How to Avoid Budget Wasting Facebook Mistakes
Facebook Ads have existed as a part of the marketing mix for nearly a decade. During this time the ad platform itself has gone through a number of different changes and iterations: some good, some bad. Best practices constantly come and go, new features are continually being added, and it’s now easier than ever to make a simple mistake that could cause your ad campaign to fall short of your goal.
With that being said, we at Stillwell+Co, wanted to provide you with a few common mistakes that are made when running Facebook ads. We will also give you tips on avoiding these mistakes so that your campaign reaches all of your goals.
Letting Your Ad Creative Get Stale
We’ve all been there, scrolling through Facebook and feeling like we are seeing the same ads over and over again. It’s not enjoyable for you, so why put your audience through it? Ad fatigue can not only cause your performance with those assets to decline, but by doing so you’re also creating negative mental associations with your brand in your potential customer’s minds. Although making new creative is a bit more time-consuming for social ads, it is important. There are also some ways to help cut down on the time it takes to create more ad creatives:
Look Around for Inspiration
Looking at other Facebook ad creatives can be a great way to get new ideas for posts. The idea for the ads doesn’t even have to be from your niche of business because you’re mostly going to be looking for layout, tone, and creative ideas. With one of Facebook’s newest updates, they will even provide suggestions for ways to make your ads better based on competitive ads that are running.
Use Stock Images
Creativity does not have to be entirely unique or custom-created. This is a typical misconception. There are plenty of sites that curate free or low-cost stock imagery for reuse. Don’t be shy about using stock photography in your creatives because most of it is amazing and useful. Unsplash.com is our go-to for stock images that are high-quality and free to use.
Leverage Design Tools
Let’s face it: not all of us have degrees in graphic design and thoroughly know how to work within Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Don’t worry, there are still some options. Sites like Canva allow you to use premade templates to design new Facebook ads in just a few quick clicks. The interface is very user-friendly and saves tons of time. In addition, Facebook continues to increase the capabilities of its own platform, allowing for you to optimize creativity for each placement within the ad creation tool itself.
Look Into Creative Marketplaces
If you simply don’t have the time to produce new creative, even with stock photography and easy tools like Canva, it may make sense for you to look into a service like Stillwell+Co. We offer a number of different packages that can help you grow and thrive within your business. Not only can we produce custom graphics with your branding at the forefront, but we can also advise and train you on the tools necessary to take over the process yourself if necessary.
Failing to Understand the Nuances of Budget Controls
When it comes to budget management, Facebook has some of the widest-ranging options of all social platforms. These different options are great tools for seasoned advertisers, but can often be confusing for those who are not familiar with them.
For example, daily budgets help balance out spending, making it predictable from a day-to-day basis. During this though, while your campaigns will still try and gain as many of your conversion objectives as possible, daily budgets will also work to spend your entire budget each day regardless of conversion performance. On the other hand, lifetime budgets help to optimize within days for your goals, though they don’t always reach the target spend each day, making pacing a bit more difficult.
Over-Segmenting Audiences
Having too tight of a hold on your audiences can sometimes be a detriment on Facebook. If you come from a search-oriented background, odds are you like to have pretty clean campaign structures with highly segmented campaigns and ad groups in order to optimize for what is and isn’t working.
If you’re segmenting your audiences too far and putting them into different ad sets, you’ll likely never get out of Facebook’s “learning phase.” This can cause you to miss important KPIs and under-serve your audience. To add to this, the smaller your audience is on Facebook, the higher CPMs you’ll pay. This means it’s more expensive to reach the same audience if you’ve broken up targeting options into 10 different ad sets rather than 3-4.
When and where possible, try to keep your audience mappings logical, but don’t narrow them too far. Depending on the account, we typically recommend aiming anywhere between 2 and 40 million users in a target audience to keep things focused and give Facebook enough performance data to optimize on.
Not Checking Audience Overlaps
Unfortunately, just because you’re not over-segmenting your audiences, it doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. You can also err on the other end of the spectrum. With all of the different targeting options Facebook has, it can be easy to build out tons of different audiences trying to reach the same users. The problem with this is that sometimes users fall into multiple different targeting options and based on your setup, could be showing in multiple different groups. This can cause issues for a few reasons:
It can be unclear which targeting options are working best. Users with feet in different pools can convert the most recent audience they were in to see the conversion, which isn’t always the one that had the greatest impact.
Ad creative fatigue can set in much quicker if you’re serving ads to users from multiple different ad sets or campaigns. The frequency numbers we see will only correlate to that individual ad set or campaign, so fully understanding saturation across those levels can be difficult.
To help rectify this issue, Facebook has a tool called the Audience Overlap tool which allows you to compare the audience makeups of saved, lookalike, and custom audiences within your Facebook audience manager.
Controlling Placements Rather than Customizing
With Facebook and Instagram being so vast it means that your ads can show up in a number of placements around the web. When users get to the “Placements” portion of the ad set controls, it often is very tempting to pick and choose which ones to have your ads show up in. But that’s not always in your best interest.
The audience you target will always be the same regardless of the placement from which your ads are being served. The audience will always rely on the same targeting options as any other, meaning that even if you are showing ads on the “Audience Network” it doesn’t mean you’ll be targeting new users.
Removing placements gives the Facebook algorithm fewer options to work with to try and get the results you want. Since the audience is the same, Facebook will sometimes serve ads to a user in a lower volume, lower cost placement that can help drive incremental revenue for you. As seen above, although this campaign has low service to this placement, it has great returns that we wouldn’t have seen without it.
To overcome this problem make sure you show up in all placements, at least at first, and leverage Facebook tools that allow you to customize your ads by each placement. This ensures your creatives look good no matter where they show up and will allow you to make a data-driven decision on which placements to keep and which to avoid.
Failing to Nurture Top of Funnel Audiences to Bottom of Funnel
The last common mistake seen on Facebook is a lack of follow-through. Facebook has tons of different campaign objectives, each with its own unique focus, but in the best accounts, all of these campaigns work in concert with each other to create a full buyer journey.
If you work at leveraging Reach, Engagement, or Video Views campaigns to gain brand awareness, you’ll ideally be creating remarketing lists of users that engaged with those campaigns and you are essentially targeting them later on with a more mid to bottom-funnel call to action. This is typically as simple as bringing them to your website for ungated content, asking for a lead generation form fill for gated content, or as complex as requesting a demo or making a purchase on a landing page. We’re all using online marketing to get more customers, so if you’re spending the time to build your top-of-funnel marketing, why aren’t you nurturing them through to the stages that actually generate revenue?
In short, to avoid making the same mistakes, be sure to do the following:
Use tools to get inspiration for new creative, such as Facebook Ads Inspiration, Canva, or stock photos.
Make sure you have a clear understanding of campaign objectives so you can make the appropriate optimizations.
Make sure you understand the nuances of budget controls.
Keep your target audiences between 2 and 40 million users to collect enough data.
Use the Audience Overlap tool to make sure you’re not serving the same ads to the same users multiple times.
Make sure you start with all placements and then refine once you’ve collected data.
Set up your campaigns such that each one is a different part of the same buyer journey.
