Have you picked up running and optimising your Facebook marketing? Let’s look at some common mistakes advertisers make and how to avoid them.
You spend a ton of money on a Facebook ad campaign hoping to generate a lot of leads but end up with little to no results. It seems like you just flushed your advertising budget down the drain.
You’re not the only one! And there are some common mistakes advertisers make to land in this space.
1) Start with a clear objective
Facebook has a number of ways to optimise your goals. Sometimes these options can get confusing. Choosing the right campaign objective can be a huge step in the right direction.
To choose the right objective in Facebook, start with your business goal from this campaign. Do you want to drive traffic to your website, increase conversion or run a one-off promotion? Resulting goals in Facebook can range from increased brand awareness to engagement and traffic to site as well as bookings. Remember, not every campaign can get you bookings – conversion should not be your only goal.
2) Running a stale or less relevant creative
Unlike Google, Facebook and Instagram are not intent based platforms. Users don’t intentionally come to them to search for something. They come to browse and your ad is served to them if they meet your criteria. Creating engaging content is imperative to the success of any social media campaign. Not just brand content, think influencer posts and guest-created or similar authentic content ideas that will strike the right chord with your audience.
Another key factor for campaigns underperforming is stale ads. No one likes being served the same ad over and over again. Keep changing your ad creative – particularly for long-running campaigns – to keep them fresh. There are a number of design tools (e.g. Canva) and free stock image sites that you can use when refreshing creatives.
3) Over segmenting your audience
Targeting the right audiences is critical to any successful Facebook campaign. Going too broad, without demographic, geographic, interest or engagement based filters applied could mean you are delivering your ad to too many irrelevant people.
However, another common mistake advertisers make on Facebook is over-segmentation – creating too many niche audiences. This would lead for your ad to not exit the learning phase and ad delivery costs (CPM) will be very high. Whist its good to test audiences, don’t make them too small.
4) Not checking for audience overlaps
Building different audiences in Facebook is simple. However, sometimes users fall into multiple different targeting options and based on your setup, could be showing up in multiple different groups. This can make the success of your targeting unclear and also lead to ad fatigue sooner.
Use Facebook’s Audience Overlap Tool to assess your target audiences and cross-over users. Make exclusions from ad sets as required to remove this overlap.
5) Lack of funnels in your strategy
Facebook has tons of different campaign objectives, each with their own unique focus, but in the best accounts, all of these campaigns work in concert with each other to create a full buying journey. So, if you create awareness campaigns, make sure to follow-through with suitable engagement and conversion ads too.
6) Not having a test and learn approach
Good digital marketing practice demands continuous experimentation to optimise your campaigns. Facebook is no different. Make sure you continually test elements of your campaign, be it the goal, delivery via audiences or placement via creative. A successful test does not mean implementing the winning candidate; it means implementing and then re-testing the winning candidate.
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7) Not tracking correctly
As with any marketing or other paid tactics, you’ll want to track KPIs from the day of the ads launch until the moment it ends to ensure your investment is effectively generating ROI. To do this requires the right tracking to be set-up. Make sure you set-up ads using UTM parameters and always look at both web analytics as well as Facebook insights when looking for ideas to improve.
Parting words
Facebook ads when done right can bring in amazing results and can lead to the fast growth of a business. The above tips are a start to ensure you stay on the path to success.