10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid

As a business owner, you would really want to use your money for more important matters rather than putting it all in your Facebook advertisement. This is why we have collected these “10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid” just for you!

Hop into the next part of this article to learn more!

10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid

Facebook has over two billion users all over the globe. Because of this, Facebook has attracted 80 million small businesses to use the platform in one of their digital marketing strategies, especially in advertising.

The platform encourages anyone to advertise their products and services. It also provided different tools, tips, and guides.

However, not all businesses have been successful in their campaign and end up wasting their money with their ineffective ads.

For this reason, here are the 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid that you should avoid so that you won’t put a single penny to waste.

1. Having no clear plan

When doing something, especially if it involves money, strategic and tactical management is important. 

This is also the case in doing a Facebook Ad. You should not just start in your advertising campaign without even planning ahead of time what you will do before, during and after it happens.

In this way, you are not only projecting the things that will happen in your campaign but is also protecting your investment by knowing possible problems beforehand.

This is why you should have an objective and a strategy to match.

• Wrong objective

Before you start your advertising campaign, you surely have an objective in mind. 

However, the purpose of your campaign might not be aligned with your strategy.

For example, you want your prospects to buy the products on your website but you are still in the awareness stage and getting customers into your website is really difficult because they don’t know your brand yet.

You can correct this by aligning your goal to the stage of your campaign. 

For instance, you can change your objective into something that encourages your audience to visit your business page. You can make an ad that includes a call-to-action (CTA) that clearly states your objective. In this way, prospects will visit your page first before they choose to purchase your product or service. 

If you find it difficult to find your objective and align it with the stage of your marketing strategy, you can check Facebook’s post about this matter. The platform gave 11 objectives that you can choose from whether you are on the awareness, consideration, or conversion stage of your campaign.

Remember that your objective is what you want your target customers to do when they see your advertisement and this also determines the result of that particular ad campaign.

• No strategy

After analyzing your objective, you should also have a strategy focusing on how to accomplish the said strategy.

The first thing to keep in mind is that your objectives and strategies should be aligned with each other. Afterward, have a plan on how to achieve your goal.
For example, you want people to know more about your brand. Then, make an ad showing the values of your brand and have a CTA that allows them to check your Facebook page. 

Moreover, your strategy doesn’t just end there. You should also choose the buyer persona, tools, budget, type of content, and timeline of your advertising campaign. 

These are an important part of your strategy that should be carefully developed because these will add more value in your marketing strategy. 

2. Poor Targeting

Facebook allows brands like yours to advertise to your chosen group of people. The platform also gives tools that you can use in making sure that your advertisement is acquired by your target audience. 

However, a lot of businesses failed to utilize these tools and even if some do use these, they have targeted their audiences badly. 

Some of the poor targeting techniques that have been made by brands are written below:

• Forgetting to exclude past converters

One of the main things businesses fail to do is to exclude those who have already been converted in their advertisements. 

This doesn’t just affect your customer’s experience but also your budget as it consumes your money. 

So, save money by customizing your target audience. Use the platform’s Custom Audience option to exclude the converted individuals from seeing your ad.

Thus, you are not just annoying your audience but you are also using your money to more important aspects. 

• Targeting audiences that are too broad

Another thing to prevent is targeting too broad audiences.

If your targeted audience is too broad, you will end up spending your money to those who are not really interested in your product or service. 

Remember that Facebook has billions of users and showing your business to all of these users would incur big spending. And even if you do have the money, you do not want to spend it on audiences who are not interested, all the more non-converting ones. Therefore, you are losing instead of investing your money on profit.

Do not focus on advertising your brand to audiences that are too broad. Instead, target the right people by using the features that the platform provides to businesses like yours. 

• Ignoring the targeting tools

This might be why you’re targeting the wrong people. You are ignoring an effective tool for selecting audiences and targeting them.

You should know that the platform allows you to target your audiences or just rely on the delivery system of the platform.

In the latter, you are allowing Facebook to target a broad audience for you. You can choose this method if you are not sure who you want to target. 

However, if you already have your audiences, you can choose to target them through detailed, custom, or lookalike audiences.

Audience targeting is everything in your advertising strategy because it identifies to whom your ads are shown.

For example, if you sell baby products, then you should target parents who are expecting or who currently have a baby and not teenagers who are not interested in this matter. There might be young parents however, their audience size might be too small to target.

