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Facebook Ads – 14 Mistakes You Didn't Know You Were Making
- July 15, 2021
Facebook Ads is Facebook’s paid tool that allows you to create campaigns and promote them, both on Facebook and Instagram. But if you’re creating campaigns, you should already know that. So let’s cover the main mistakes made on this platform and what you need to know to avoid them.
1. Audience segmentation
It is very common that the targeting of the campaign’s audience is not done in the most effective way. Here are some points you should consider when setting this parameter when creating a Facebook campaign:
- Knowing your target audience is the first step to creating an effective campaign. It is important that you try to know the consumption habits, interests, geographic location, age group, and several other factors about your potential customers. In order to accomplish this, do market research – never assume that your audience’s interests are the same as yours. Make sure it is based on real data.
- You should take into account the size of your campaign’s target audience: it should be neither too broad nor too small. Use and abuse the pointer that Facebook presents, which tells you the potential reach of your ad and ensures that you define an appropriately sized audience. If the displayed dimension is too broad, use interests, job titles, gender, age and/or location to filter your ad’s audience. Furthermore, it is important to take into account the budget you have available for the campaign and adapt the audience size depending on that factor.
- Another thing you should know is that the interests you select when creating your campaign do not always correspond to the “likes” that users put on Facebook pages – they also include people who showed interest in that topic or in that company/brand through other activities online.
- The size of each interest also varies widely and there are some with very large dimensions. In these cases, it is necessary to better segment the audience, selecting other options – for example, through the “Filter Public” option, where Facebook allows you to select someone who has a certain interest/position/behavior, but who, at the same time, also have another interest/position/behavior.
- If your campaign is international, don’t forget to adapt the language and content, depending on the culture and habits of the ad’s destination country.
Read more about lookalike audiences and their advantages to optimize your campaigns
2. Competition Analysis
Keep an eye on your competition – what they are running, what paid ads they are doing, and how they communicate with their customers.
3. Ad Creative
It becomes increasingly difficult to get an ad that stands out among so many posts on social media. Nonetheless, there are a few things you should consider when creating your ad image or video and text:
- Your images or videos must respect the dimensions recommended by Facebook so that they have the necessary quality that allows the viewer to perceive the content presented in them.
- The text should be appealing so that it immediately catches the eye of the viewer and can convert – pay attention to the illustrations and colors you use and don’t include too much text in the images. You can include your logo in the content– even if people don’t know your company or brand, it’s a way to make it known.
- You must not deceive the public by promising things that are not true.
- A/B testing is a good way to see which creatives work best in terms of adhesion, CTR (Click Through Rate), and CPC (Cost per Click).
- The message you use is another very important factor. This shouldn’t be too long, but it should be direct and informative – make sure you include the crux you want to communicate so that the person across the screen clicks on the image. Don’t forget to adapt your writing to the audience – consider whether you should use more technical or more informal language.
- Vary the topic: don’t always use the same topics. Your public will not want to see the same thing all the time. Plus, the results will tend to diminish, and you run the risk of losing followers and potential customers.
4. Ads Optimization
Another common mistake in creating Facebook ads is not adapting, updating, or correcting the ads over their lifetime:
- It is important that you monitor the campaigns on a daily basis and that you make small optimizations that will allow you to improve their performance.
- The learning phase of the ad is a factor that you should be aware of – when the ad goes into “limited learning” it means that it is not receiving enough optimization events. You can optimize it by making small changes to the target audience and/or increasing the value of the daily budget.
- To tailor your campaign’s target audience, you can analyze your ad statistics and see which age range or gender generated the best results.
5. Setting Goals
One of the most important things when you run a campaign, is to set goals, conversion targets, and a budget, so you can then measure and analyze your results.
You must also define the metrics that are most important to you and your business and keep track of their results.
6. Landing Pages
Landing Pages are very useful tools and still very little used.
A Landing Page is a page that contains all the necessary, but summarized, information about the product or service you are promoting. You can direct users to this page via the ad instead of directing them to your website. They usually contain a form that visitors can fill in, where they leave their contacts.
The chances of converting a click via a Landing Page are higher.
Learn more about the importance of creating a website and landing pages in this article.
7. Budget creation
Budgeting for a campaign can be a challenge, so here there are a few things you should be aware of:
- You shouldn’t set too low a budget for a campaign. Sometimes it’s better to set a higher budget and shorten the campaign’s duration than to leave it active longer with a lower value.
- When setting your budget, you should also take into account the size of the audience – if it’s too large, setting a daily budget that’s too low can compromise the effectiveness of your ad.
8. Use of a single Ad Set
This is a common mistake for beginners. You shouldn’t have all your ads concentrated in a single Ad Set.
Facebook will likely assign different values to your ads within the same Set. In other words, it will make your task of analyzing the ads more difficult and will cause you to draw wrong conclusions. Bet on the creation of different sets of ads.
9. Test
- It is important to test various components of the ads. But be careful, never test two or more factors at the same time – you’ll end up not knowing what worked and what didn’t.
- The tests help you understand the most suitable audiences for your business, what types of content those audiences prefer and what their interests are. You can test factors such as images, copy, Call To Action, and even Landing Pages.
- Leave the ad active for +/- 72 hours without making any changes – Facebook’s algorithm needs time to “learn” your audience and generate results. Furthermore, it is unlikely that you will be able to draw reliable conclusions about audience preferences if the ad is active for a short time.
10. Boring ads
It’s important to keep in mind that people don’t use social media to see ads. Therefore, your ads should be appealing:
- Don’t use repetitive texts.
- Don’t clutter your images with too much text.
- Don’t use too many Call to Action
- Don’t leave the same ad active for too long.
- Content is important too!
Even when it’s hard to measure whether people have seen your ad too often, one of the signals is when you optimize your ads and the results don’t increase.
11. Facebook Pixel
Pixel is a tool that Facebook provides, which you can (and should) put on your website so that it allows you to collect more data about the visitors and what they do while they browse.
This tool allows you, for example, to count how many people have added items to the cart, how many purchasde, and how many left the cart without completing it.
12. Choice of Ad Objective
It is quite common for people to choose the wrong objective for the ad they are creating. First, you must define what is your purpose: what do you expect from that ad? Then align the purpose with the options that Facebook presents and select the goal that makes the most sense for your business and for that specific ad.
13. Results and Metrics
Many people create ads and then don’t analyze important results and metrics.
You should define which metrics are most important depending on the type of ad you’ve posted and review them regularly to understand where and how you can maximize your results.
14. Highlights of the Offer
Explore the highlights of your offer. You must highlight the main factors in your ad that differentiate you from your competition.
Test, test, test
Before creating a campaign, you must define the target audience, budget, and ad objectives. During its duration, don’t forget to test several factors (one thing at a time), track the results and make some optimizations when necessary.
Don’t forget, there’s not just one way to do things – try different plans and draw conclusions about the best way to approach your audience.
Do you have your ads account disabled? Learn how to unlock a Facebook account in this article