5 common Facebook Advertising mistakes that you can easily fix
Everyone has a social media account. Your mum, sister, brother, grandma, cousin.. they all have a social media account. Even your neighbour’s dog has an account (and it has more followers than you do). In fact, even my dad has a Facebook account now.
It’s set up under the name of his fantasy football team instead of his real name (which is against Facebook’s terms of service by the way), but it still counts. Now he’s able to keep up with his fantasy football leagues and continually update the family group chat with random gifs…
Anyway.. What does all of this mean for business owners? Well, for businesses, the fact that so many people are on social media platforms make them a great place to advertise. In fact, based on the 2020 report published by Yellow, as much as 100% of Australians use social media (source: Yellow Social Media Report).
— source: Yellow Social Media Report).
At this point, you might be wondering why this article focuses on Facebook advertising instead of focusing more broadly on social media advertising. Well, that’s because Facebook is the biggest social media channel, and it also owns Instagram, which is the third biggest social media channel. This means that you can reach a really high percentage of the population using only ‘Facebook’ ads.
Because Facebook owns other platforms, including Instagram, you’re able to deliver your message to all kinds of places including, Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, stories, and lots more, by learning how to use one advertising system.
“I’ve done Facebook advertising and it didn’t work.”
So while the Facebook advertising platform can be difficult to learn, once you’ve figured it out it opens up a vast world of possibilities for business owners and/or marketers.
If that’s not reason enough to be running ads, consider the fact that Facebook has been selling ads since 2007 and the product has come a long way since then. In all honesty, it’s one of the best advertising tools available to any business in 2021. It’s one of the first places to go if you have advertising dollars to spend.
Some business owners will look at us funny when we say that, and it’s probably something you’ve thought as well “I’ve done Facebook advertising and it didn’t work.”
hang on…. Facebook advertising doesn’t really work, right?
Before we start telling you all about the common mistakes we see and how you can fix them without needing a marketer lets deal with the giant elephant in the room - social media advertising doesn’t work and is actually a waste of money.
You’re not alone, we hear that Facebook advertising isn’t effective a lot. Most, if not all, business owners and marketers have had bad experiences with Facebook ads. It’s especially hard for people starting out to run Facebook ads successfully, and as a result, most people decide to ‘boost’ posts instead of running ads *shudder*.
That’s right. ‘Boosting’ isn’t the same as running Facebook ads. If we’re being professional we would say that boosting is the ‘light’ version of Facebook advertising, but when we chuck on our tin foil hats, we would tell you that there’s a reason why Facebook promotes boosting so much, over it’s better quality product the Facebook Ads Manager.
Facebook Ads Manager is kind of like Hogwarts - it’s where the magic happens. But first, you have to learn how to make the magic work. And when you’re just starting out that isn’t easy. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the 5 common mistakes that people make with Facebook advertising and how you can make sure you don’t make them.
Your Facebook Pixel is not set up properly, or at all
yep, we’re really proud of our Hogwarts metaphor
If Facebook Ads Manager is like Hogwarts, then the Facebook pixel is your magic wand.
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you install on your website that helps you target your audience and ultimately makes your ads run better. A lot better.
There are lots of things that a properly set up Facebook pixel allows you to do, but here are some of the most important ones:
Track sales or actions made on your website (purchases, leads, contact submissions etc.) so that you pinpoint exactly how successful your ads are.
‘Re-target’ people who have visited your website to show them ads (this is what it’s called when you look at a new pair of shoes and then the ads follow you around the internet).
Keeping Facebook accountable by providing data on what a successful ‘conversion’ is, so that the Facebook algorithm can find more of them.
Basically, the Facebook pixel is the most important tool in Facebook advertising. To put it bluntly, most businesses shouldn’t run ads without a Facebook Pixel.
Even Facebook itself will tell you that if you have to choose between running ads or paying someone to help you install a pixel, you should put your money towards the Facebook Pixel first.
2. Picking the right objective
Picking an objective is about telling Facebook what you want your advertising to achieve. Do you want likes, comments and shares? Then pick ‘engagement’. If you want website visitors then pick ‘traffic’. If you want sales, then most of the time you would pick ‘conversions’. The objective indicates to the algorithm that delivers your ads what's important to you and what it should be focusing on.
Below is a list of the different objectives and when to use them, according to Facebook:
However, there’s a catch. The thing about telling Facebook what you want to achieve is that they’re really good at delivering it. Maybe even too good.
You’re probably wondering what that means and why it’s a bad thing, so think of it this way - you've asked your kid, partner or friend to clean up after dinner and you've wandered into the kitchen to find that they're getting the dog to lick the plates clean or they're throwing the dishes in the bin rather than using the dishwasher.
They're definitely cleaning up after dinner but it's not exactly what you meant.