So, how can you assure that you are targeting the right individuals for your advertising campaign?

You can do this by conducting a customer survey or utilize the platform’s Audience Insight.

By doing these, you are not just learning more about the audiences that have interacted with your business but you are also using their background as an insight in targeting new customers. 

To conclude, targeting your audience is important in your advertising campaign on Facebook as it affects the success of your campaign.

3. Designing an Ineffective Ad

The third mistake that you should not do is designing an ineffective ad. 

Sometimes, it is really tempting to advertise anything if you have excess money in your pocket. 

However, as a marketer, you should avoid making an ad that is not useful in your marketing strategy. 

• Choosing the wrong ad type

After knowing your objectives and your audience, you can already make an advertisement. 

However, a lot of businesses fail to choose the right type of ads for their audience.

For example, you want to make an advertisement for your game app. Then, you should make a playable ad so that your audience can have an interactive preview before downloading your app and not just make an ad that only has a photo of your game in it.

Moreover, the ad type should also be aligned with its purpose. Any content that you choose to be in your ad should have a clear connection of the product, service or offer that you are promoting. 

If you are not sure what type of ad you want to use, then read this post from Facebook that states how the platform provides several ad formats for your objectives. 

• Making ads that fail to draw attention

The other thing that you should not do is to make an ad that cannot grab the attention of your audience.

You see, the purpose of your advertisement is to reach your prospects and by making ads that don’t even bring new audiences, then you are clearly wasting your money.

How can you prevent this from happening?

Carefully analyze these things before publishing your ad:

• Choose the best ad type for your purpose.
• Don’t stuff too many texts on your images.
• Don’t forget to add captions to video advertisements.
• Write a headline with a hook and a CTA.

• Choose the best ad placement.
• Think of other devices.

Remember that your advertisement says a lot about your business, this is why you should make one that will clearly show the audiences that your brand is worthy of their time.

4. Not Being Socially Creative

Businesses tend to forget that Facebook is a home for billions of people and because of this, brands make advertisements only for themselves.

• Forgetting that Facebook is a social media

Although, the platform has opened itself for businesses like yours, remember that billions of users on this platform are people and these people are your target audience.

This is why you should not forget that Facebook is a social media platform. 

So, create an ad that captures the heart of your target audience

For example, if your an insurance firm, then make content that values the life of people. You can create an ad with a quotation about the importance of life, family, and health. 

In this manner, you are not only showing the values of your company, but you are also targeting them through their emotions.

• Not Personalizing

Another thing that you should also not forget is to personalize. Personalize your image, your ad, your message. Let people know and feel that you are really talking to them. Make it seem personal, as you actually should.

Don’t create those advertisements that only says about you. Instead, you should customize it.

Remember that by capturing the hearts of your audience, they need to feel that your ad is only made for them.

For example, if your target is teenagers, then make advertisements that grab the interests of these people by including phrases that only they can relate to.

• Don’t Forget to Refresh Creatives

Everything seems to be beautiful at first. However, if people tend to see the same advertisements over and over again, you will surely annoy your prospects.

This is why you need to refresh your creative juices. 

You can revise your ads, for example. Tweak some aspects of it, like its CTA, blurb, or used image. Edit its filters and backgrounds. One pro tip is to change the ad format into a carousel.

In this way, you are not only recreating an old advertisement, but you are also saving your time and money and just use it to other aspects of your business.

5. Reckless Spending

Putting out too many ads in order to get your desired outcome is really tempting but don’t do it. 

Doing this doesn’t just let you lose your money, you are also losing a lot of time. Why? Because you should just be focusing on one ad at a time. 

According to Ralph Burns, the founder, and CEO of Tier 11, a marketing, consulting, and advertising agency, “Having a lot of advertisements will only lead to confusion, lack of efficiency, high costs and poor results.”

If you don’t want it to happen to your advertising campaign, you should focus on one advertisement, monitor it during its whole duration, analyze the data and results that you can gather and make another advertising campaign again.

Just keep in mind that you should carefully analyze every strategy that you want to use before handing out that dollar into Facebook. 

6. Ineffective Landing Page

Have you committed any money-draining mistakes so far? Hope not! Let’s dig in to more mistakes that you should avoid like have a useless landing page.

It is really harsh but the truth is, if a landing page doesn’t convert even just one person, then that page is really meaningless.

