Critical mistakes new advertisers make with Facebook Advertising
You’re trying to drive more leads and revenue into your business. You are familiar with the massively popular Facebook ad platform.
But, as you begin setting up campaigns and spending your ad money with Facebook advertising, you realize (after a while) that you’ve spent hundreds or thousands of dollars but with low click through rates and poor conversions. Your cost per lead is more than the average order value of your products or services, and you cannot see how the average lifetime value of the customer will yield proper ROI.
Like any other advertising method, Facebook comes with its own risks and pitfalls.
If you’ve lost all hope, you might be interested to know that many marketing professionals and business owners experience a great amount of success using the Facebook advertising system.
But, not always at first…
Here are five mistakes many make when advertising on Facebook:
1. Using Incorrect Campaign Goals
What are you trying to accomplish with your Facebook advertising campaign? While the obvious bottom line for every business is to make money, your advertising goals should be directed at smaller, more manageable goals that ultimately lead to an increase in revenue.
Consider the following list of possible goals and how they pertain to your business:
- Website Clicks – When using this goal, you need to measure the cost per click.
- Page Likes – If your goal on Facebook is to increase your fan base (not recommended), then you need to measure how much it costs to obtain every like.
- Page Post Engagement (PPE) – Engagement is crucial on Facebook, especially when trying to spread a message or piece of content. You can measure engagement by dividing the total cost of one advertisement by the amount of shares it received.
- Conversions – is the CPC (cost per click) investment less than EPC (earnings per click)? (Facebook have many options to track stats, but it gets down to ROI / ROAS and CLTV)
Setting and tracking every goal correctly will help you measure your success, help you manage your ad spend and respond effectively to any campaigns that are ineffective.
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2. Creating Only ONE Ad
Business owners who only create one advertisement will likely fail and lose potentially big dollars over time.
Not every ad you create will work. While there are proven ad formats and direction you can take, ads must be tested, and against each other.
In fact, the majority of your ads will likely generate less than 10 percent of your conversions.
The easiest way to solve this issue is to create between 2-4 different ads and let Facebook perform A/B testing on them. This will allow you to determine the handful of ads that net you the greatest return.
Watching metrics like ad frequency, relevance score, CTR vs CR, number of leads, ad performance by placement, clicks by interest, video views, etc – should be reported on and it’s impact. For example, you may see a low relevance score, but if it’s converting, don’t touch it!
And, don’t forget – using creatives that support the ad copy is ESSENTIAL, and testing different formats, placements (newsfeed, sidebar, instagram, etc) and types is a MUST. (video, photo, stories, messenger, carousel, etc).
This is easy enough to do this in Facebook, but be clear on your outcomes before just modifying another checkbox, creative or type. This year, testing videos will be key to your success! And, Facebook now allows slideshow ads to create animated effects for those who cannot budget professionally produced videos.
3. Poor Landing Page Experience, No Call to Action and Missing / Incorrect Pixel Code
Have you ever dealt with a car salesman that took you on a test drive and then never asked you to buy a car? He did all the hard work but never asked for your business.
The same principle can be used in Facebook advertising. You created so much hype for your product with your awesome advertisements and then led potential customers to a horrible landing page and with no clear call-to-action.
The best solution to this problem is to create a Facebook approved landing page or squeeze page. IMPORTANT: Make sure that you have implemented the Facebook Pixel on your pages. Your entire website should have this little snippet of code applied, so you can track conversion points and add valuable data points to custom audiences.
Squeeze pages are there simply to provide value, benefits and asking a prospect to perform an action.
Whether it be an email opt in or to enter information to receive a free e-book or special whitepaper – your landing page must directly ask the customer to complete one simple task, or your clicks will be wasted. Note: a customer journey engagement map should be developed, so that you build multiple landing pages and interaction points based on cold, warm and hot (buyer) traffic.
4. Incorrect / Bad Targeting of an Audience
Facebook geographical targeting tools (Insights) are available for a reason.
If you create an advertising campaign and then simply let Facebook show it to every single person in the United States, or men and women between 18 and 65+ you’re going to waste a lot of money with no real results.
Facebook advertising isn’t the same as broad-based television or radio advertising. That’s “branding” money tax for big budgets. You are smarter than that.
You must perform research on customers who you think (survey your list!) might be interested in your product and use that information to geographically locate your demographics and more.
While your total overall reach is much smaller, your CTR and conversion rates will dramatically increase – and they will/should respond better to your advertising and offers. Building custom audiences from traffic, engagement, video % watched and email lists (segmented by buyers and subscribers) is something not to be missed as you build out your campaign goals and business strategies.
Add to the audience strategies, “exclusions” – that help further narrow down your audience for better ad traction and clarity.
5. Neglecting Your Ad Campaigns
Never set your campaigns up and then forget about them.
As a general rule, you should check your Facebook campaigns at least twice per week to see how they are performing, and more often during the initial setup of any new campaigns. If one ad is failing (no return, high cost, etc), replace it with another set of ads and continue to test the ads and your landing pages (A/B testing).
If you have a larger daily spend, you should check it daily (several times when you are first starting out) to make sure you’re money isn’t being wasted and that your information is truly serving your audience. Tip: What can help you as you start to see it working, is to established RULES (either via Facebook internally) or from tools like Revealbot, that can help automate ads and campaigns.
TIP: A strategy that you can use, is to allocate advertising dollars towards your articles or blog posts. Then, create call-to-action buttons/links on those pages. More trust, good will and engagement will be had, and Facebook and your users will love you for it too! Plus, you’ll be able to retarget them later, and build audiences for up to 180 days.
Want to learn more?
Here’s a great way to learn more about how to avoid these mistakes and to implement a proven process. (Free registration for our Facebook Done For You Consultation)