Home > Blog > Facebook Ads – 14 things you’re doing wrong and didn’t know it

Facebook Ads - 14 mistakes you are making and didn't know about

July 15, 2021

Facebook Ads is Facebook’s paid tool that allows you to create campaigns and promote them, both on Facebook and Instagram. But if you are creating campaigns, you should already know that. So let’s cover the main mistakes made on this platform and what you need to know to avoid them.

Facebook Ads: common mistakes and how to fix them

1. Audience segmentation

It is very common that the segmentation of the campaign’s target audience is not done in the most effective way. Here are some points you should consider when setting this parameter when creating a Facebook campaign:

Knowing your target audience is the first step in creating an effective campaign. It is important that you try to learn about your potential customers’ spending habits, interests, geographic location, age group, and various other factors. To do this, do market research – never assume that your audience’s interests are the same as yours. Make sure you base it on real data.
You should consider the size of the target audience for your campaign: it should be neither too large nor too small. Use and abuse the pointer that Facebook presents, which tells you the potential reach of your ad and ensures that you set an appropriately sized audience. If the displayed size is too large use interests, job titles, gender, age and/or location to filter the audience for your ad. In addition, it is important to take into account the budget you have available for the campaign and adapt the audience size accordingly.
Another thing you should know is that the interests you select when creating your campaign do not always correspond to the “likes” that users have put on Facebook pages – they also include people who have shown interest in that topic or that company/brand through other online activities.
The size of each interest also varies greatly, and there are some with very large dimensions. In such cases, it is necessary to further segment the audience by selecting other options – for example, through the “Filter Audience” option, where Facebook allows you to select someone who has a certain interest/role/behavior, but at the same time also has another interest/role/behavior.
If your campaign is international, don’t forget to adapt the language and content according to the culture and habits of the ad’s target country.

Know the advantages of creating a lookalike audience to optimize campaigns

2. Competition Analysis

Frequently analyze what your competition is doing – what they are publishing, what paid ads they are running, and how they communicate with their customers.

Amplifier identifies your main competitors and shows you what they are doing on social media. Learn more in this article: What is Amplifier.

3. Ad Creativity

It is becoming increasingly difficult to get an ad to stand out in the midst of so many social media posts. There are a few points that you should consider when you are creating the image or video and text for your ad:

Your images or videos must conform to the dimensions recommended by Facebook in order to have the necessary quality to allow the viewer to perceive the content presented in them.
The creative should be eye-catching so that it grabs the viewer’s attention right away and can convert – pay attention to the illustrations and colors you use, and don’t include too much text in the images. You can include your logo in the creative – even if people don’t know your company or brand, it’s a way to make it known.
You must not mislead the public by promising things that are not true.
A/B testing is a good option to figure out which creatives work best in terms of adhesion, CTR (Click Through Rate) and CPC (Cost Per Click).
The message you use is another very important factor. This should not be too long, but it should be direct and informative – make sure you include the crucial point you want to communicate, so that the person on the other side of the screen clicks on the image. Don’t forget to adapt your writing to the audience – consider whether to use more technical or more informal language.
Vary the material: don’t always use the same material. The audience will not want to see the same thing over and over again, and the results tend to decrease. In addition, you also run the risk of losing followers and potential customers.

Learn the basics of content marketing in this article.

4. Ad Optimization

Another common mistake in creating Facebook ads is not adapting, updating or correcting the ads throughout their duration.

It is important that you monitor the campaigns daily and make small optimizations that allow you to improve their performance.
The learning phase of the ad is one factor you should pay attention to – when the ad goes into “limited learning” means that you are not receiving enough optimization events. You can optimize it by making small changes in the target audience and/or increasing the daily budget amount.
To tailor your campaign’s target audience, you can analyze the ad statistics and see which age range or gender generated the best results.

5. Choice of Goals

One of the most important things when you run a campaign is to set objectives, conversion goals, and a budget, so that you can then measure and analyze its results.

You should also define the metrics that are most important to you and your business and keep track of their values.

6. Landing Pages

TheLanding Pages are very useful tools and are still little used.

A Landing Page is a page that contains all the necessary, but summarized, information about the product or service you are promoting. You can direct users to this page, through the ad, instead of directing them to the website. They usually contain a form that visitors can fill out, where they leave their contact information.

The probability that the click will convert via a Landing Page is higher.

Learn more about creating a website and landing pages.

7. Calculate Budget

Setting the budget for a campaign can be a challenge, but there are some points that you should keep in mind.

You should not set too low a budget for a campaign. Sometimes it is better to set a higher budget and shorten the duration of the campaign, than to leave it active for longer with a lower value.
When you set your budget, you should also take into account the size of the audience – if it is too large, setting your daily budget too low can compromise the effectiveness of your ad.

8. Use of a Single Ad Set

This is a common beginner’s mistake. You should not have all the ads concentrated in one Ad Set.

Facebook will probably assign different values to your ads within the same Set. In other words, it will make your task of analyzing the ads more difficult and will cause you to draw wrong conclusions. Bet on creating different sets of ads.

9. Test

It is important to test various components of the advertisements. But beware, never test two or more factors at the same time – you will end up not knowing what worked and what didn’t.
Tests help you understand which audiences are best suited for your business, what types of content these audiences prefer, and what their interests are. You can test factors such as: the images, the copy, the Call To Action, and even the Landing Pages.
Leave the ad active for +/- 72 hours without making any changes – Facebook’s algorithm needs time to “learn” your audience and generate results. Furthermore, you are unlikely to be able to draw reliable conclusions about audience preferences if the ad has only been active for a short time.

10. Boring ads

It’s important that you keep in mind that people don’t use social media to watch ads. So it’s important that your ads are not boring:

Don’t use repetitive texts.
Don’t fill your images with too much text.
Don’t use too many Call to Action
Don’t leave the same ad active for too long.
Content is also important!

While it’s hard to measure whether people have seen your ad too many times, one of the things that indicates this is when you make optimizations to the ads and the results don’t increase.

11. Facebook Pixel

Pixel is a tool that Facebook provides, that you can (and should) put on your website, that allows you to collect more data about the people who visit and what they do while browsing there.

This tool allows you, for example, to count how many people added items to the cart, how many made the purchase, and how many abandoned the cart without completing it.

12. Choosing the Ad Goal

It is quite common for people to choose the wrong target for the ad they are creating. First, you must define what your goal is with the ad: what do you want with that ad? Then you align that with the options Facebook presents and select the goal that makes the most sense for your business and for that specific ad.

13. Results and Metrics

Many people create ads and then don’t analyze the results and important metrics.

You should define which metrics are most important depending on the type of ad you run, and analyze them regularly to understand where and how you can maximize your results.

14. Highlights of the Offer

Make a point of exploring the highlights of your offering. You should highlight in your ad the main factors that differentiate you from your competition.

Test, test, test

Before you create a campaign, you should define the target audience, the budget, and the goals of the ad. During its duration, don’t forget to test various factors (one thing at a time), track the results, and make some optimizations when necessary.

Remember, there is not just one way of doing things – try different things and draw conclusions about the best way to approach your audience.

Did they block your ad account? Learn how to unblock a Facebook account in this article