Facebook Advertising Mistakes
It’s no secret that Facebook provides organizations of all types with one of the primary, most comprehensive promotional channels to meet their target consumers.
But it can be daunting to figure out exactly how much trial and error and learning is involved at the beginning as a do-everything-yourself entrepreneur, especially as you bet real dollars on real results.
The positive news is that especially when we’re starting all of us seem to make the same mistakes.
If you haven’t received a single sale from your Facebook ads or it seems like you’re not making the right return from what you spent, here are some typical (and often expensive) Facebook advertisement errors and how to correct them.
They are not investing in audience research upfront.
What one do you think is more likely to produce better performance?
In front of the wrong audience, a decent ad?
I will first put my money on attracting the right crowd.
Facebook is home to a vast population and, based on what you’re offering, the audience may be larger, smaller, or even entirely different from the one you set out to reach.
In the beginning, before you start checking particular topics like ad copy or shape, you will have to try out specific viewers. But that does not mean that with any educated guesses, you can’t give yourself a head-start.
An excellent way to look at targeting is to ask yourself if you would be able to gamble cash on the chances that specific individuals would be involved in purchasing your goods (because that’s what you’re doing technically).
For starters, you might think that people on Facebook who like “Starbucks” may be interested in buying your specialty coffee. Maybe some of them will, but a lot of different people like and drink Starbucks (over 33 million on Facebook in fact). You want to find a niche that aligns with your products.
You’ll have a lot better time than someone whose products don’t have a specific demographic if you has selected a specialty product, e.g. t-shirts for individuals who own pugs).
Placing yourself in the shoes of whoever you consider your client is one of the better ways to find passions you can target:
- What would they Google?
- What pages would they like” on Facebook?
- What influencers or celebrities would they follow?
- What apps would they use?
- What publications/blogs do they read?
- What competitors are they already buying from?
- Where would they hang out on Reddit?
Do any study to see what you can about the impulses that make them particular relative to the masses.
If you can find a Facebook page referring to what you discovered in your study, under your personal profile, go to Like It. Facebook will recommend similar websites that provide still more preferences that you can probably target. Again, disregard those who in any way do not have a clear link to buying intent.
To further brainstorm additional targeting strategies based on the desires and qualities, you have a positive feeling about you can use Facebook’s User Insights app. If you’re intrigued, you can even use it to get more insight into how the audience acts, how they invest, and more.
Targeting an audience that’s too broad
A common mistake of paid ads, regardless of medium, with the markets we want to reach, is going too big.
You may assume that everybody is a potential buyer, but the people that your advertisements hit are what you’re paying for. Why pay for reaching out to the wrong people?
A target audience ranging from 500K to 1.5 million is also a decent scale for many e-commerce firms to launch with.
“If your audience is too large, try to narrow it with interests that must also be matched by your main audience.” If it’s too small, consider building a wider pool of users to add excitement before you reach your sweet spot.
Impatience
For some form of paid ads, if you do not see any results right away, it may seem like you’re wasting money. Often you can feel obligated to take charge of your advertising and tweak stuff to “optimize” them so that as quickly as possible they will work better.
In the beginning, though, gaining knowledge and insight is critical.
That’s why it’s essential to have a good understanding of how much you’re truly going to pay to get one client.
Let’s say $17 is the cost of your products, and you market the commodity for $50. That gives you about $33 to spend to break even on acquiring a client. With your budget, be able to go above it at the beginning when you test your audience and advertising.
Until you’ve hit 1000 users, try not to make any assumptions about your advertisements, such as pausing or tweaking them. At that point, even though they don’t get any revenue, you have enough data to at least gain more about the success of your ads.
When you don’t give Facebook the chance to improve over time, the other direction that impatience ends up undermining your success is. You can certainly do so if you haven’t built your Facebook Pixel (which is super easy to do in your Shopify store). To enhance its targeting, Facebook’s advertisement network uses the Pixel to control and learn based on output results.
For instance, if you set the target of your campaign to maximize based on transactions at the outset, because you have had zero sales, Facebook will not know what a “purchasing” client looks like. Yet the data collection gets more educated as you pile up more transactions.
