6 Common Facebook Ad Mistakes Beginners Make & How To Fix Them

The Facebook ad platform is one that has been around for a long time but is one which has experienced a huge amount of growth over the years. This has meant that new policies have come into place, new ad objectives have launched, and best practices are always changing. 

Even businesses that are experienced in Facebook ads fall into these traps at times!

Here are the most common ad mistakes that businesses make on Facebook and some solutions to the problems:

Breaking Facebook Policies

The biggest mistake that we see beginners making is not following the guidelines that Facebook asks all advertisers to comply with. Many small businesses launch straight into Facebook ads before taking any training or checking what you are allowed to say, how you say it and what you’re advertising.

Fully understanding Facebook’s entire ad platform would take many, many hours of training and experience, but we recommend at the very least reading their policies. 

For example, do you think this example ad would be approved or rejected?

Seems innocent enough, right?

Unfortunately enough, this is likely to be rejected because you can’t reference or imply personal attributes for a number of factors such as, as above, medical condition.

This is crucial to know about because not only will Facebook reject ads that don’t comply with policies, but they will even disable ad accounts and even permanently ban businesses and domains from their platform entirely at times.

Choosing the Wrong Objective

Of course everyone wants to get leads and make sales through Facebook ads, otherwise what’s the point of spending your money here? But if that’s the case, why do all the other objectives exist?

Before diving into Facebook ads, take a moment to sit down and figure out your goals and how you can reach them. Selecting the conversion objective and driving a cold audience towards your products might result in sales, but it’s likely that your cost per conversion will be far higher than it needs to be if you haven’t considered an overall strategy.

Conversion campaigns are usually a more expensive option than others in terms of CPM.

What you need first is to set up a strategy that considers how you will gather an audience of interested potential customers that can then be nurtured towards buying. In this online savvy world, people are wary of giving up both their money and their contact details to companies they either don’t know or don’t trust. Those that have been nurtured are more ready to buy, are more likely to do so from you and will make larger purchases.

For example, you might start by introducing customers to your brand with a video that highlights your products using a Brand Awareness or Video Views objective. You can then capture the most interested members of this audience by how much of the video they’ve watched and targeting them with a Traffic objective. It’s possible some may purchase at this stage, but may need a little more incentive. At this point, you can retarget them with a Conversions, Catalogue Sales or Lead Gen objective to push them to make that purchase.

If Facebook ads are just a part of a larger marketing strategy, you may not need to set up a campaign at each different step of the funnel – you may already be generating enough awareness with organic social media, email marketing or paid Google ads. But for a successful overall strategy, you’ll want to consider each of these steps at some point in your marketing.

Reporting on the Wrong KPIs

Checking the results of your ad campaigns and analysing how well they’ve performed is absolutely critical to getting the best bang for your buck.

Viewing your results on Facebook’s Ads Manager can feel a little overwhelming at first. There are a selection of default columns in place that show basic performance results such as reach, impressions and cost per result.

What a beginner might not realise is that there are a multitude of options if you customise your columns here, including everything from click through rate and cost per conversion, to add to carts and your ROAS (return on ad spend). 

Choosing the right ones to view and analyse is totally dependent on your campaign objective and goals though. There’s no point in fretting over a Conversion campaign only resulting in 2 page likes, or vice versa, a Page Engagement campaign that drives absolutely zero sales when those aren’t your KPIs or goals for that objective!

Multiple Interests in a Single Ad Sets

It can be really tempting to add as many behaviours and interests as possible into your ad sets so that you reach every single potential customer, but this can be a particularly problematic downfall, particularly if you’re still at the testing stage.

In order to find the best performing audiences, you’ll want to test either single interest audiences in a single ad set. If you’re struggling with finding a large enough audience size for niche industries, group together a few similar interests and trial those in a single ad sets.

Not Following Up On Leads

For businesses that require leads with contact details, Facebook has a number of campaign objectives including:

• Lead generation: customers can complete a form on Facebook.
• Conversion: drive customers to a landing page on your site where you have your own form.
• Messenger ads: start a conversation with customers to interact and then gather contact information.

Unfortunately, many small businesses fall into the trap of putting the time and effort into building great ads that are driving a good number of leads, but not following them up well enough to generate enough conversions. 

It’s important to nurture your leads, as a customer who is invested enough to trust you with their contact information is one that is ripe and ready to convert. It might be worth considering having a dedicated person or team to follow up on leads.

Over Complication on Smaller Accounts

When you’ve got a small budget, you don’t want the complication of tens of different ad sets and ads under your campaign. This is often particularly a problem when you’ve inherited an account as the campaigns may not be set up and organised in the way that you have chosen.

Over complication can cause a couple of problems:

• The budget on each ad or ad set will end up so small that you can’t properly tell what is working and what isn’t.
• You’ll spend far too much time managing the account, especially if you’re only one person managing hundreds of different ad sets and ads!

Our top recommendation here is to declutter! Take out lower performing audiences to get rid of ad sets, and cut ads that barely get a look in at the budget. If you have audiences that seem successful that you want to continue using, consolidate similar ones into single ad sets where you can allocate a larger budget. 

Still feel like you’re floundering with Facebook ads or just want to bounce your strategy off someone? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to help!