Here, we will look at some of the most common mistakes people make on their Facebook ads and how to fix them to help you achieve better results.

One common issue that business owners face is that Facebook’s ads are easy to make, even if you have no idea what you are doing. So, you may end up spending a lot of time and money on ads that you discover weeks later were not worthwhile at all.

When it comes to advertising for your small business, Facebook is usually at the top of the list for someone to place your ads. There are well over two billion users on Facebook, so your customers have at least some presence on the network, so you should too.

Unclear Objective

When you begin any marketing campaign, you need to determine your overall objective for the campaign and then craft a strategy around it. Your objective needs to be something you can measure, too, as that is an important part of your campaign strategy.

Are you looking to increase website traffic? Do you want more conversions? How about to direct your leads to a specific landing page? Are you running a one-time promotion to generate sales for a certain product?

All of those objectives are something that you can measure and can help you generate ideas for your strategy.

To determine your objectives, sit down with your team and discuss what goals you want to achieve that are attainable through a Facebook ads campaign. Once you have an idea of the goals you want, begin crafting your strategy for the campaign. If you brainstormed multiple objectives, take the time to develop a strategy for each one; even if you are only using one in this campaign, you can use the others later, and you will already have an idea of how to achieve them! Finally, you need to come up with key performance indicators so that you can track the progress of the campaign more easily.

Bad Audience Targeting

There are thousands of posts being added to Facebook every minute. Millions of business pages all advertise on the network, so your ads can get buried in the traffic. Your competitors are also on Facebook with their own ads, so there are plenty of brands competing for your audience’s attention too. If you are not targeting your audience right in your ads, there is a good chance they can get lost.

To fix this problem, you need to come up with interesting and engaging content with a clear call to action. You need to optimize your ads to fit in with your audience just right, or you will end up losing time and effort. Facebook does include some easy to help you target your audience. You can target people in your audience based on their location, demographic information, interests, and behaviors. You can also set a target based on engagement, so if someone recently interacted with you in some way, they will see your ads. The mistake here is that when setting these parameters, people often make their target audience too narrow or too wide. To avoid that, you can set your audience size. How many people will be interested enough in your product to convert after seeing your ad realistically? Facebook gives you a dial that tells you what is more realistic in your reach for your ads, so you can avoid making something too narrow or too broad. You can also create two similar audiences to conduct A/B testing for your ads to determine what is working and what is not.

Using the Wrong Type of Ad

There are several different ad styles for you to choose from when you create your Facebook ads, and you need to select the ad style that your audience is most likely to notice and interact with. The most popular ad types are photos, carousels, slideshows, videos, and collections. You can also select what you want your ads to appear on — mobile, desktop, or the sidebar on the right.

For your Facebook ads to succeed, the right ad type for your audience and the right placement are key. Desktop ads are more expensive and tend to have more competition, so you need to make sure it is worthwhile to your objective if you use them. If you only want to drive more traffic to your site, it will eat up a lot of your marketing budget to run them on desktop, so it is probably more worthwhile to advertise on mobile for that objective. This is especially true for small businesses that do not have a big marketing budget.

Only Using Ads for the Sales Funnel

If you only use your Facebook Ads to sell your products, customers will feel like you are pushing your products on them, and they might not engage with your ads because of that. Instead of using a salesperson approach to your ads, try to tell a story with your ads that your audience can connect to. Share success stories, testimonials, benefits, recognition in industries, and more. This approach can help you get more sales than simply pushing your products on your customers.

Abandoning Ads

One big mistake when it comes to Facebook Ads is to make your ads and then abandon them for weeks, leaving them alone just to do their thing. If you want your Facebook ads to succeed, you need to keep an eye on them and check their performance daily. By doing so, you can ensure you are achieving the goals you set for the campaign. You will also be able to make sure that you do not need to make any changes to the ads.

When you check your ads, look at their frequency, click-through rate, conversions, leads generated, performance by ad placement and type, and clicks by interest. If you notice your numbers getting low in any of these areas, you can change the placement of them, the type, the ad content, or pull the ad in favor of something new. But you must check this regularly to ensure it is working; otherwise, you might end up wasting money on ads that are ineffective.

Conclusion

Facebook ads are an essential part of any marketing strategy these days because of how popular the social network is. We’ve gone over several mistakes someone can make on their Facebook ads that can lead to the campaigns failing.  Remember, it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is or how difficult you think it will be to reach your ideal audience on Facebook, Instagram, or other media.  Seattle Digital Marketing will work with you to build wide-reaching and effective campaigns that naturally develop your customer base.