Considering the sizeable dent to your company’s wallet on digital advertising, the real question is; Is your current online ad strategy making you a killing or killing your business?
Read on to ensure you’re not guilty of these 8 cardinal sins in paid Facebook advertising.
1. Failing to optimize bids toward the right goal
To run a successful ad campaign it is crucial to understand the goals of your business. A budding enterprise would place its focus on generating new likes and page visits, thereby building brand awareness. An established business targets lead generations. The first step in setting up a Facebook ad campaign is settling on an objective. This means making Facebook aware of what you intend to achieve with the assigned bid. This could be anything from website traffic to conversions. As an example, if you decide that your objective will be website clicks, the further ad optimization options that are at your disposal will accordingly be suited to that objective. You may only ever choose one objective per campaign.
Thusly, if you have a clear-cut objective in mind, you will be able to squeeze the maximum ROI out of each and every advert by aligning them with your company’s objectives.
2. Thinking your audience is everyone and their second cousin
It’s better to have a sub-par ad targeted toward the right people than a fantastic ad targeted toward the wrong people. To assume that all your users from ages 18-80 of every gender under the sun are going to go bananas over all your products/services is a mistake – a very costly mistake.
When narrowing down to a target demographic, never underestimate the power of Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor. Of course, in due time you may well end up with a multitude of target groups as your company grows. This gives you an insight into each specific target group and their response/engagement to your products/services, wherein you can also cross compare performances between different groups. It has been confirmed that companies are able to procure about 700% more click-throughs when targeting fans with their ad campaigns.
3. Targeting too narrow an audience
On the flip side, be sure you don’t get too specific with your target audience pool. That would do just as much damage as its aforementioned counterpart. This entails affording Facebook extremely restrictive parameters to function with whilst displaying your ad.
A good indication that your target audience is too narrow is if the campaign’s click-through rate (CTR) is relatively low even if the bid is quite high or higher than usual. To test this theory out, try different approaches wherein you refresh your creative to see if the engagement rates fluctuate positively. If not, your audience probably needs to be broadened.
A simple example to hit this point home; Instead of simply targeting people who are interested in stilettos, expand that pool to include people who are interested in women’s shoes.
4. Having your campaign overstay its visit
Quit while you’re ahead. Don’t keep your campaign running way longer than is needed. If your audience gets bombarded with your ad too often they are more than likely to hide all future ads from your page, or subconsciously turn a blind eye to stale ads that have been recycled over and over again, thus rendering your ad campaign ineffective.
Research suggests that adverts shown more than 3 times to a particular user will likely decline in performance, even if they were extremely successful initially. To ensure your ad doesn’t under-deliver, keep it running for a specific time and quit when you notice low engagement, and eventually, you’ll arrive at the most optimal duration to run your campaign. Also be certain to stop any previous ads from running before you launch a new one so that they aren’t in competition one with the other.
5. Launching a campaign where the call to action is missing in action
Having no call to action for your advert could potentially defeat its entire purpose, and lay waste to all the resources expended on your campaign. Ensure at all times that your call to action is extremely clear so that users know exactly what is asked of them. As discussed earlier, the call to action will depend upon your ad’s objective. If you’re aiming at driving brand awareness, you’ll probably just need to add your address and phone number to the ad. This way, the user won’t even need to click on the ad to carry out the action you desire to prompt.
On the other hand, if you’re looking to generate leads, you want the user to convert over to your website. Bear in mind that your website’s homepage doesn’t have to be the landing page all the time. Users visiting your home page might get distracted by all the other pretty elements and fail to carry out the purpose that you intended.
So, for example, if you wish them to sign up for your newsletter, try making a custom-made landing page that displays just the details to be filled in by the user. If you wish the user to try a certain product, the call to action must contain the link to that individual product page rather than just your general product catalog.
6. Falling victim to the ad set syndrome
Here’s the concept of Facebook ad sets in a nutshell – Advertising campaigns on Facebook revolve around ‘sets’ that are essentially groups of individual ads, each of which includes lifetime or daily budget, targeting data, bid type, bid info, and schedule.
As an advertiser, you have the option of placing as many ads as you like in a single set and as many sets as you like in a single campaign. Whilst this technique might seem like the easiest to manage your ads, it isn’t without problems. Let’s say you decide to put 15 ads in one set, Facebook might take it upon itself to assign maximum reach to just one advert in the aforesaid set, depending on what it deems most suitable. Thus, it’s likely that a majority of your audience might not even see the other adverts in that set.
The key is to keep them apart as far as possible. Assign no more than five to six ads to a single set, and no more than 3 ad sets to a single campaign, and you’re good to go.
7. Using images that don’t play nice with Facebook or its users
The first thing that catches the eye of a Facebook user is a beautifully crafted image that crisply highlights its subject matter in as little an effort as possible. However, casting a careless assumption that you know exactly what type of image will inspire clicks is not something you want to find yourself guilty of. Split testing images is key. Run an experiment wherein you post two different types of images, whilst keeping the remaining parameters such as target data, bid info, etc., exactly the same.
To illustrate our meaning here’s an example; there was a split test experiment conducted displaying two images to users. The first image showed a woman smiling brightly at the camera, the second showed an assortment of colourful festive ornaments.
Now an uneducated guess would suggest that the smiling woman got more clicks, correct? It just so turned out that in that particular ad campaign, the latter inspired more user engagement than the former. There is no rhyme or reason to these things, the rule of thumb is; if you can afford to split test, do it. It will save you way more resources in the long run.
Additionally, ensure that you are using the correct image size as per Facebook’s recommendations. If not, you’re risking lowering the engagement rate to your ad as the image is unlikely to be displayed properly.
8. Not knowing when your audience has had enough
Saturation is an absolute no-no. Keep in mind that a majority of Facebook users do not log in only to be treated to a plethora of advertising propaganda. With too large an influx of messages from you, your audience will naturally get increasingly jaded, thus rendering the impact of your ad campaigns less and less effective as time drags by.
A huge red flag to hint at audience saturation is dwindling engagement. If this continues even after you’ve played around with other parameters of your campaign, you can be sure you’ve waterlogged your demographic and it’s time to lay low for a while.
To play it safe initially, expend a lower revenue on ads and narrow your target criteria to understand how much is too much before you begin campaigning at large and risking a much higher loss.
