It is not difficult to launch advertising on Facebook. Therefore, entrepreneurs often do it themselves according to the social network’s instructions. But without experience, you can easily make mistakes that will lead to a drain on the budget. A marketer has collected the top pitfalls when setting up campaigns on Facebook. And described how to avoid them.
Misunderstanding of the campaign goals
Facebook has 11 goals for setting up campaigns. A goal is the result you need to get from users after running an ad. Therefore, when setting up a campaign, you need to clearly understand what you want to achieve. First, let’s briefly look at what goals there are.
Globally, goals are divided into three types:
- Recognition. To increase the number of users who know about your brand. To increase audience reach.
- Consideration. This is designed to get people interested in the company and start looking for more information about it. The goals here can be increased traffic and engagement, video views, app installs, lead generation, messages in the business account chat.
- Conversions. Such a campaign is needed to encourage users to perform some action. For example, sign up for a master class, make a purchase, visit a store, etc.
The main catch is in the “Traffic” goal. It has different optimization options and the two with the most nuances are clicking on a link and viewing the target page.
If you are running a campaign to sell a specific product, clicking on a link is not enough. It is important that the user actually waits for the page to load. Here’s why:
Many more people will click on the link than wait for your site to load – either by mistake or because the site takes a long time to load. It turns out that some of the clicks are useless.
This point is especially important to consider for those who order promotion from a contractor. Agencies and freelancers often set the goal of “Click on the link” in the race for quantitative results, not qualitative ones. This happens if they initially have quantitative KPIs or they are not clearly spelled out at all.
How to do it right
Clearly understand what result you want to get from the ad in the end. And only based on this, set the goal. If you choose “Click on the link”, remember that only a part of users will see your offer. To evaluate the effectiveness of such a campaign, pay attention to the views of the landing page.
Blurred Age Targeting
There is no product for the age group of 18-65. This age category is too vague. Think about it, what can unite a recent schoolchild and a pensioner? Even toilet paper, which everyone uses, is most often bought by the person in the family who is responsible for household chores. And he is 23-45 years old, not 18 or 60+.
We also got burned by this mistake. We launched a campaign on Facebook to tell users that we had become a call tracking, telephony and end-to-end analytics platform. We wanted to reach a wider audience, so we specified the age of 18-65 as the target.
We hoped that this would expand our regular audience. But it turned out that women 55+ began to actively respond to the ad, and the system decided to show the promo only to them as the most relevant users. After all, they performed the target action. And here is the result – just a drain on the budget:
How to do it right
Clearly understand the core of your target audience. The article “What is a target audience” will help you with this . Target not those who use the product, but those who buy it. For example, when promoting quick breakfasts for schoolchildren, keep in mind that the parent will buy such a product.
For infobusiness, age options from 18 are also acceptable, and for medicine – after 50, but you need to take into account the solvency of the audience. Here you also need to consider the specifics of the services you are promoting. For example, for plastic surgery, there is no point in setting such a high age limit.
An important point is that you may think that you know your customers well. But you will be mistaken. For example, one of our customers sold fishing gear and was sure that his products were bought by men aged 18-65. When he decided to connect call tracking , he was very surprised. It turned out that women regularly called him and their calls most often ended in a purchase. Such customers want to make a gift or surprise their loved ones who are keen on fishing.
You can also get to know your target audience better. To do this, simply listen to calls and analyze the age and gender of the callers.
Incorrect audience location selection
Facebook advertising newbies often select the “People who live here” parameter for geo targeting. But businesses are usually not interested in local residents, but in general, all people who may be in a specific area. Unless, of course, you are a construction crew or a company that exterminates rodents and insects in houses.
How to do it right
It is necessary to choose not only the location, but also the residents or recent visitors. Businesses may also be interested in travelers.
But here again you need to consider the specifics of your business. For example, it makes more sense to advertise hotels to travelers, not local residents. If your goods or services are sold only within the city, then you need local residents.
Launching creatives that are too similar
In an effort to save time, companies sometimes develop just one creative and simply make several versions of it with different text. This is a mistake that Facebook will not allow.
We saw this for ourselves when we launched one of the campaigns. We had a very successful creative with the company symbol — the crocodile Kroko. That’s why we wanted it to appear in all the ads. As a result, the system showed ads about telephony much more often:
How to do it right
It is better to launch at least two creatives that differ in composition, color, or format. Changing one word is not an option if the visual component does not change. Facebook will simply show the ad with one product more often, and not with the other, or much less often. For different products or services, it is better to launch different ad groups within one campaign.