I am not isolating what you’re testing
In marketing, in search of outcomes, perspective is frequently undervalued. And while it’s highly recommended that you experiment and test stuff in your advertisements, if you test one variable at a time, you can only really learn as you go.
Testing multiple crowds, each confronted with different advertisements, won’t teach you anything at different times, even though you come upon something that gives you better performance.
Try to isolate one element to test as best as you can, so you can go forward after the trial with information that you can operate upon. In the beginning, particularly for the audiences, you are targeting, you can test at the Advert Set stage.
At each step of your Ad Manager account, bear in mind what you should alter and test:
- Campaign: Your target for Facebook to simplify centered on (add to cart, purchases, etc.)
- Advert Set: The demographic you’re addressing, placement, and timetable.
- Ad: Links, format, creativity, etc.
You are not squeezing the value of your spending on advertising
And if your primary purpose is to get revenue, it’s not the only return you can get on your ads that is feasible.
There is still a lot of added value that you would receive from an ad that “failed” to get you some clients.
You could:
- Collect emails from the site’s users.
- To create social evidence for your ad over time, get more views and feedback on your message.
- To encourage them to shop, communicate directly with individuals who vote on your ads.
- Retarget visits to your site in the future as “warm traffic”.
- Set up a series of emails to collect any abandoned carts you may have acquired.
- Invite people who enjoyed or responded to the post on your website to like your Facebook page as well (click on the reactions of the post itself).
There’s also the useful perspective that you may gather from your paying traffic.
I remarkably suggest you set up Google Analytics and Hot Jar and take a look at how the website traffic behaves. This will help you determine whether your audience, your website architecture or any other issue is your problem.
In particular, heat maps such as Hot Jar are helpful because they allow you to see visually how traffic on your website behaves: how far down the page user’s scroll before leaving, what they click on as well as recordings of real individual visits.
You are not optimizing your ad creative for attention and clicks
An excellent creative for your ads will help you improve your outcomes after you’ve worked out your audience.
A lot of different items go into a good ad, so to help; here are a few best practices:
- Have a focal point that captures the eye in either the graphic, copy or video thumbnail.
- Try using emojis in your copy to incorporate individuality and graphic features.
- Any time you run an ad, collect social evidence (likes, comments, shares) over time which makes your ad that much more effective.
- With links and product tags, build several clickthrough opportunities (you would need a Facebook Store, which you can quickly add through Shopify).
- Within the same Advert Collection, experiment with various ad formats, especially video as Facebook has been known to prefer this style.
You are not taking advantage of all your available insights
Many features in the Facebook Ad Manager get lost in their complexities, especially when it comes to gathering insights from a view of your results.
For starters, the default columns that you see in the Ad Manager do not display all the data that is useful to you. To get additional detail, you can certainly configure your columns.
To get a better understanding of ad efficiency, consider adding the following, along with whatever else you think could help:
CTR: Click-through rate is the proportion of people after seeing it who clicked on your ad.
Cost-per-click: how much you pay for each of your ad clicks.
Website Purchases: The number of purchases the ad brought in.
Website Purchase Conversion Value: The total value attributed to the ad for the purchases made.
Frequency: How many times an ad has been seen on average by each user you meet. You’ll see the ad success decline dramatically occasionally, and it’s because Facebook displays the ad many times to the same users.
Reach: How many unique (not repeated) individuals have you reached?
Relevance Score: Based on your first 500 impressions, how relevant your ad is to the audience you target (this has a significant impact on your costs).
Budget: How much money you have devoted to the advert set daily or in total.
Cost per Result: How much it costs to achieve the objective of your campaign.
CPM: How much do you pay for a thousand impressions?
Based on a variety of variables, such as the devices on which purchases were made, and how gender affects performance, you can also use the “Breakdown” options to evaluate your ad performance.
Using a consistent, meaningful naming convention through your Ad Manager account at each stage is a super comfortable but highly impactful method you should also follow. This way, you can say things at a glance, such as what demographic you are approaching and what you are checking.
What have you learned?
It can take some time to get the hang of Facebook advertising still one of the most efficient ways to distribute any message, it’s worth investing in and learning from others’ experiences.
