Top 10 Facebook Ad Mistakes Marketers Should Avoid
When getting into Facebook advertising, you may get many misleading tips. Without any experience, marketers and business owners can easily get lost. You may assume that it’s easy: you’ll set a budget and choose your preferences. Well, that’s the first mistake that marketers make with Facebook Ads. It takes some research and lots of experimenting before you figure out how things work for your specific project.
Learning from the mistakes of others is always a good place to start. We’ll list 10 common mistakes that marketers make with Facebook Ads.
1. Focusing Solely on the Brand
Facebook users are flooded by ads. They hate the “me, me, me” approach. Many marketers focus solely on the brand, and they forget the 80/20 rule.
Make the campaign 20% about your brand and 80% about the audience. When you suggest solutions that improve their lifestyle, you’ll get their attention.
2. Over-Segmenting Your Audience
Facebook allows you to segment your audience in several ad groups, so you’ll deliver the right message to the right lead. Many marketers get carried away with this feature. By segmenting your audiences too far, you’ll unnecessarily complicate the entire advertising and analytics process.
3. Not Optimizing for Different Devices
Clearly, a huge percentage of Facebook users access the platform via mobile devices. Most of them use the app, but what about those who access their profiles via Chrome and Safari? If you’re not optimizing your ad creative for all platforms, you’re missing out.
Safari extensions, in particular, may close unexpectedly if an ad blocker has been installed. Learn what to do if you face such issues with the browser.
4. Not Determining a Value Proposition
By focusing on being creative, marketers often forget about the classic rules of proper advertising.
Should someone choose to buy your product, they must receive a certain value. Your Facebook Ad campaign should underline and promote that value as an advantage over competitive brands.
5. Not Specifying the Targeting
Unspecific targeting is one of the most common (and most serious) mistakes in Facebook Advertising. Targeting the fans of your page and hitting the Boost button is far from enough.
A successful social media marketing campaign takes a lot of work! You’ll need to get deep into Ads Manager to specify the audience you want to target. In the best-case scenario, you want to develop a custom audience that combines your current customers, previous buyers and leads, and website visitors.
6. Optimizing the Ads too Frequently
Yes; Facebook Ads are a lot of work. But constantly tweaking the parameters is a common mistake that marketers make. They change the targets, budgets, and bids too frequently.
Why is this a mistake? It takes some time for a specific parameter tweak to deliver results. You have to focus on its separate analytics and connect how it works with other parameters. By changing nuances too often, you won’t know what helped you achieve success, and what caused a drop in effectiveness.
7. Forcing too Many Ads with a Small Budget
How much does Facebook advertising cost? No one has a specific answer to the question. The price depends on the needs of your brand, your marketing goals, and the particular campaign. One thing is for sure: you can’t invest $20 and run several ads on that budget.
Let’s say you want to achieve a $5 per lead conversion rate. In that case, you need around $40 as a daily budget for a single ad set.
8. Ignoring the Importance of Budget Controls
Facebook offers an extreme range of budgeting options. Newbie advertisers often find them confusing. Not investing enough time to understand this aspect of social media ads is a huge mistake.
For example, daily budgets will help you spend consistent amounts day by day. It’s a good tool that lets you target your audience without going over budget. A lifetime budget, on the other hand, is a great tool to synchronize with the campaign’s mission.
9. Putting the Campaign on a Break
So you created new ads and invested a decent budget into them. You focused on attracting leads for a week, and then you abandoned the campaign for two weeks. You decide to come back to it for a few days, and then you abandon it again.
That’s not how social media advertising works. It’s important to work with your ads and analyze their performance on a daily basis. It’s not an exaggeration. Facebook offers simple and effective analytics. It would be a shame not to use them to your advantage.
10. Setting a Wrong Objective
Facebook lets you optimize for specific goals: awareness, conversion, and consideration. Each of these categories contains more specific objectives. Marketers often choose random objectives. Many check all the boxes, thinking they would get more value for their money that way.
It’s important to choose specific objectives that correspond to your campaign’s goals. When it comes to Facebook advertising, nothing is random. If you focus on Conversions as an objective, you’ll set actions that help you reach that target.
Stay Focused
When starting a Facebook Ad campaign, you can learn from the mistakes of others. Not being focused is the most common flaw of social media advertisers. They spread out on too many platforms, set up too many ads, and abandon them to shift to other projects. Don’t do that! Make a precise plan and stick to it!
If you know what common mistakes to avoid, it will be easier for you to develop a focused campaign.