Avoid the Pitfalls: 4 Common Facebook Ads Mistakes & How to Fix Them

The number of users on Facebook and Instagram has been increasing at an average rate of around 10% annually. These social networking platforms are increasingly becoming popular hubs for communication, information search, and transacting business. In line with this, not only are their interfaces and features getting optimized, but their advertising utilities are also undergoing significant enhancement. Whereas it was formerly sufficient to merely hit the “promote the publication” button, modern advertising requires a more strategic and well-prepared approach.

To facilitate seamless targeted advertising, you can leverage your Facebook Ads account effectively. To ensure that all your advertising efforts proceed as planned, this article will discuss the most typical missteps. It’s essential that you familiarize yourself with them so that you never make them yourself.

Mistake 1. Putting Photos in the Wrong Order on the Carousel

The carousel setup offers the advantage of exhibiting the product from diverse perspectives and delivering the service in a systematic order. It allows for narrating a story, outlining the stages of purchasing, and underscoring the unique featuring attributes of a product, thus providing an array of methods for information display. Furthermore, there is an option to activate the “Automatically show the best performing cards first” item. When activated, this setting arranges the display of creatives based on declining efficiency. It is crucial to note that this option is enabled by default. Therefore, to personally determine the sequence of the cards, one must deselect this option.

Mistake 2. Incorrect Budget Optimization

In the case of orchestrating a campaign that caters to specific sales or promotions, it’s integral for the promoter to generate the highest quantity of conversions in the shortest time frame. This objective generally involves the deployment of the “campaign budget optimization” feature. By leveraging this feature, advertisers have the capacity to engage in multiple auctions simultaneously. A prevalent pitfall is the habit of setting one comprehensive budget for the entire campaign duration, rather than splitting it into a daily budget allocation.

Opting for an all-encompassing budget for the entire campaign duration could potentially stifle the campaign’s capacity for self-learning. The repercussion of such an approach could result in diminished conversions, inflating the cost of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

A more pragmatic setting option would be: daily budget coupled with optimization strategies or a full-time budget accompanied by consistent impressions.

Mistake 3. The Wrong Campaign Target Audience

How to define your ideal target market? Is it organic traffic, conversion rates, or sales figures? Deciding on your objective is pivotal when initiating a fresh marketing campaign. Yet, appropriately considering the purchasing funnel is just as crucial when making this choice.

Let’s take for instance, you’re dealing in the housing market (real estate) or automotive industry. Choosing conversions and sales as your ultimate goal might not be the most strategic choice. The buyer’s journey in these sectors is often elongated and transpires across several stages. Therefore, it’s crucial to guide prospects towards a purchase in a phased manner. You could kick off with a brand awareness campaign or driving traffic as initial steps to present your product, highlight potential advantages, and most importantly, give your audience ample time to mull over their options. Following this, you can roll out a “lead generation” campaign aimed at collecting prospective customer’s information. After engaging with account managers, evaluating the benefits and drawbacks, the prospect would then be prepared to finalize a purchase.

However, if your advertisement is focused on commodities with a brief decision-making timeframe (like fashion apparel, children’s toys, compact home gadgets, etc.), you could directly opt for a sales-centric goal. Concurrently, it’s vital to devise compelling ad creatives that will spark customers’ buying impulses.

Mistake 4. Audience Overlap

To understand this better, let’s consider a hypothetical scenario. Assume you manage a broad audience advertising campaign focused on residents of Australia between the ages of 18 to 25, alongside an interest-based campaign directed at the same demographic. Under these circumstances, the chance for users from the latter campaign to view your adverts twice escalates. Consequently, you’re effectively paying double to display ads to a single user. The same redundancy exists in retargeting initiatives where customers who’ve already made a purchase aren’t removed from the retargeting list.

Audience overlap is something frequently encountered when campaigns kick off simultaneously. This is particularly true when these are directed at a large set of audiences and involve dynamics like look-alike audiences, interest-based and look-alike, retargeting and look-alike, or any other blending of the campaigns mentioned.

When dealing with parallel geotargeting campaigns, it becomes crucial to strategically distinguish one audience group from the other.

The extent of audience overlap can be determined via a simple process. Simply opt for multiple audiences and click on the ‘Show Audience Overlap’ feature. In general, an overlap of 10% or below is deemed as tolerable.

Summary

Avoiding mistakes at the outset is less complicated than dealing with their aftermath. Therefore, while structuring your advertising campaign, be sure to review and consider the following points:

• Should you need uniformity in your carousel, deselect the option ‘Automatically show best performing cards first.’
• When using an accelerated or optimized budget, it is advisable to adopt a daily budget strategy.
• Establishing your sales funnel should be a priority before determining the goal for your campaign.
• Regularly inspect for possible audience overlaps.