6 Mistakes You Are Making in Your Facebook Ads Campaign
Whether you are a small or an established business, you might have already used Facebook Ads to increase the traffic to your website and find more potential customers. Facebook Ads is one of the most popular advertising platforms, mostly because it is less expensive that other platforms like LinkedIn or Google Ads.
It also attracts many businesses because Facebook makes it look easy to start an ad campaign: all you have to do is boost one of your best performing posts and the platform will take care of the rest. However, from my experience, this is not the best way to have an optimized campaign that matches your target audience and ultimately, leads to the results you are expecting. This requires more work and will take more of your time but in the long term it will help you get the most out of your advertising budget.
In this blog post I will explain the most common mistakes I noticed businesses make in their Facebook Ads campaigns and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Choosing the wrong objective
When launching a new campaign, the first step is choosing the campaign’s objective. There are three broad categories of objectives that you can choose from: Awareness, Consideration or Conversions, each split into multiple smaller categories.
It is very important to pick the most relevant action that you want your audience to perform, the goal that matters the most for your business. The objective will define the campaign’s setup and will also be used to measure its success.
A trap that people easily fall into is not keeping their goal in mind all along. For example, your objective might be traffic: sending users to your website or landing page when clicking on an ad. However, you may get easily distracted by the number of likes and the engagement your post gets and ignore the fact that only a small part of the users actually visit your website. This is a very common mistake when using Facebook Ads, as it can be tempting to react as if it was a personal account. Remember, unless this is your business’ main goal, you shouldn’t use likes to measure your campaign’s success. Always check what happens next.
Personally, I would recommend always choosing an objective related to your website, like traffic or conversions. This way, besides developing your Facebook page, you make sure to also direct your audience to your website and not only rely on social media to grow your business. Even though it may be tempting to only keep an eye on your number of followers, leveraging your website has many advantages that you will be able to benefit from later on.
Mistake #2: Ads don’t match the marketing funnel steps
You might be familiar with the concept of marketing funnel. It is a visual representation of the buyer’s journey, from the moment they first get in touch with your brand, to the moment they become a paying customer.
When you create an ad within a Facebook Ads campaign, make sure you keep in mind the audience you are trying to reach. What do they already know about your brand? In other words, what step of the marketing funnel are they in?
If the answer is: they have no idea who you are yet, in your ad text you definitely should not talk to them as if they were familiar with your company. I see this very often when scrolling on Facebook, and you probably do too: for example, businesses that promote an event they are organizing, or offer a coupon code even though you have no idea who they are or what their product/service is. The problem with this approach is that the audience will not understand the message and it will just keep scrolling.
Now, why does this happen? Probably because Facebook is encouraging advertisers to boost their best performing posts in order to reach more people. But if you think about it, this is not always a good idea because these posts perform well among your audience, people who already liked your page and know your brand. When you show it to new users, they will not respond the same way.
In order to avoid this mistake, make sure you always ask yourself, when creating an ad, who your target audience is and which step of the marketing funnel they belong to. This way you will send the right message to the right people and improve your chances of getting the response you are hoping for.
Mistake #3: Not testing multiple ads
As I mentioned before, boosting a post is not the best way to advertise on Facebook. In order to have access to more settings and complete customization, you should use the Ads Manager instead.
The Ads Manager will allow you to create multiple campaigns, ad sets and ads. Creating several different ads is essential for any campaign. This will allow you to compare their performance and keep the best versions. You can test different formats, ad copy and images. When using a single ad, you have no way of knowing whether it’s performing well or if there is room for improvement. You can see the results, but without comparing the ad with other versions, they can be difficult to interpret.
Also, in the case of boosted posts, maybe it’s obvious that the ad is not performing well, but since you don’t have any alternatives, your only options are to keep it as it is or to stop showing the ad altogether. According to Facebook, “you can’t edit text, image(s) and video once your boost has been reviewed and published”. So, always test multiple versions of the same ad. I would recommend having at least three of them.
Mistake #4: Not using the Facebook pixel correctly
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code you can add to your website. According to Facebook, “it lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your advertising campaigns”. Why is it important?
- Once the pixel is set up, you can define conversions, which are the actions that matter most to your business. A conversion can be a sale, a form submission (e.g. Contact form), a newsletter sign-up or any other action that a user can perform on your website. Using the Facebook pixel, you can track these conversions and use the results to find out how your campaign is performing besides clicks and impressions. It can tell you which ads trigger the most conversions and therefore help you optimize your campaign and make informed decisions.
- You can also create audiences based on the pixel. They can be used for remarketing campaigns or to create broader audiences similar to the users who have already visited your website.
This is why the Facebook pixel is essential for your campaign’s success. If it is not set up correctly or if you don’t use it at all, you are missing out on very important information that can help you figure out if your marketing budget is actually providing good results or whether it should be focused on other ads, ad sets or even audiences instead. Without the pixel, you can see how users interact with your ads, but not the rest of their journey on your website.
Mistake #5: Monitoring the campaign results: either too often or not enough
When it comes to checking the results of the Facebook Ads campaign, I have noticed two types of behaviour:
- “Set and forget”: once the campaign is launched, the advertiser doesn’t make any updates for weeks or even months. This is wrong, because optimization is just as important as the setup of the campaign. Sometimes the best way to realize if you made a mistake in targeting, settings or ad copy is simply testing the campaign and analysing the results. It will also provide enough data for you to make informed decisions and be able to keep the best ads running. Also, if you display the same ads for months in a row, ad fatigue will lead to poor results. Especially on Facebook, where users aren’t looking to make a purchase right away and are just scrolling to catch up on their friends’ activity, seeing the same ad over and over again will only make them resent the brand and ignore the ad or hide it from their feed.
- Advertisers in the second category check their campaign results too often, even daily. Overanalysing will make you waste time and miss the big picture, since daily variations can happen even if there is nothing wrong with the campaign’s setup. Also, by doing this you are not letting Facebook’s algorithm do its job and finish its learning process. With every change the learning phase will start over and the algorithm will not be able to optimize the delivery of your ads to reach the best people and show up in the best placements. If you must monitor the results very often, you should at least try to not always make changes, but rather group multiple changes and apply them all at once.
So how often should you check the results of a Facebook Ads campaign? There is no right answer (sorry), but I would recommend between a few days and a week, and definitely not more than two weeks.
Mistake #6: Not taking your website into account
Even if you avoid the common mistakes above, you need to remember that your campaign is only one part of the picture. Maybe your setup is perfect, the ad copy matches your audience and the engagement is very high. There is still something you need to take into account: your website or landing page.
The website where the users end up is the next step of their journey. A poor website can ruin a perfectly executed ad campaign. There are many reasons why this might happen, like design, page speed, a mismatch between ad copy and website content and more. If you notice that users don’t convert, these are some aspects you can look into.
Make sure to also check traffic analytics using a tool like Google Analytics. It can give you precious information like the time users spend on your website, whether they visit other pages, the bounce rate and other useful data. For example, if you have many clicks on your ads but the average time spent on your website is 2 seconds, they probably clicked by mistake and immediately left the landing page, which is a waste of your ad spend.
Conclusion
You should now be able to avoid the most common mistakes in your Facebook Ads campaign. If you are not getting the results you were hoping for, maybe one of the issues above is to blame.
If you liked this blog post and found it useful, you can join the newsletter to receive my future articles on how to improve your digital marketing, from web design to marketing campaigns and content creation (and everything in between).
To find out more about what I do and how I can help you as a digital marketing consultant, you can find more information below.
