7 Budget-killing Facebook Ad Mistakes That Are Hindering Your Results
Are you throwing money at your Facebook Ads and not seeing the results you hoped for? When using the tool correctly, you can get a wide reach and a high number of conversions from your target audience. If you’re not paying attention to its pitfalls, you may just be throwing money down the drain.
Here are some budget-killing errors and how can you correct them:
The error: Too broad of an audience
The fix: Targeting the right folks — what a challenge. If you’re targeting too broad of an audience, you could be paying for people who aren’t interested in your company to see your ads. Think of it this way: if you’re setting enterprise computing networking solutions, you don’t want to target teenagers, retirees, or people who work in irrelevant fields such as human resources or accounting.
By targeting people who are not interested in your ads, Facebook will give you a low relevance score. A low relevance score results in a higher cost-per-click.
Use more specific targeting based on your target’s location, age range, and interests. By casting a smaller net, you’ll see more significant results. It’s common for our clients to be concerned when we have a small target audience — oftentimes people want to reach as many people as possible. It’s important to remember that reaching more people doesn’t always mean we’re reaching the right people.
The error: You could be experiencing Ad fatigue
The fix: If people have seen your ad too many times (typically 5-10 times), they might just be tired of seeing it. Going into the Facebook ad manager and filtering your ad results by “Delivery,” it will tell you how many people have seen your ads on average under the “Frequency’ column.
A good rule of thumb: If people have seen your ad three times and not converted, they are most likely uninterested.
You can combat this by changing your ad’s creative, tweaking your targeting, selecting “daily unique reach” when creating your campaign, or by creating a set of ads and rotating them periodically. Monitor your ad’s performance every 2-3 days to see what’s working, what’s not, and hone in on what your audience is resonating with and what they’re not. At the end of the day, you don’t want to continue throwing money at something that isn’t working.
The error: Too much text on the ad image
The fix: By having more than 20% of your creative have copy on it, Facebook begins to decrease the ad’s delivery while also increasing its cost-per-click. Sometimes, Facebook may stop delivering your ad altogether.
The solution for this issue is pretty simple: swap the image out for one without as much, if any, text on it. Easy-peasy, huh?
Interested in learning more about social media advertising?
Check out our blog on targeted advertising.
The error: Not excluding past converters
The fix: This issue also goes hand-in-hand with ad fatigue. By re-targeting people who have already converted by registering for your event or downloading your eBook, it could annoy them to continue to see the ad. Not to mention you’re spending money on people who’ve already converted.
By using Custom Audiences to exclude people who have already converted, you can focus your budget on fresh eyes.
The error: You’re targeting the wrong audience
The fix: If you’re not getting your ads in front of the right people, you won’t see the results you’re aiming for. Dig into who your demographic and customer persona is and then alter your targeting to represent them. By interest profiling and being more specific, you’ll be more on-target to reach the people who will be interested in your ads.
The error: Not disposing of low-performing ads
The fix: If you have an ad group, your low-performing ads could be hindering the results of your well-performing ads. Check your ads regularly and discard of the low-performing ads to reroute your budget to the ones driving results.
The error: Your ad copy isn’t effective
The fix: Your ad copy could be killing your ad for several reasons. It could be boring, lengthy, lacking value, too much corporate-speak and too little emotion, or the call to action could be unclear.
Be sure to adopt a writing style that resonates with your audience, provides a clear call to action in the headline, and aim for 80 characters or fewer (according to Hootsuite, copy with 80 characters or less receives 66% higher engagement). Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: What types of ads do you click on when you’re scrolling through social media? Do you read long paragraphs, or seek out the call to action? Keep in mind your own user experience as you’re writing your copy.
Many issues can lead to underperforming ads, but hopefully with these common pitfalls that we’ve seen you can make your advertising as effective as possible. For more tips on social media advertising, read here.
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