6 things you should never try with Facebook ads
Facebook advertising is one of the most popular ways for businesses to promote their products and services. With its huge suite of advertising options, easy to use platform and ability to benefit businesses of any size, it’s no surprise that 93% of social marketers use this tool today.
However, for all its convenience and glory, it’s actually quite difficult to get the positive results you’re hoping for. In order to achieve success, you need to understand exactly how to use this platform correctly and put best practices to use.
Below you’ll find some of the most common mistakes that prove detrimental to an ad campaign. Read on to learn what to avoid when setting up an ad on Facebook.
#1 Choosing the Wrong Campaign Objective
The first choice presented to you will be the campaign objective. Your objective needs to align with your overall goal for the campaign. It’s crucial to understand why you’re running this ad and what you want to gain from it before choosing the objective.
Why does this matter so much? The campaign objective determines the bidding options and optimization efforts that you will have throughout the entire rest of the campaign process. Choosing wrong can make or break a campaign’s success.
Each objective focuses on the particular goal you have for your campaign. For example, do you ultimately want to increase subscriptions, have users buy products from your site, or create brand awareness? Knowing the outcome before you begin the process significantly determines the result.
#2 Wrong Targeting
Who do you want your ad to be viewed by? Facebook offers unparalleled options for targeting, based off of information that users put on their own profiles, as well as their actions on Facebook and other sites.
If you already know your audience, you can target them effectively. Facebook allows you to target based on location, age, gender, interests, and much more. While it seems like a no brainer to target the largest groups possible to reach the biggest audience, this is actually a common mistake.
In fact, rather than targeting broad terms like “cameras” or “baseball”, it’s best to target niche and specific interests. For example, choosing a type of camera, like Nikon or Olympus, or a specific baseball team like the Yankees or Red Sox, gives you a much better chance of reaching people who are actually going to take action on your ad.
If you don’t already know your audience, you should learn about them rather than guessing. One way to do that is to create a customer survey to gain the necessary information to place a targeted ad.
#3 Putting all eggs in one basket
Facebook allows you to run multiple campaigns at one time, which we strongly recommend you take advantage of. A/B testing will help you understand which campaigns are performing well, and which aren’t, allowing you to further understand your audience and refine your objectives and targeting methods.
It’s important to realize that all campaigns, no matter how great they are performing, will drop off after a certain amount of time. You will need to reinvest in campaigns that are working, and let go of the ones that aren’t.
We suggest you allocate your budget in the following way:
- 80% performance: Investing and reinvesting in campaigns that are delivering a great ROI
- 20% discovery: Testing new designs, tactics and targets to discover new potentially profitable opportunities
Oversaturating your audience will degrade ad performance over time as people reach a limit with how much information they can digest. Therefore, you’ll need to constantly re-structure your ads to make them feel new, fresh and interesting. Which brings us to our next point.
#4 Neglecting to update creatives
It’s vital that you deliver new information to your audience, often. Nobody wants to see the same ad over and over again, and it’s amazing how a quick picture switch or copy change can breathe life back into a campaign.
Your campaigns will perform at peak levels if you refresh your creatives at least once every two weeks. This will prevent ad fatigue, which produces a significant drop in frequency, conversions and ROI, resulting in a rise in ad costs overall.
So, how can you refresh your creatives successfully? Here are several ways to inexpensively revive your ads.
Revise your ad copy
- Add or remove price details, emojis, products or your brand name
- Switch the voice from first person to third person or vice versa
- Change the CTA verbiage
- Turn statements to questions or vice versa
Edit your ad Image
- Add filters, text, stickers, quirky backgrounds, or switch the image entirely
- Add or remove your brand logo
- Turn existing photos and videos into gifs
- Rotate Ad Formats — Facebook offers single image, video, carousel, slideshow, and canvas.
#5 Not Using the Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is one of the most impressive and influential took at your disposal. Ignoring it would be a huge mistake.
The Pixel is essentially a piece of code, provided by Facebook, for you to place on your website or within your FB ad. This code will then capture vital information via the use of cookies to track users and their interactions within your site or ad.
You can use this data to track conversions, optimize ads, gain a better understanding of your target audience, and remarket to people who have taken some action, but haven’t completed your campaign goal yet.
As we mentioned above, understanding your target audience is one of the most important factors in an ad’s success. The Facebook Pixel gives you invaluable insights into your audience, which will ultimately help you improve your targeting efforts and increase your ROI.
Another type of ad that the Facebook Pixel helps with is the ‘lead generation’ type. Lead generation ads work by asking people to fill out a form, essentially offering the business to gather enough information from a user in order to follow up with them. If this is your objective from the get go, you can use the Facebook Pixel code on your website before you run the ad to gather important information about your audience. Then, Facebook will generate effective results outlining your audience’s habits and site engagement, which you can then use to create and deliver a highly effective ad that converts.
#6 Not working with marketing software
As amazing as Facebook Ads are, they are admittedly quite confusing to beginners. On top of that, Facebook is constantly changing their platform, algorithms, user interface and options for creating ads. These continuous updates are difficult to keep track of, and if you don’t know the rules, you won’t be able to play the game well, even if you are a seasoned player.
Luckily, there are many marketing agencies/software that are available to help you on this journey.
Here’s a few that we highly recommend:
- CrowdFire — To schedule your social media posts in advance, saving you tons of time and stress.
- Adespresso — To connect you with experts who will help you manage and improve your Facebook campaigns.
- Leadza — To hire your own person virtual Facebook ad assistant to help implement, optimize and scale your ads.
Get these steps right and you’ll be well on your way to Facebook ad success!
