3 Costly Facebook Ad Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Running a successful Facebook Ad looks easy at first, until it’s not. Having a good ad will help you get new customers. Of course, this does not come without problems. Creating the perfect Facebook and Instagram advertisements can be very frustrating. If not done properly, it can cause poor results and a waste of money. Especially if you’re just starting out.

Developing ads isn’t easy. Over the last 5 years we made many mistakes and we learned from them. We are offering a few solutions to the most common mistakes. Hopefully this will save you time and money!

3 Costly Mistakes and Solutions

Here are a few mistakes and how you can easily solve them:

1. Targeting the RIGHT audience

Mistake:

1. Targeting is not detailed enough

2. Targeting is too detailed

3. You are not using the available resources offered by Facebook

Problem:

1. If you are not specific enough with your targeting, you will end up spending a lot of money showing your ad to an irrelevant audience.

2. If you are too specific with your targeting, you are limiting the Facebook algorithm from doing the right work. At this point you are spending too much money on a small audience.

3. Are you using a pixel and custom audiences? These tools allow you to target individuals who have already shown interest in your business.

Solution: If you are not sure about the right audience, a good place to start is to look at characteristics of your current or previous customers. You can use this information to make buyer personas, lookalike audiences or interest based audiences.

With a buyer persona, you are creating a fictional representation of who your ideal customer would be. Information such as demographics, behaviors, goals are important.

Using a lookalike audience you are creating an audience based on people who have purchased, added to cart, or viewed your store’s product. It is important to have a pixel installed on your website to track this information.

You can create an interest-based audience based on your customer interest. This can help you pinpoint your audience more accurately and introduce yourself to a cold audience.

When you are first starting out, we recommend making an interest based audience AND a lookalike audience. You can find your cold audience and then retarget them with the proper hook.

2. Choosing the Right Ad Placement

Mistake: You are using automatic placements for low budget ads.

Problem: If you are running ads with a smaller budget (less than $20/day), you should manually place your ads where you want your audience to see it.

Facebook’s algorithm is very advanced. They are able to automatically adjust where to best position your ad based on how the audience reacts to them. However, they do so with trial and error.

If you have a limited budget and you choose automatic placements, Facebook will make it’s own tests and determine where to best position your ad. In the process of doing so, you will be spending more money than you should on your ads.

Solution: We recommend manually placing your ads where you think it is most relevant to your audience. Most of the time the best options are Facebook News Feed, Instagram Feed and Facebook Marketplace.

For example, if you are a restaurant owner you would choose Facebook News Feed and Instagram Feed but not Facebook Marketplace as

3. Invest in your Content

Mistake:

1. You are using low quality content

2. Your content is not engaging

3. Your content does not capture the attention of your audience

Problem: One of the most expensive mistakes is content. Content is often rushed, overlooked or poorly made. The usual thought process is “I won’t spend on the content so I can spend more on the advertising”

Facebook is a virtual billboard, like the ones you see off highways. The billboards job is to place itself in front of an audience. If 1 million individuals pass in front of a billboard of low quality, that is hard to read or simply doesn’t capture attention, you will not get good results, if any.

If you do not invest in proper content, you will simply never get good results, no matter how many people view it.

Solution: You may or may not have heard “Content is KING”. Any successful influencer, advertiser and celebrity will live by those words; because it’s true.

If you have no experience creating content, we always recommend one of the following:

Hire a professional to create your content. We almost always recommend to have an expert create your content. Because they will not only create high quality content, but they also know all the tricks to make it as engaging as possible.

Ask a friend to help you. Most of us always know a graphic designer, photographer or filmmaker. You can always ask for help.

How ViralCollab Can Help You Save Money

Our best tip to avoid any mistakes is to let someone else do the hard work for you. ViralCollab can create engaging ads and attract new customers at a fraction of the price it would cost you to make these mistakes. We will also save you a lot of time and effort.

Our experience has taught us how to avoid mistakes like these and hundreds of others that people make. Over the last 5 years, we have developed advanced strategies to build intelligent and interactive ads.

ViralCollab is here to help you grow your business. If you grow, we grow.

We’ll even help you for FREE. Schedule a consultation with us by sending an email to info@viralcollab.com. We can answer all you questions and give you advice on how to improve your current ads. For more information about our services, click here.