Even if it’s a top priority to convert audiences into customers on your website, some businesses still find it difficult to do these. 

Why? Because their landing pages are either not optimized to any devices or are not really aligned to their business’ objectives. 

• Not Match with Advertising Objective

For an audience, it is really annoying to click on an advertisement of a favorite book, only to find that she has to locate that book all around the website because she was brought to the homepage and not on the product’s page. 

Although businesses should connect their ads with their landing page, too many businesses tend to forget this aspect.

You should prevent this from happening because it didn’t just annoy your audience, you are also wasting your money because some of your target customers might not come back to your website again. 

• Not Optimized 

Another thing that annoys prospects is not optimized landing pages. 

Keep in mind that those people who have clicked your advertisement is willing to give their money in exchange for your products or services. 

If they found that your landing page takes a very long time to load, they will surely close that page and choose another service that they may find on the platform.

Although, Facebook is the platform that you are currently using for your advertising campaign, do keep in mind that the place where your audiences are converted into customers are on your website’s landing pages. 

This is why on whatever advertising campaign you are doing, you should really check your landing pages and make sure that it is aligned to the objective of your advertisement. 

7. Not Monitoring

Publishing an advertisement is really easy but the difficult aspect is managing it throughout its whole duration.

Surely, you can just leave your ad hanging and just come back when it is done. However, doing will really cause a negative impact to your advertising strategy.

So, instead of just increasing its ad fatigue, monitor it regularly so that it won’t become stale. 

Remember that the data from your ad is needed in order to really improve its results.

So, don’t be impatient and exert more effort in managing your advertising campaigns regularly.

8. Not Analyzing

When you have made a lot of successful advertisements and you don’t have a lot of time, you will surely become hesitant in analyzing your other ad’s results.

However, you should not exclude it.

Why would you analyze it if it’s already done and you have converted audiences already? Well, because it involves your business, efforts, and money.

Remember that you have invested your money in your advertising campaigns and because of this, you should analyze its overall performance.

In this case, carefully check these important metrics:

1. Total number of Conversion rates
2. frequency
3. Spend and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
4. Cost per Click and Click-Through Rate
5. Cost Per Action

Analyze every data that comes with it. Then, it’s already time to see if your campaign is really a success or not.

9. No Testing

Testing your campaign before publishing it is really important but due to the little time that business owners have, they failed to execute it. 

Because of this, a lot of businesses are unsuccessful in their advertising campaign and have lost a great amount of money. 

Remember that although you have past advertisements already and you have obtained great results, you should not just forget testing your future ads.

Testing might really take time but it will ensure that your campaign is already a perfect one before publishing it for the public to see.

So, just test two campaigns of yours. You won’t know the first one that you think is perfect for posting is not as great as the second one. 

Just keep in mind that the more you test, the more you make the perfect advertisement for your campaign.

Thus, this will not only bring you audiences but also sales.

10. Not utilizing tools

A lot of businesses failed in their advertising campaign because they are not utilizing the tools that Facebook provides.

One of the reasons they are not using these tools is because they don’t know how it works and it really does take time.

However, investing your time in utilizing these tools is really important because this affects how you perform, monitor and analyze your advertising campaign. 

Besides, these tools won’t cost a lot of money. So, just utilize and understand it.

The two tools that you should use are:

• Facebook Analytics

This is a tool that will allow you to measure the performance of your ads and compare them.

With this tool, you will be able to track, analyze and adjust your advertising efforts.

This will also help you in understanding how your audiences react to seeing your ads.

• Facebook Pixels

This is a troubleshooting tool that will help you find out if your code is working perfectly.

Keep in mind that a pixel is a way to track the interactions from your ad into your website.

The three main uses of this tool include building custom audiences, optimizing your ads and track the conversions on your website and attribute these into your advertisement.

Conclusion

It is really heartbreaking to see that you have wasted a lot of money on an advertising campaign.

This is why you should remember these 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid:

1. Having no clear plan
2. Poor Targeting
3. Designing an Ineffective Ad
4. Not Being Socially Creative
5. Reckless Spending
6. Ineffective Landing Page
7. Not Monitory
8. Not Analyzing
9. No Testing
10. Not Utilizing Tools

In order for your advertising campaign to be a success, you should not just put your money on it.

So, exert more effort and time and remember these 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid while making another advertising campaign so that you won’t lose any penny in your pocket again.

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