This is kind of how Facebook objectives work. They’re really good at getting results, but it’s not always in the way you want. This means you have to be honest with what you really want to achieve from an ad. If you want sales but think the best way to start is with an ’awareness’ or ‘engagement’ ad then you probably won’t get the results you’re after from Facebook advertising.
In this example Facebook will target people who are more likely to react to a post, rather than targeting the people who are most likely to buy something. Facebook understands this based on all of the data points it has about different people’s accounts and in our experience, it’s pretty accurate. So be careful about which objective you select and be sure that it aligns with your ultimate goal.
3. Not knowing about ad placements
Most people don’t know this, but Facebook ads don’t always show up in the Facebook news feed. In fact, there are 19 (yep -19!) different places that Facebook ads will show as a default setting. These are all of the different spots on the internet that your ‘Facebook’ ads can show.
These placements include the obvious, like Facebook and Instagram feed and story placements, but they also include placements like the ‘Audience Network’, which extends campaign reach across a bunch of apps, including games, gumtree, snapchat etc. One time I was scrolling through TikTok when I stumbled upon an ad that I’d set up to be delivered on Facebook. I wasn’t too upset by it, but you can see how this is important information to know.
Here’s a list of all the ad placements that Facebook offers:
In some cases, it’s beneficial to deliver across these different placements as it helps you reach more people and more frequently, which can be good. The danger is not being aware that this happens.
Because the objective you pick can impact where Facebook decides to show your ads, sometimes Facebook will send a large amount of impressions to a particular placement without you realising.
For example, when you select ‘video views’ as your goal, Facebook will sometimes show your ad almost exclusively ‘in-stream’. i.e. as a non-skippable ad during another video on it’s platform. So when you’re looking in the reporting window you feel great about all the views your video is getting, but in reality, Facebook has kidnapped your audience and is holding them to ransom before letting them go back to the video they actually want to watch.
Being able to see where your ads are going and manually selecting placements is another benefit of using Facebook Ads Manager over boosting.
4. Location targeting
Location targeting is a really useful and often crucial component of the ad set up for small businesses. I bet we’ve all seen an ad from a different state or country and thought to ourselves “What are they doing, I don’t even live there.”
Or maybe that’s just something us marketers think when we see these ads?
Either way, if you’re running ads, that’s something you don’t want anyone to be thinking.
If you offer a service in a particular location it’s really important that you’ve selected the right one. Whether that’s Australia wide, statewide, or within a 5km radius or your store, it’s important to limit your delivery to only people who have the potential to become customers.
For some readers, that last point was painfully obvious. “Target the locations where you operate” - duh. But it wouldn’t be Facebook without the possibility of a spanner in the works. Facebook doesn’t *just* allow you to target based on location, it also allows you to select what sort of relationship that person has with the area.
For example:
People whose home or most recent location is within the selected area (the default).
People whose home is within the selected area.
People whose most recent location is within the selected area.
People whose most recent location is within the selected area but whose home is more than 200km away (travelling)
From this you can see some of the different use cases when these different targeting methods would be useful. Sometimes you want to target people who have a home in the area, and other times you can target people who are frequently in an area (like shopping in a CBD). These options have different applications and it’s important to not only target the right location, but to ensure that you’ve selected the right relationship to reach your ideal audience.
5. Making it easier for the customer
One of the biggest fail points for social media advertising isn’t the advertising at all - it’s your website. We put so much thought into what our ad says and how our ad looks that we forget about the customer’s journey after they see the ad. We forget to improve the process they go through after they click through so that it’s easy for them to take the actions we asked them to take.
It’s important that we take a step back and consider the customer’s entire journey, so that we can deliver a better user experience, which in turn helps us achieve our advertising goals.
The key to delivering a good customer experience is putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and thinking about the different steps they’ll need to take. Go through your website process and see how easy it is to understand.
When you get to your website, is it easy to walk a mile in your customers shoes, or are you giving up after 50 metres because the process is too confusing? Not making it easy for the audience is the number one reason why they drop off and never become customers.
To make the customers journey as easy as possible, do the following:
Make sure you’re sending the customer to the right page. i.e. the most relevant page to the ad.
Make sure the website looks good and works on mobile (most traffic from ads comes from mobile).
Make sure it’s easy to navigate and that it has all the information they need on it.
And most importantly, make sure there are clear calls to action that make it easier for them to do what you asked them to do, i.e. fill out a form, call you, or buy a product.
One last thing to remember is that it’s important not to send traffic to a website that isn’t ready for it. If you try to run ads too early, you’ll end up tripping over your own feet.
So there you have it. Those are some of the most common mistakes we see with Facebook advertising. If you’ve run ads in the past and struggled to find success, can you think back to how many of these mistakes you were making?
If you’re only just getting started with ads then great! We hope this will help speed up the learning curve so that you can see a return from your ads straight away!
