Are you running your own Facebook Ads? Facebook ads can be fantastic for reaching a variety of business goals, such as awareness, leads and sales. However, the challenge for business owners doing their Facebook ads is they don’t know the tropes and traps of Facebook Ads manager. This posts going to talk about some Facebook ad mistakes that could be costing you some serious budget. Before we get started, we understand a lot of business owners would rather focus on what they do best. SBIM can help. We’ve been in the marketing industry for more than 10 years, and have over 500 happy customers, so we have the experience to help you drive sales and unlock your dream business. Go to SBIM.com.au or call 1300 781 609 to find out how we can help you. Without further delay, let’s take a look at common budget wasting mistakes.
1 – Running Ads 24/7
Much like television and radio, you shouldn’t run the same ads all the time. Many people see Facebook Ads as cheaper than traditional media, which is generally true, so they run ads non-stop. However, there are several drawbacks to this. Running the same ads all the time will exhaust your audience. Research conducted by The Drum found that ineffective campaigns can exhaust the audience within 3 days. There are a few ways to avoid this: set your budget with the audience size in mind, exclude people who’ve seen your ad too many times and don’t use the same creative all the time. First, Facebook Ads manager will give you an estimate of how many people are in your target audience, and how many of these people you will reach a day with your budget. Use this as a guide for setting your budget, based on how long you want your campaign to run. Second, Facebook allows you to exclude people from your targeted audience if they’ve seen the ad a set number times. Without excluding the audience, you will be paying for ads that probably aren’t converting, and are annoying your audience. Finally, running the same ad creative will bore and frustrate your audience. If you have an evergreen ad, turn it off every so often and run a different one. And in general, make sure you’re changing ad creative regularly. Overall, variety and taking breaks from Facebook advertising will help you get the most bang for your buck.
2 – Weak Landing Pages
Running an engaging and effective Facebook Ad is only half the battle. Where you’re sending your users is just as important. Generally, Facebook ads provide a link which takes the users to a landing page. However, a common mistake we see is sending people to an irrelevant landing page, such as a home page. Imagine you see an ad for red shoes, and you click the link which takes you to a list of products – making it hard to find the red shoe you saw. It’s frustrating not get shown what you came for, and often causes people to bounce from the page. Customers want to see what they’ve been promised. So make sure your landing page is relevant and attractive to the ad you’ve shown.
3 – Constantly Adjusting Your Ad Campaign
Facebook is a fascinating, artificial intelligence-driven marketing platform. However, this doesn’t mean Facebook can magically produce results immediately. Facebook Ads go through a learning phase, where they gather data to optimise performance for your campaign. It can take up to a few days for the learning phase to complete. Where some businesses come undone is thinking the ads aren’t working and making changes to the ad, before the learning phase is over. This makes it harder for Facebook Ads to learn the best strategy, all the while it will be spending your budget. The key here is to be patient. Let the ads learn and if they’re still not working, make a tweak, let it learn again, and so on until you reach optimal performance. At SBIM, we use a strategy called beating the control. Essentially, we run a few different ads in the same campaign, see what works best, and try to beat that creative with a new creative. However you approach it, let Facebook Ads complete the learning phase.
4 – Not Using Facebook Automate Rules
Even a fantastic ad campaign will eventually wear out its effectiveness over-time, but often they are left running and costing you money if you don’t use Facebook’s automated rules. Understandably, not everyone has the time to constantly monitor their ad campaigns. And the longer you keep spending on worn-out campaigns, the more money you’re wasting. To keep your campaign operating effectively, with less effort, use Facebook’s automated rules. These rules allow you to set limits on your spending, when the campaign runs, etc. It can save you a lot of time and budget when using Facebook Ads.
5 – Marketing to converted customers:
One of the easiest ways to waste your marketing budget with Facebook Ads is to keep showing ads to people who’ve already converted. Chances are, if someone has already clicked and converted, they’re not going to be interested in your ads anymore. Especially not the ads for the product they’ve just purchased. To avoid wasting your money on converted customers, make sure to use exclusions for converted customers in your audience targeting. You will want to retarget these people later for other products, or related products, but not immediately after purchase.
6 – Not Testing Different Ad Types
Not all audiences engage with content the same way, and Facebook Ads offer a plethora of different ad creatives. However, so many businesses are neglecting to use different ad types. While video ads are widely considered the most effective ad type, which we certainly don’t disagree with, since we do video production in-house, there are times where other ad types may be more effective. We’ve covered ad types multiple times before, but that’s because it’s ever important in reaching the full potential of your target audience. So, make sure you’re testing out different ad types.
Conclusion:
Getting the most for your Facebook Ads budget may be as simple as following the tips above. However, it can be difficult to know all the tools in the Facebook Ads Manager. If you’re not sure about running your own ads, or you just want to focus on what you do best, contact SBIM today. We can give you hours back in your life and save you some serious money on ads that aren’t reaching their full potential. Go to SBIM.com.au/book-a-call, to book a call, or call 1300 781 609 today to start unlocking your dream business with effective marketing.
