“Your best teacher is your last mistake.” The Facebook ad system is incredibly powerful. It has the potential for earning huge profits and, it has a lot of room for “learning.” i.e. Mistakes. Most Facebook ads strategists have made these mistakes at one time or another. Facebook ad mistakes are not uncommon. The best ads strategists have learned from those mistakes.
1. Using the Facebook Boost button.
Boosting posts is the “easy button” for Facebook ads. While it’s not necessarily a Facebook ad mistake, it’s also usually not the smartest strategy. Boosting a post is like going out for dinner instead of making yourself a home-cooked meal. When you go out for dinner, it’s awesome because someone else does all the shopping, cooking and even clean up. You get great food, but you also pay for it. Plus, you don’t have as much control over the food. If you don’t like cilantro, too bad. For the most part, you get what the restaurant serves up. When you cook your meals at home, it’s cheaper because you’re doing the work yourself and your food tastes exactly the way you want it to taste because you can leave out the cilantro and lower the salt if you want. The catch is that you have to know what you’re doing in the kitchen. Facebook ads work the same way. When you use the “boost button” you’re having Facebook do all the cooking and cleaning for you. The food tastes great (and the post works well), but you’re paying extra and it may not be exactly what you want. When I was using the boost button to promote my posts, I was seeing great results. I was also throwing money out the window. Once I learned how to cook in the Facebooks ads kitchen, the budget dropped and I started getting exactly the customers I wanted. Avoid this Facebook ads mistake by spending some time learning the Facebook ads manager. And if you don’t have time to learn, get some help from someone who does.
2. Missing the lifetime versus daily budget checkbox.
All of the Facebook ad mistakes listed here have a financial cost, but this one is the most measurable. When you’re creating Facebook ads outside of the boost button, you can choose how you apply your budget. First, you can run an ad for a finite period of time with a set budget. For example: run the ad for 2 weeks for $150. (That’s the same way a boost works.) You can also set a daily budget. For example, you could set a daily budget at $10 per day, and run it indefinitely. Many, many people have unknowingly set a daily budget instead of a lifetime budget. Facebook makes it easy to make this mistake. In my case, I set a daily budget of $350 instead of a lifetime time budget of $350. Because I set the ad on a Friday, I didn’t notice the error until 2 1/2 days and $750 later. I’ve heard of many people who have made this error. Mine is the least expensive one that I’ve heard of. I’ve heard of $10,000 errors. Can you even imagine? You’ve got to know what you’re doing. That was the first and last time I made that kind of error and I’m grateful it wasn’t more expensive.
3. Using an audience that’s the wrong size.
Some of my first Facebook audiences were ginormous. Like millions of people big. It sounds logical: the more people you reach the more likely you are to find a buyer among them. But it doesn’t work that way. If you’re not targeting the right people, you’re basically throwing away money. We just finished up election season here and I have a huge stack of political ads that came in the mail. They all ended up in the recycle without a second glance. You can’t recycle a Facebook ad, but you can ignore it just as easily and that’s what happens to most of your Facebook ads when you cast too large a net. You can also run into trouble with audiences that are too small. There simply aren’t enough people from your audience that were actually on Facebook when you are running your ads, so your ads aren’t leading to downloads, or even clicks. When I started building my audiences more carefully, I started seeing better results.
4. Bad creative.
“Creative” refers to the image and text you use in your Facebook ad. Facebook has strict rules about what you can and cannot use in an ad. If you use certain words, they’ll block your ad altogether. If your image has more than 10% text, they will limit the number of people who see your ad. I always use this tool to check with Facebook to see what they think about the image I’m planning to use. Facebook uses “bots” to evaluate images so it sometimes will perceive a really busy image as having too much text.
It’s also really easy to put too many words into a Facebook ad. Keep your copy short and to the point. People are always skimming on Facebook, so make sure that your main message is what they’re most likely to see. Read my article about composing a Facebook post that people are likely to pay attention to for more tips on writing strong copy.
5. The Biggest of All Facebook Ad Mistakes: Ignoring the Facebook Pixel.
This mistake is huge folks. Huge. And it’s probably one of the easiest of all Facebook ad mistakes to fix. When you put the Facebook pixel on your website, you can serve Facebook ads to anyone who has ever visited your website, even if they don’t “like” your Facebook page. It’s a way to make sure that your potential customers are seeing what you have to offer. You can even create specific audiences based on your content. Do you have a math bundle that sells very well? Create an audience of all of the people who have visited any of your blog posts about math and serve them an ad promoting your new and improved math products. The possibilities are endless. Putting the Facebook pixel on your site isn’t hard. Facebook walks you through the steps. It requires a little bit of technical knowledge but don’t let the technicalities get you down. I include Facebook pixel installation with all of my Facebook ads packages. Get in touch if you’d like help.
The great thing about all of the Facebook ad mistakes I’ve made is that I’ve only had to make each of them once. It’s a complicated platform, but like most things, it can be mastered with a little bit of practice.
