It’s no secret that the cost of Facebook advertising has risen over the last few years, and with the iOS14 update, Facebook advertising has become a riskier investment for companies. Yet, Facebook advertising remains one of the best ways for any business to reach its target audience due to an estimated 2.93 Billion active monthly users.
Of course, now more than ever, it is important to increase your chances of a successful campaign. Here are the most common mistakes Facebook marketers make that you should avoid.
1. Not Aligning Your Campaign Objective With Your Ad Copy.
One common mistake is using the same ad copy across all the different campaign objectives. You shouldn’t try to sell a product or service if you are doing an awareness campaign. Using facebook’s retargeting options, you should take your customers through a purchase journey and create a unique ad copy for each of the 3 stages of the customer journey. Awareness, consideration and conversion.
Example of Facebook Ad Copy/Creative
2. Narrowing Down Into Too Specific (Or Too Wide) Target Audiences.
Don’t underestimate who your potential customers can be. Narrowing down your Facebook targeting options by too much may mean you miss out on customers you didn’t know you had. However, trying to reach all 2.93 billion Facebook users will mean you will waste a lot of money trying to find the right audience.
What’s the right balance?
While there isn’t a specific number you should target in each campaign, you should aim to look outside your current target audience without trying to reach people who will never become your customers. A good way to do this is by creating customer avatars. This way you can put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. By Identifying who your customers are, you can better create campaigns that are not too specific or too broad.
Despite Facebook’s recent removal of many targeting options, there are still many ways in which you can target your different audiences. While it is always good to choose age, gender, and location, you want to be more specific about each of your target audiences.
Facebook allows you to pick hobbies, values, interests, income, job title, and even phone usage. Facebook truly knows everything, so experimenting with its features is a great way to find the perfect audience that gives you a return on ad spend (ROAS).
3. Not Analysing Campaigns
Chances are your first campaign won’t give you a positive ROAS, but don’t let that discourage you. Making mistakes along the way is important in realising what works and what doesn’t. It will be different for every company. However, something that stays true for all companies is that you have to measure your campaign in order to improve. This is particularly important for failed campaigns. Understanding why something worked, and why something didn’t work as well as comparing campaigns with each other is the only way you can succeed with Facebook ads. You’ll be surprised which campaigns work and which don’t; Facebook Advertising, after all, can be tricky, even for the experts.
Facebook Ads Manager and Google Analytics are great tools to track various aspects of Facebook campaigns. It’s important to analyse consumer location, website interaction, CTR, conversion rate and average purchase order.
Check out this guide to Facebook Ads in Google Analytics.
Facebook Ads Manager Campaign Analysis
4. Not A/B Testing
The biggest part of Facebook Advertising is testing what works and what doesn’t, so by not using A/B testing, you are limiting your ability to analyse and compare campaigns with each other.
A/B testing involves running two campaigns with the same objective but with a different audience or ad copy. This is done to compare audiences or ads and to optimize for campaigns.
Even if your current ads are doing well, it is crucial to do some A/B testing as you may be able to do even better. Experiment with some A/B testing and you might surprise yourself.
In Summary
Facebook Ads remain a cost-effective way to reach current and new audiences.
When you do an in-depth analysis of your Facebook Ad Campaigns, you will be able to improve your return on ad spend and continue growing your business.
Making mistakes is an important part of success; as long as you reflect and analyse the mistakes you can make improvements in the right direction.
A/B testing is a great tool to analyse and compare Facebook Ad campaigns.