Slow processing of leads from advertising
This primarily concerns companies that have launched advertising with the goal of “Lead Generation”. Businesses often forget that after the start of the promotion, there are more requests. And the workload on the sales department increases. Or advertising is shown on holidays and weekends, when there is no one to answer calls and messages in the chat. Because of this, attracted leads are lost and go to competitors.
How to do it right
Make sure that the leads you receive are processed in a timely manner. For example, if your sales department does not work on weekends, then advertising should be disabled on these days. The cost of achieving the “Lead Generation” goal is higher than for other types of campaigns. Therefore, make sure that managers are aware of the activity and are ready to promptly process requests.
To control this moment, use the report on missed calls in your virtual PBX or call tracking. And set up notifications about such calls.
The same applies to the speed of response to messages. If you have an SMM specialist on your team, agree with him/her to be on duty on weekends. Otherwise, the campaign result may be negative – no one wants to wait two days for a response to a question. We recommend using special software that allows you to instantly see messages in Messenger and promptly respond to them.
Incorrect choice of target audience
At first glance, it seems that everything is simple here. For example, car ads should be shown to people who are interested in cars. But this is not entirely true. If you are a car dealership and sell premium cars, you risk wasting your budget by choosing such an audience. Because not everyone who is interested in a status car can afford one.
How to do it right
Consider also the income level and indirect interests. For example, for the same premium car dealership, people with at least an average income are interested. Their interests may include yachting, golf or other similar hobbies. They can be set here:
The likelihood that someone who has never played golf is interested in it is low. And not everyone can afford such a hobby, but among the target audience of such a car dealership there are definitely such people.
This does not mean that you should exclude the direct audience that may contact you. But it is important to pay attention to indirect signs that will help you target as accurately as possible. I advise you to study the profiles of your current clients to get into the target more accurately. And think about what actions or interests are generally characteristic of your target audience.
Incorrect Pixel setting
Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your ads and study how people act on your site.
But it is important not only to install it, but to do it correctly. For example, it should be not only on the main page of the site, but also on the landing pages where the ad leads, if you do not have a landing page. Or track only one type of event if users can perform different actions.
How to do it right
Set up the Pixel so that it can track conversions and user actions. Otherwise, you won’t be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your ads. More details about the capabilities of this tool are here .
It is important that the Pixel is installed on the page you expect conversions from — not just on the main page of the site, unless it is a landing page. Set up events that will help track user conversions from advertising. This can be done specifically for your needs through Google Tag Manager or through the Event Setup Tool.
If your clients usually call you, be sure to connect call tracking and integrate it with Pixel. How this connection works using an example:
- a person visits a website;
- having selected the product of interest, makes a call;
- It transmits information about this to Facebook as a standard “Contact” event.
Therefore, you can work with the events transmitted by our service on par with other pre-installed ones.
You can view Contact events on your Facebook Pixel page in Events Manager. There you can see what your potential customers are doing and reach them with future social media ads.
Summary: How to Avoid the Most Common Mistakes When Setting Up Facebook Ads
Before you launch, think carefully about what goals you want to achieve when setting up your ads. For example, to make a wider audience aware of you or to get more sales. If you want to get clicks, see how many people ended up loading the site.
Analyze who makes up the core of your target audience. Who will ultimately pay for the product, not just use it. Not all companies are suited to targeting such a vague age category as 18-65 years old.
When setting up a location, don’t limit yourself to just residents of a certain area. It often makes sense to show ads to travelers or recent visitors as well.
Don’t use the same creatives in your ads, just changing the text on the image. Facebook will consider them the same and will show one ad more often.
Be prepared to process leads from advertising. After the campaign launches, there will be more requests, so the sales department should be prepared for this. If you have no one on duty on weekends, it is better to turn off advertising so as not to lose leads and money.
Consider the income level and indirect interests when setting up targeting. Consider whether a student or a person with a low salary can afford your product. If you sell premium goods, target people with “status” hobbies — yachting, golf.
Make the most of Pixel. To do this, you need to set up events to track user actions. For example, you need to integrate it with call tracking if your clients usually call you.
For optimal results, consider leveraging the best social media marketing services to enhance your Facebook advertising campaigns.
