15 Worst Facebook Ads Mistakes (Avoid Doing THIS!)

The good news is, you are not the only one!

With 2.45 billion active monthly users, Facebook remains an advertising giant. If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world.

57% of consumer says that social media influences their decision-making process. Hence, every business wants to run ads on Facebook.

Its active user in billions, coupled with great targeting criteria, makes it a magnet for advertisers.

Recently, there has been a massive decline in Facebook’s organic reach and ad impressions on the increase. This has made the competition steep for advertisers to keep up by ensuring ads are engaging and relevant.

Hence the reason I am sharing with you great insights consulting for advertisers across various industries.

These common Facebook ads mistakes and errors can cost you your ads budget without getting an impressive result on ads spend (ROAS).

In this article, we will explore the 15 worst Facebook ads mistakes you should avoid to ensure your advertising efforts yield maximum results.

Worst and Common Facebook Ads Mistakes to Avoid

Let’s jump in…

1. Not Defining Your Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a prototype of your typical or ideal customer, based on detailed audience research.

When you target everyone, you target no one. Still, trying to sell to everyone?

Mass marketing is the ’90s tactic and just doesn’t work anymore. This is one of the Facebook ads Mistakes that most Facebook marketers make

You need to define your ideal customer. If your ideal customer base is too broad, streamlining it into a few buyer personas is essential.

Important questions like who needs this the most, what age bracket do they fall in, what interests them, and where do they live?

Have a well-defined buyer persona. This is the first step to an effective marketing strategy for any business.

Perhaps, you are wondering what benefit this is. Facebook offers a wide range of targeting criteria based on demographics, behavior, and interest options.

Throwing your ads to everyone will not only be ineffective, but it will also cost your hard-earned money.

2. Expecting Facebook to Work Like Other Channels

This is another popular Facebook Ads mistake among advertisers that you should avoid.

Expecting Facebook to deliver results in the same way search ads or display ads do is the wrong way to monitor campaign performance.

You need to always bear in mind that Facebook delivers your ads to people who are most likely to be interested in your offerings.

Google Search Ads will deliver different results as they are great for matching audiences based on intent. Facebook matches the audience based on interest.

Hence, they will typically deliver different results.

3. Setting the Wrong Marketing Objective

This is a prevalent Facebook ad mistake among beginners. Facebook advertising is crystallized into a sales funnel.

The sales funnel starts with awareness and ends with conversion and within it, you have the marketing objective.

It’s difficult to develop a holistic Facebook Ads Strategy if you lack an understanding of your ad objective.

To avoid this Facebook ad error that could cause your ad budget, you must choose the right Facebook Ads objective that aligns with your business goal at every point in your marketing journey.

The Marketing objective is the first level of the Facebook campaign structure. Just before you start creating your Facebook ad, the ads manager asks you what your objective is.

 What is the goal of my campaign?

Am I looking for event responses, awareness, engagement with consumers, traffic to my site, or lead generation?

Whatever objective you select must align with your business objective and where your business is in the marketing journey.

The wrong Facebook campaign objective is synonymous with building a castle in the air. Hence, this is the first step to any successful Facebook Campaign.

4. Measuring the Wrong Metric

When your Facebook ad campaign is active and delivering, there are a ton of metrics at your disposal within the ads manager.

Some of them are reach, clicks, landing page view, impression, cost-per-click click-through rate, conversion rate, and others.

Again, your marketing goals inform the metrics you measure — are you trying to optimize your ads for higher conversions and bring down costs or do you have a really large budget to test?

5. Forgetting To Use Facebook Pixels

Tracking and reporting are vital elements of any marketing strategy. How are you able to ascertain that what you are doing to drive opportunities for your business is working?

Facebook pixels are snippets of javascript code Facebook uses to monitor users’ behavior on your website. It is simple to install.

However, if you’re not a techie, you might need to get a website developer to assist with the Installation.

Most advertisers seem to ignore this important step and proceed with running a campaign.

Pixels not only help Facebook measure who’s doing what on your site, but it also helps you as an advertiser define your audience in the future and also optimize effectively.

Also, you could decide to exclude a certain audience segment of people who have already visited your website from a new campaign or remarket to those who are your existing customers.

Facebook pixels is a very useful tool and must never be ignored.

6. Ignoring Facebook’s Analytics

Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Crazy Egg. These tools are some of the most famous websites and app analytics tools out there.

It’s easy to rely on the robustness of these tools out there and forget that Facebook ads manager is a great analytics tool in itself.

It can help you get a deeper insight into where and how people interact with your business across your multiple channels. Then, optimize and grow.

7. Forgetting to Exclude Those Who Have Already Converted

This mistake often happens with Facebook ads and making it has real implications for both your budget and the customer experience.

Imagine seeing an ad over and over again for a product you got a few days ago from the same business, how would you react?

You must look at the offer you are about to promote in your ad and ensure that you have excluded individuals who may have already converted to it.

The easiest way to avoid this as one of the Facebook ads mistakes is to create a list of those that have visited your offer’s Thank You Page, completed a purchase, or filled out your conversion or sign up form.

Then use Facebook’s Custom Audience option to exclude these individuals from seeing your ad. This way, you’re not wasting mad budget or annoying your prospects and customers.

8. Too Much Text on the Ad Image

Do you remember the Facebook Ads 20% Rule that signifies that only 20% of the ad creative may contain text?

Otherwise, Facebook could limit the distribution of your ad.

Well, the times, they’ve changed. Facebook isn’t as strict about text rules lately.

