Facebook Ads Mistakes You’re Probably Making

It’s no surprise that with over 2 billion active monthly users brands keep coming back to Facebook. It’s a great platform, but are you getting the most out of It?

Facebook Advertising has a prominent place in any digital strategy. It’s a powerful way to target segmented audiences and is one of the more generally cost-effective ways to get eyes toward your products or services. With so many opportunities provided by Facebook, it’s easy to miss the mark. That’s why we are showing you six mistakes you might be making with Facebook Advertising. 

1. Setting the Spend at Campaign Level

When you create Facebook advertising the default option is set for spending to be at the ad set level. This means that you dictate how much should go on each audience. While this sounds like a great option, you’re actually hindering Facebook’s machine learning to determine the best audience for your business.  

Setting the spend at the campaign level allows it to be spread across multiple ad sets and ads within the campaign. This does not mean you need to spend more — but it will guarantee that your spending goes further by giving you better learnings over time.

2. Loading All Of Your Audience Into One Set 

You might be tempted to load all your audiences into your first ad set. But did you know that stacking up interests into one audience can have an adverse effect on your results? It does not allow you to see which exact audiences performed well and where to spend next.

Our tip is to split ten different interests into ten ad sets. This will allow you to see the best ones and find out what really works for your brand. Similarly, you should never have existing audiences (website traffic, email lists, etc) stacked in with new and lookalike audiences. This is a huge no as it dilutes the performance of your strongest audiences.

3. Only Targeting One Wide-Reaching Remarketing Audience 

Every single remarketing audience will respond differently. From website traffic, email lists, social engagement, and video content — each remarketing audience has unique properties. 

Even within these smaller groups, for example, your 7-day website traffic is a much warmer audience than your 30-day website traffic or your 90-day traffic. If you’re not serving different types of ads to these users you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Those who have very recently engaged with your brand should be served conversion-focused ads. This is in contrast to those audiences that are 10 days or more plus. For these, we recommend trying to use a softer approach such as a discount code or similar to lure them back in.

4. Running the Same Ad Creative For Months 

No one likes seeing the same ads over and over again. Just like annoying adverts on TV playing over and over again, you quickly learn to tune them out. This is why it’s so important to constantly reinvigorate your creativity. 

Not refreshing your creative is a major issue we see in brands running their own ads. As a general rule, we like to refresh creative for every $1000 spent. To do this we create three or more variations that will allow you to gain more learnings and drive future insight. By doing this you can see what types of ads work best for your audience — for example, you could compare carousel and video formats. By split testing your ads you can learn exactly how to target your audience.

5. Running Ads on the Same Daily Spend Without Scheduling 

Setting a daily spend is great. It means you don’t have to worry about over or under-spending. However, this does not take into account the trends of your audiences. For example, are they more active on weekends or during business hours?

By setting a lifetime spend, you can schedule on which days down to the very hour, and your budget is maximized. We have seen massive results with this simple rule and it’s something we always do as best practice for all of our clients.

6. Not Tracking Conversion Events With a Pixel 

Last, and by no means least, conversion tracking is the most important tool at your disposal to ensure Facebook Ad success. 

If you have worked with an agency, or are self-taught with Facebook Ads then you should know that pixel is a piece of code that goes on your site or app to track traffic and performance. Yet, we still see a huge number of brands that do not have one set up on their website and as a result are throwing money at the Facebook wall, without any data or insight into the results they are getting. 

A fully functioning pixel will allow you to build those previously mentioned remarketing audiences from your site, but also crucially tell you how many conversions your ads are actually achieving. Our first point of call for any Social Advertising client is to ensure their pixel is in place and working correctly. Often this requires Development skills, so we don’t recommend doing it yourself!

This is why we have a dedicated team of experts to ensure you are getting powerful results on your Facebook advertising spend. Let us fix these issues for you with our Social Media Advertising service.