook campaign, this way you will better decide whether to allocate more budget for Facebook or not.
4. Using the wrong ad format
I see this mistake all the time, startups advertising photo and video posts with a link in the post caption, instead of link posts; I understand it’s important to showcase your brand in beautiful visuals and designs but you can still do that by resizing these visuals to a link thumbnail dimensions, you can also use a video as a link thumbnail. Another point related to ads format is; startups always miss to explore the carousel ads which let you feature and advertise different images and sections on your website in the same ad unit, this gives you the chance to showcase more products and get creative in capturing more attention.
5. Targeting a very small or very broad audience
The final common mistake is the extremes when it comes to targeting. Your ad must be relevant to the target audience, but at the same time if your campaign target audience is too small the campaign reach will be very limited which will cause the cost to increase, so make sure to utilize the right targeting options. Try to test different ways using interests and behavior targeting, also consider retargeting if you have good number of users on your website or app.
Try to avoid these mistakes and don’t be afraid to test different strategies, you will see the positive effect on your campaign performance and this should reflect directly on your business objective. Have you done any of these mistakes before? Tell us how the change affected your business performance.
About The Author
Roula Al Khatib help brands achieve business objectives through social advertising. While working as the Head of Advertising at the Online Project; a regional Social Media Agency, she managed over three million dollars in Facebook & Twitter advertising, the advertising campaigns were for regional and global brands like Mercedes Benz Middle East, Zain Telecom, Swarovski Middle East, IKEA, Nescafe Arabia and many other local brands in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE and Oman.
In addition to the agency advertising experience, Roula helped over 30 startups from all over the world in their online marketing plans over the period of five years, many of these startups are now successful online businesses.
Currently she works as a freelancer working with e-Commerce businesses and online startups such as tasmeemme.com, sporter.com gingerlining.com and others.
