Why Are Your Facebook Ads Not Effective?

Whilst it offers the most extensive targeting options of all the paid social platforms, that comes with a whole lot of room for errors. Combine that with Facebook offering little support and making updates to the platform every two weeks, it can result in some common mistakes being made which compromise the performance of your ads. Here are the most common problems we come across and our advice for avoiding them (besides letting us take the hard work off your hands…)

1. Poor Targeting

1. 1. 1. Understanding your audience is vital. The lack of audience insights since the 2018 Analytica scandal, has made it harder to solely use Facebook to pinpoint your customer base, and the rollout of IOS will only make gaining those insights harder.
      2. Without knowing who your audience is, there is no point wasting budget on Facebook ads that could be reaching an audience who will not care about your brand message or purchase your product.
      3. In-depth audience analysis using a wider variety of tools is the first point of call underpinning every paid social strategy that we create. It’s a time-consuming process, but this is arguably the most important part of your campaign to get right and will pay off in the results that you generate.

                                                                   

2. Treating all your customers the same

1. 1. Whilst Facebook may recommend selecting all placements in your ad sets and decide on your behalf when and how often your ads appear in those placements, this is a common area of budget wastage and inefficiency.
      1. There are likely to be differences in your audience segments who are most active on Instagram vs Facebook, treating them the same may mean you miss the mark engaging with them and gives you little control and fewer levers to pull.
      2. We often see that more conversions come through one platform, but the other platform is where the higher value customers are. How do we know this? Because we have tested these audiences and analysed the results and taken back control over our budget.

                                          

1. 2. It’s also very tempting to reach customers with the exact same ad across all placements but if you have the time, it is very worthwhile tailoring the creatives to each placement.
2. 1. To not tailor the ad to their placement is ignoring the context and the different specifications. You wouldn’t want to turn up to the gym in your office clothes just because it saves you a tiny bit of time getting changed. Yes, you are the same, but the context is different, and you want your ads to stand out for the right reasons and be equipped to be able to perform at their best.

3. Impatience

3. 1. One of the most common mistakes to make is judging your campaigns too early. As with all digital marketing campaigns, no matter the channel, campaigns need time to gain data, meaningful insights and to be optimised to reach their potential.
   2. Don’t expect your ads to perform in the first week, your boss didn’t expect you to be exceeding your monthly target in the very first week of your first marketing job, and if you did, then your targets weren’t challenging enough.

                                                       

4. Lack of clear testing

4. 1. Make your life easier; clear naming conventions is the first step we implement when taking on a new account. It allows us to evaluate our tests and get significant outcomes to inform future activity, rather than making assumptions.
   2. Don’t test too many things at once or you will never get a meaningful result. One common thing we see is ad messaging containing 10 different themes, it may perform well, but how do you know which part of that message is resonating? What is your takeaway for future messages? You don’t have any, because you have no idea what makes it work. Split out the copy into clear themes and A/B test them fairly.

5. Don’t be afraid to make your own best practices

5. 1. We aren’t telling you to throw the rule book out the window here, but always bear in mind when following Facebooks recommendations, just as with Google, that they have their own agenda, and they don’t know your customer base like you do.
   2. Copy, creative, ad format, budget split, placements, audience size etc. all these things should be tested and tested again until you have your own enhanced best practices that specifically apply to your brand and your audience.

Get in touch  if you think you’re guilty of one (or all) of these mistakes and we can see how we can create the best strategy to help you correct these mistakes!