Facebook advertising is fantastic. Facebook’s advertising platform pulls in quite a bit of money – 2019 saw companies spend $1.7billion promoting themselves on the social media site. 

 With 2.7 billion active users, Facebook gives you a huge opportunity to advertise your products to your target audience.

Having said that, Facebook advertising does also make it very easy for you to waste money. Whether it’s because you’re new to setting up ads or simply not sure how Facebook ads actually work, it’s incredibly easy to spend money on their platform. 

So before you completely wreck your advertising budget, it’s a good idea to get to grips with the ins and outs of optimising your Facebook ads to avoid making any awful mistakes that could end up costing you some serious money.

Not sure what you’re looking for? We’ve put together this guide on the 6 of the most common budget-destroying Facebook ad mistakes and how you can avoid them. 

Mistake 1: Running your ads continuously

Your audience will have their ‘peak times’ and their ‘quiet times’. Nobody can look at your Facebook ads while they’re asleep. So you’re always going to have better results from your Facebook ads during peak times, that’s just natural. 

Running the same ad day in and day out isn’t great for customer interaction either. Think of it this way. If you’re watching TV and the same advert keeps playing over and over again you’re going to get sick of it. It’s the same with Facebook ads. Your audience doesn’t want to keep seeing the same advert appear on their timeline.

Research even shows that your audience can experience campaign fatigue within only three days of you launching your retargeting campaign. This campaign fatigue can lead to potential customers being left with a negative association of your brand. 

If you’ve accidentally caused campaign fatigue in your target market then you’ll begin to see a steadily decreasing ad performance. 

To combat campaign fatigue try to rotate your adverts every week or so. Every company is unique which means every audience is unique. Make sure to keep a close eye on your CTR and frequency metrics. Change your ad whenever your frequency increases but your CTR decreases.

Mistake 2: Linking ads to irrelevant or sub-par landing pages

A well-crafted ad only has the ability to earn the initial click – and that’s only half of a marketing equation. The landing page that your advert leads to shouldn’t be something mediocre or irrelevant to what the ad was for. If it is, then your ad (and the money you spent on it) is good for nothing. 

If your Facebook ads lead to a landing page that isn’t interesting, engaging, or relevant to what the customer is looking for they’ll just click away. This means no conversion, no sale and you lose out by paying for a Facebook ad that didn’t work out. 

The most common mistake when sending clicks to a landing page is sending them to a homepage or a completely useless page of your website. 

If your campaign has a solid CTR but a very low conversion rate then this is probably your issue. 

When sending people to a landing page make sure you deliver on what grabbed the attention of your audience in the first place. They clicked on your ad for a reason as they were interested in your product or service – make sure they can buy the product/service immediately when they land on your site.

Mistake 3: Messing with your Facebook ad settings

Have you noticed that your Facebook ad campaign hasn’t taken off and is struggling to gain any real traction? This could be because you’re tinkering with the settings too often. 

Facebook ad campaigns use machine learning to help optimise themselves. This is great for busy business owners –  however, it takes between 24 to 48 hours for Facebook to fully optimise the ad’s performance. 

There are no when it comes to getting your Facebook ads optimised which means no amount of tinkering is going to help, it’s only going to slow the process down.  

Impatient marketers who run very short ad campaigns or start tinkering with the settings only hours after the campaign is live are only running their advertising into the ground. They’ll still have to pay for the ads but they won’t see any conversions. 

It might be tempting to make a few changes, especially when there’s money on the line, but give it time and wait to see how your advertising campaign plays out. Then you’ll know what to change for your next round.

Mistake 4: Not using Automated Rules

Even the very best ad campaigns will eventually run themselves dry. There’s only so much one campaign can do before it begins to become less and less effective. As your campaign works through more and more of your target audience you’ll naturally lose effectiveness over time.

If you don’t keep tabs on your campaign and check it as often as you should, they could fall below the threshold of profitability as soon as your back is turned.  

With Facebook’s Automated Rules turned on you’ll be able to automatically switch off a campaign or advert and adjust a campaign budget based on set conditions. This will help you keep control over any changes to your campaign and help maintain it so it works efficiently.

Mistake 5: Forgetting to exclude (all) converted customers 

Remarketing can often be an excellent way to keep clients coming back for more but there’s no point serving an ad to those who’ve already clicked and converted. So remember to exclude everybody who’s already taken the desired conversion steps and purchased your advertised product in the last month.

By excluding these converted customers you’ll be able to focus your ads solely on new people who have the potential of becoming paying customers.

Mistake 6: Following the same ad formula without ever trying new ones 

Every audience is different which means they’ll respond differently depending on what type of promotion is used. So many businesses push all their ad campaigns to the News Feed or right column ads – but there are so many other options for you to choose from. 

Take the opportunity to experiment with different media ads like videos or GIFs. You might discover that they have a higher impact on your audience than what you were using before. 

Finding the most effective format for your ads won’t just help you improve your conversions, but it’ll also help you get the most out of your advertising budget. 

Remember, stuff changes online all the time. It might be tempting to double down and keep using whatever worked before but sometimes you have to let go and try something new.

Facebook marketing can help your company to drastically improve its reach online but unless you optimise your campaigns it can end up as an expensive lesson. Make sure that everything is running smoothly and that you’ve avoided all the mistakes above, or you might not be getting what you can out of your budget. 

Are your Facebook ads still failing you? 

Get in contact with our team at Ireland Website Design and we’ll help you figure out exactly what’s wrong with your ad campaign. Our team of marketing experts would love to help your business improve and get the conversions it deserves.