9 Facebook mistakes that hurt your ad performance

9 Facebook mistakes that hurt your ad performance

Often, target market beginners or even business owners, when launching Facebook ads, make many mistakes that lead to the deterioration of the results of advertising campaigns.
Therefore, in this article, we decided to collect the TOP 9 main mistakes that worsen the results of advertising campaigns.
Familiarize yourself with the article, use and correct these errors if they are present in your work. So, let's get started!

1. There are no audiences.

When creating audiences, you form remarketing lists that you should use in the future to target and create similar audiences based on them.

Audiences for remarketing can be collected, for example:

- from people who interact with an Instagram profile or Facebook page

- people who viewed the video on the business page

- from your customer base and others

Saved audiences can and should be cross-checked. You need to go to the "Audiences" tab, select the audiences (2 or more) for comparison, and click on the "Show matching audiences" button.

Audiences can also be shared between advertising cabinets, another advantage of their creation.

Example of saved audiences

An example of an audience overlap

2. Unconfigured Facebook pixel and events

A Facebook pixel is a piece of code on your site that helps you better understand the performance of your ads and the actions people take on your site.

Facebook events allow tracking the actions on your website, such as sending of feedback forms on the site, calling, adding to the cart, etc. All of these activities can be tracked using the Facebook Pixel.

Having Pixel Facebook installed on the site, you can create additional audiences of users who performed a specific action on the site (filled out a form, viewed some of the pages, clicked on the "contacts" button, etc.), that is, a warmer audience that can be "moved ” further down the sales funnel.

An example of a configured Events manager

3. A very narrow target

Choosing the right target audience for showing your ads is an important factor in the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, but it is also not worth narrowing it down too much. After all, in this case, impressions can be minimal, and the price for the targeted action is high.

In this case, we recommend expanding the audience using geo, age, or interests.

An example of audience size

4. Using of both — mobile devices and PCs— in the "Devices" section

Device restrictions are another method that allows you to show ads to the most targeted audience. Therefore, it is better to refrain from using devices like PCs and use only mobile devices. Because it is from the PC device, there is a high probability of receiving many fake applications from bots or automated systems.

An example of selected devices

5. Using only static creatives + incorrect format

Facebook allows you to create different types of ads. If you use different placements in your ad, then you need to choose the right size for each of them, for example, the recommended size for:

- static Facebook and Instagram feed banner: 1080 x 1350

- Facebook and Instagram stories: 1080 x 1920

- incoming messages in Messenger: 1200 x 1200

We recommend testing different creative formats: static banner, carousel, slide show, or video. In addition, you can collect an audience for remarketing from a video/slide show, create a Lookalike from it, and use it in the target.

6. Absence of an additional question in the lead form

Because most of the information in the lead form is pulled automatically, people sometimes send applications without even realizing it. And then they are very surprised by the managers' calls.

Therefore, to improve the quality of targeted leads, rather than "random" leads, we recommend adding an additional question with an answer to the lead form.

An example of an additional field in the lead form

7. Lack of UTM labels

Google Analytics is required for comprehensive analysis of advertising activity and user behavior. And it "sees" user conversions from Facebook ads only when UTM tags are attached to the site link.

Creation of UTM tags

Then, in GA, you can see information about the effectiveness of each ad.

How the UTM tags is displayed in GA

8. Incorrect optimization of Ads campaign Traffic

The most common mistake is improper optimization of the Traffic advertising campaign. Very often, the choice falls on optimizing a click on a link. You can click the button several times and not get to the target page for some reason.

Therefore, we recommend choosing the "Landing page view" optimization because this optimization will allow the user to go to the page you specified.

An example of correct optimization of Ads campaign Traffic

9. Use of automatic placements

Facebook recommends automatic placements, but you should be careful with them. With such settings, the campaign budget is distributed between Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network, Messenger.

Moreover, most of it falls on the cheap Audience Network. This means you are getting a lot of impressions, spending a larger share of your budget on that placement, but getting few targeted actions/apps. We recommend using a manual selection of placement. The most high-quality ones are - feeds/stories/reels.

Example of recommended selected placements

Conclusion
Everything is very simple: correct the errors listed above, and you will definitely get a better and cheaper result than you had! Good luck!