The Top 5 Facebook Advertising Mistakes to Avoid

Facebook advertising are all the rage right now, with more than 2 billion users active on Facebook and more than 92% of social marketers are using this platform to advertise their services.  The main question is, are those people using this advertising platform in the correct way?

Not Even Close

Like other forms of digital marketing, the target for successful Facebook advertising is ever moving. Digital marketers are also humans and bound to make mistakes, let alone in an area so new and dynamic.

With this in mind, let’s take a quick look at the top 5 Facebook advertising mistakes that you could possibly commit and how you can avoid it in the future.

1) Don’t have Clear Ad Objective When Setting Up Campaign

When creating a Facebook Ad, the very first step is to establish your marketing objectives. With so many different options to choose from, how can you be sure you select the right one?

Ask yourself: What do you want the Facebook user to do?

Do you want them to learn about your brand?

Visit your website ?

Want your visitors to convert on an offer?

So which ad objective you need is really depending on what end-goal you want for your ad.

Think carefully before choosing your objective. Why? That’s because choosing the incorrect objective will not only waste your time but ultimately result in you spending money on something you didn’t really want.

Also, you always need to set only ONE objective for ONE campaign. In other words, you should not expect to see high engagement, high click rate, high reach and high conversions at the same time in one single campaign.

2) Selecting Wrong Placement for the Ads

By default, Facebook will pick “Automatic Placements (Recommended)” for the advertisers.  But not many know that by selecting this option, you’re throwing money down the drain because advertisers do not know where their ads shall appear and which placement is the most effective to obtain the desired end results. Not forgetting, selecting this Automatic Placement option may eat up the advertisers’ budget very fast.

Based on our experiment, it’s recommended that you choose Facebook Feeds, Right Column and Audience Network for the best advertising results.

Please note that opting for these options will bring cheaper clicks but not necessarily higher conversion rates!

3) Targeting Audiences Either Too Broad or Too Narrow

When creating your ad, be sure to look at the audience size to see if you are targeting too many — or too few — people. To do so look at your potential reach.

If the ad is set to reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, ask yourself if there are realistically that many people out there who would be highly interested in purchasing your offer at that very moment. Is the answer NO? Then narrow down your audience by selecting additional demographics or interests.

On the flip side, you don’t want to cut down your audience so much that it is too small for Facebook to deliver your ad.

You will need to play around with your targeting to get the fit that is just right.

In the example below, the ideal potential reach size is between 120,000 to 500,000 people.

That’s the sweet spot we are looking for. Not too big and not too few.

4) Making Decisions Too Early

Once you have launched your Facebook Ads campaign, you need to allow at least 5 days for data accumulation first before performing any editing works on your campaign.  The 5 days data is regarded as the minimum requirement to measure the performance of your ads accurately.

In most cases, advertisers are too eager to stop their ad campaigns too early (in less than 5 days) without investigating the actual reasons that cause the poor results. The downside of stopping early is that advertisers will not get enough people they require before they can measure the ads performance accurately.

Before pausing your ad campaign, do remember to research the interest of the audience, demographic, placement, cities, ad image and write-up, cost per conversion, cost per engagement to identify whether there are other things you can optimize before deciding to pause the campaign.

5) Ad Frequency

This is another important component that is overlooked by most advertisers when running their Facebook Ads campaign.  If you Ad Frequency score is above 3, that means your audience will be seeing the same ads for 3 times at least.

If you ad campaign objective  is to boost brand awareness, then ad frequency score of 3 is fine but this score does not reflects well if your ad objective is focusing on conversion rate.

This will render your ad campaign becoming less cost effective because you’re targeting the same people with the same advertising message, and expecting different results at the same time.

So make sure to check your Ad Frequency in your Facebook Analytics data regularly!