Are you making Facebook ad mistakes that could be eating away at your marketing budget? Are your ads helping Facebook more than they’re helping your fitness business?
In this blog, you’ll discover the most common mistakes made with Facebook ads and how to resolve them so you get a better return on your ad spend.
1. Too many interests in a Facebook ad set
Most people who want to run Facebook ads to new audiences spend time researching relevant interests they can use to target. Then they run a set of ads with all of those interests in the same ad set.
Using interests is a great way to find new audiences, but this approach makes it impossible to discover which specific interest was most effective or to find additional interests similar to the interest that brought in the sale. And that makes the ad impossible to scale.
Instead, create a list of all of the interests you want to target and group the interests into several categories. Then create multiple ad sets and target each one to a single group of interests. This way you’ll know which audiences are best, how large each audience is, and how to find other interests to test.
2. Expecting to make sales from cold traffic
Another critical mistake Facebook advertisers make is expecting to make sales straight from their first ad. Although this can happen, it is very rare. People who have never come across your business, your brand or your services in general won’t part with their money straight away regardless of how good your offer is.
In order to get anyone to buy anything, they need to know you, like you and trust you. That’s how sales are closed. So in order to turn “cold traffic” (in other words, people who don’t know you) to “warm traffic” (in other words, people who know you, like you and trust you), you need to offer them value for free several times.
You can do this by advertising free blog posts, free videos, free tutorials, etc without asking for anything in return. This will enable the people you’re advertising to, build a positive connection with you, so next time you do sell something, they are much more likely to buy.
3. Selecting the Wrong Facebook Campaign Objective
The first mistake people often make is using Facebook ads to sell too quickly. They create an ad that pushes cold audiences directly to a sales page to sell something right off the bat.
It’s too fast and completely inappropriate, and it violates one of the golden rules of social media advertising: you must give before you ask.
You need an intermediary step for lead generation in which you provide something of value in advance. This is the start to a conversation you can use to build a relationship you can nurture. Then when people are ready to buy, they’re more likely to do so from you.
This leads to the second mistake, which is selecting the wrong objective in the campaign structure. Many people looking for leads will select engagement or clicks when they should be selecting conversions and optimising for leads.
Ninety percent of the time, this selection will result in stronger performance.
4. Setting and forgetting
A huge mistake people make is not managing campaigns after they’re active.
Set up a campaign and let it run on its own, and it will decrease in effectiveness over time due to Facebook ad fatigue.
The key to developing sustainable results from Facebook advertising is to analyse your campaigns on an on-going basis. Look at your Return on Ad Spend and the cost, relevance, frequency, and CPM metrics and then make adjustments to ad creative and copy, as well as objective and targeting.
5. Yawn-Worthy Ad Creative
Your image is the first thing people will notice. That is if it’s interesting. Otherwise, they’ll completely miss it. That means bright colours, captivating images, and other visual elements that stand out so people will stop and take notice.
Images MUST immediately catch your eye, but they also instantly communicate what the ad is about (or the value proposition). All without using a single word.
6. Too many words
Previously, Facebook had an automated ‘20% rule’ that said you weren’t allowed to have text cover 20%+ of an ad image.
They’ve done away with that automated rule in the past year or so. But generally speaking, fewer words still work better. Just think, less is more!
This ‘fewer words’ mantra shouldn’t just apply to ads, though, but also your ad text. For example, the ideal headline? Five words in length.
7. Ad Fatigue!
The best Facebook ads work for a week or two until they start declining in performance.
Know this. Expect this. And start subtly tweaking your ‘winning’ ads to refresh results.
“Ad fatigue” can set in, in as little as a few days.
Your click-through rate suddenly starts dropping like a rock, frequency increases, and results start trending in the wrong direction. Start by rotating your ads.
Tweak the ads that already work. That might mean the same basic offer and layout, but different colours, varying backgrounds, or just simplifying what you’re doing.
8. Having No Clear Value Proposition
A unique value proposition is a fancy way of stating the promise you are making to your customer. This is the hook that will lead people to click through to learn more versus scrolling on to find the next best thing.
Though some Facebook ads may be small, they still need to have a true value proposition. If your offer cannot be read or understood in three to five seconds and doesn’t easily capture how it’s better than the competition, then you should not use it.
To ensure your ad has a strong value proposition, focus on the following:
- Make the content clear and easy to understand
- Communicate results the user will get from purchasing your product or service
- Avoid cliche copy like superlatives and business jargon
- Explain how it’s different from or better than the competition
9. Using a one hit wonder!
When putting together a Facebook campaign, it is absolutely critical you run a variety of ads and test every aspect of the ad. Each Facebook ad includes a headline, description, image and call to action. By just launching one ad, you are minimising your chances of success considerably. You are giving yourself only one opportunity to succeed.
Instead, run multiple FB ads and monitor what performs better. For example, run four exact same ads but try for example different headlines (always change just ONE aspect so you know which one worked best). After a day or so, you’ll notice that one ad performs better than the other ones.
Once you’ve found your winning headline, run another four exact same ads with the winning headline and try different images. Once you run all the ads, you will be able to put together a killer Facebook campaign, as you will know which headline, image, description and call to action performs better.
10. Not matching the ad with the landing page
Another common mistake Facebook advertisers make is not matching the marketing message and feel of the ad with the landing page. In other words, the image, the description, the colours and the marketing message in the ad is incongruent with the landing page.
By not matching the message and feel of the ad with the landing page will cause visitors to leave the page without taking any action so make sure the landing page is an extension of your ad.
