4 mistakes that prevent Facebook Ads campaigns from working as well as they could

The average growth of audiences on Facebook and Instagram is about 10% of users per year. Social media sites are becoming more convenient places for communicating, searching for information, and doing business. In this regard, it’s not just interfaces and functions that are being improved, but it’s the advertising tools that are being updated as well. Until recently it was enough to click the “promote the publication” button, but today you need to approach advertising carefully and prepared.

You can effectively set up targeted advertising in your account Facebook Ads. And in order for everything to go according to plan, we’ll go over the most common mistakes that you should read once and never make for yourself.

Mistake 1. Putting Photos in the Wrong Order on the Carousel

The carousel format is convenient because the product can be shown off and viewed from different angles, and the service can be provided in a logical sequence. Storytelling, the sequence of purchase steps, and listing the product’s unique selling points all offer different options for presenting information. Additionally you can check the box next to the item “Automatically show the best performing cards first”. If it’s set, the system displays creatives in order of decreasing effectiveness. It’s worth mentioning that this is on by default. So if you want to set the order of the cards yourself, you have to uncheck it.

Mistake 2. Incorrect Budget Optimization

If a campaign is being configured for a specific sale or promotion, it’s important for the advertiser to get the maximum number of conversions as soon as possible. This is usually done using the “campaign budget optimization” setting. This makes it possible to simultaneously participate in a large number of auctions. The big mistake that many people make is using one budget for the entire period instead of using a daily budget allocation.

By choosing a budget for an entire period of time, you could end up limiting the campaign’s opportunities for self-learning. In this case, there is a risk of getting fewer conversions, which means that the cost of KPIs will increase.

Correct setting options: daily budget plus optimization or full-time budget plus regular impressions.

Mistake 3. The Wrong Campaign Target Audience

What to choose as a target audience? Traffic, conversions, sales? Setting a goal is the first step in setting up a new campaign. But when choosing, it’s important taking into account the sales funnel.

For example, let’s say you sell real estate or cars. In that case, choosing conversions or sales as your goal is the wrong way to go. The decision-making process in these areas takes a long time and happens over several stages. So it’s important to lead the customer to the purchase gradually. For starters, you can launch a brand awareness campaign or drive traffic to introduce the product, show the potential benefits, and, of course, give time to think. Then you can already launch a campaign with the purpose of “lead generation” to get customer contacts. And only after talking with the manager, and weighing all the pros and cons, the person will be ready to make a purchase.

If you are advertising a product with a short decision-making period (clothes, toys, small household appliances, etc.), you can set a sales goal straight away. At the same time, it’s important to work out ad creatives that will induce a purchase.

Mistake 4. Audience Overlap

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you run a general audience campaign that targets Australian residents aged 18-25 and an interest-based campaign that targets that same audience. In this case, users from the second campaign will see your ads twice. As a result, you’ll end up paying twice for showing ads to one user. The same thing happens with remarketing campaigns, where users who made a purchase are not excluded from the remarketing list.

Most often, audience overlap occurs when campaigns are launched simultaneously to a wide audience and look-alike, interests and look-alike, retargeting and look-alike, or any other combination of the listed campaigns.

For similar geotargeting campaigns, it is important to exclude one audience from another.

You can check the percentage of overlap by selecting multiple audiences and clicking the ‘Show Audience Overlap’ option. Overlap of up to 10% is considered acceptable.

Summary

It is easier to eliminate errors right away than to clean up after their consequences. So when setting up your campaign, be sure to go through this list again:

1. If carousel consistency is important to you, uncheck the box next to ‘Automatically show best performing cards first.’
2. If you’re using an accelerated or optimized budget, use a daily budget.
3. Before setting your campaign goal, develop your sales funnel.
4. Check for audience overlaps.

Internet Marketing Agency Web-Sci wishes you effective advertising!