Instead of getting a “Yes” or “No” from Facebook, your ad’s text density will fit into one among the four classifications:

• Ok
• Low
• Medium
• High

Having a High Text Density on your ad images doesn’t mean that Facebook won’t deliver it, but it will deliver it to fewer audience members.

Facebook also notifies advertisers by email, guiding their attention to text-heavy ads.

9. Making Your Target Audience Too Broad (or Too Narrow)

Not ‘everyone’ is your target audience. No matter how good your Facebook ad copy, design or ad placement is, making a targeting mistake that should have been avoided, can ruin your campaign’s success. 

When creating a Facebook ad, be sure to look at the audience size to see if your targeting is broad — or too few — people. To get this done, look at your potential reach on Facebook.

The more defined your target audience is, the better your ads will perform. This is what effective marketing is about — getting the right message out to the right audience and at the right time.

PS: You will need to test your targeting to get the fit that is just right for your business.

10. Poor Ad Bidding in Facebook Ads

Facebook ads work similarly to Google ads. It deploys an auction-based system. Applying the right bidding strategy can give your ad campaign a significant boost in performance.

Budget is one key parameter that determines the performance of any campaign.

It is important to know that if you set a small or inflated ad budget, the Facebook delivery system will have an inaccurate indicator of the people for whom the delivery system should optimize the campaign.

Provide a budget large enough to generate at least 50 total conversions and avoid frequent budget changes (which can cause an ad set to re-enter the learning phase).

There are four bidding options:

• Impression
• Conversion
• Link Clicks
• Daily Unique Reach

To get started, you would have to go to the “Budget and Schedule” section in the Facebook Ad Manager.

11. Running Conversion Campaigns Without Enough Data

I know that you’re excited about making massive sales from your Facebook ads. And the best way that comes to mind is to create a campaign using the Conversions (especially when set to purchases) ad objective.

However, if you haven’t made enough sales, this campaign simply will not perform as you’d like it to and this is a massive Facebook ad mistake.

It takes a minimum of 50 conversions for the delivery system to optimize any campaign effectively.

When you set up a Conversions (purchase URL) campaign, you tell Facebook to target your ad at the people who are most likely to click ‘buy’ on your landing page.

When your pixel has gathered enough data, these can produce a remarkable ROI.

And this is why so many beginners rush into a Conversions (purchase custom conversions URL) campaign, only for it to fail, waste their budget (which would be better spent elsewhere), and put them off Facebook ads for life.

As mentioned earlier, Facebook needs at least 50 conversions per week to fully optimize its conversions algorithm.

Avoid one of the common mistakes of jumping into Conversion for purchase campaigns before your pixel has enough data to optimize your Facebook ads.

For some of you, this may mean running other Facebook ads campaigns to funnel your audience until you can increase your ad budget to generate enough conversions for this type of campaign.

12. Forgetting To Retarget

Studies have shown that campaigns that are retargeted have a 10X higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) than regular ads.

This is so as a person that has landed on your website and knows your brand is more likely to click an advert than someone who has never heard about what you’re selling or your brand.

At this point, the Facebook pixel is most useful. You could use it to promote new content or new products on your site to an old visitor.

You could also use it to reach someone who added a product to the cart but did not checkout. The opportunities in retargeting are endless.

Retargeting can be segmented into two main types: pixel-based and list-based.

• Pixel Based: this is a way to re-display your material to an anonymous website visitor.
• List Based: works after you already have someone’s contact information in your database.

Facebook advertising is all about deploying the right tools, creative format, messaging, and content.

Always test different audiences, content, and messaging when managing a Facebook campaign.

The best way to learn is still through experimentation.

Take advantage of the tools Facebook has made available to you as an advertiser. And avoid the mistakes of creating Facebook Ads without setting up a pixel.

13. Not Having Conversion API Set up

After the iOS14 changes, Facebook data reporting and campaign optimization have really been hard.

The conversion API is the solution to help advertisers and businesses ensure that their campaigns are not impacted.

The Facebook conversion API which is a server-based event helps to close the gap in data reporting and campaign deliverability to iOS users.

See how to set up Facebook Conversion API through partner integration or manually.

Words to Avoid in Facebook Ads

Addingcertiang words to your Facebook ad copy is also one of the common Facebook ads mistakes that can trigger your account being disabled.

There are certain words that can cost you your Facebook advertising access. Compliance is very important if you must continue to advertise on Facebook.

Below are some of the phrases and words to avoid in Facebook ads:

• Generate $10,000 in the next 30 days! Register for my free masterclass to find out how
• Make 7-figures with this lifetime opportunity
• “Frustrated with diets that don’t work? Do you want to lose weight without counting calories?”
• Are you over 25?
• Use of too many “you” or “your”
• Diet
• Fat
• Anxiety
• Stress, fear,
• Work-from-home
• Overwhelm
• Depression
• Terrified
• Make money
• Lose 15 pounds this summer!
• Like us
• Like this
• Comment
• Share
• Tag a friend
• Enter Contest
• Affiliate
• #Sponsored
• #Ad
• Deby-Relief
• Weight loss
• Covid-19
• Corona Virus

Conclusion

Facebook ads can be a useful tool in growing your business, creating awareness, lead generation, and driving sales to your product or service.

However, there are common Facebook ads mistakes that you can make that can crush your business growth if you don’t avoid them.

You can avoid these common Facebook ad mistakes. To do so, you can use these tips highlighted in the article above to get started and avoid making the same common Facebook mistakes made by marketers.

Be proactive by tracking your ad spend and campaign performance consistently.

Also, share that data with stakeholders so that they understand the results you’re getting.

Stick to your plan, test, and optimize. Once successfully master your first campaign, then take the time to consider other options.

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