Posting ads on Facebook is simple enough but achieving the desired results might prove tricky sometimes. This might be because you are making simple mistakes that are impacting your Facebook ad campaign. This article looks at a few of these mistakes and how you can rectify them.
Mistake #1: Bidding against yourself
The benefit of Facebook ads is that you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on it or interacts with it in some way. Facebook ads are all about bidding for the chance for your audience to click or interact with your ad. Your direct competition is obviously the other ads that are targeting the same audience you are, so bidding against yourself isn’t really something you need to worry about unless you are running different ads that are targeting the same audience. In this instance you are in direct competition with yourself because you are trying to place different ads in the same place at the same time while targeting the same people. This bidding war against yourself will result in your ads underperforming. To avoid this, the solution is simple – don’t target the same audiences at the same time with different ads. In instances where this can’t be avoided because you might be trying to create a sales funnel, you could consider using Facebook custom audiences to exclude some of you audience based on their previous interactions with your posts.
Mistake #2: Setting your bid cap too low
A common mistake made with Facebook ads is setting a bid cap too low. A bid cap is there to tell your social media ads what the maximum value is that you are willing to spend to get customers to interact with it. It is so important to know the value of your conversion because if it is set too low then it can impact your ads negatively by lowering their performance. A simple fix for this is raising your cost cap to improve delivery. While this may mean that you use up your daily budget a lot faster, the up side is that you will see more conversions.
Mistake #3: Distributing your budget poorly
Facebook allows you to distribute your campaign budget equally across several ads. While this seems like a helpful option, the downside comes in when one of your ads is underperforming compared to the others. Whether an ad is performing well or not, Facebook will continue to distribute the budget evenly between all your ads, meaning that the ads giving you better results will be losing out because they are treated the same as underperforming ads.
Setting up Campaign Budget Optimizationcan solve this problem for you. By setting up this option, Facebook will then spread your budget according to an ad’s performance. A higher budget will be pushed towards a higher-performing ad, so your budget will be going directly to the ads that are giving you better results.
Mistake #4: You don’t have enough conversions to optimise delivery
If you are running campaigns that require conversion events, such as clicking on a link or making a purchase, you need a minimum of 50 conversions a week for Facebook to be able to optimise delivery and consistently deliver your ads. What this means is that if your campaign is struggling to convert, Facebook won’t be able to settle the campaign into a stable cost or delivery so your budget will be used up on ads that aren’t working.
While your first course of action should be to evaluate your ad campaign to try and establish why it isn’t working, another option is to change over to target cost bidding instead of lowest cost bidding. This way you can tell Facebook to bid around an approximate amount so that you can keep your delivery and costs consistent throughout the campaign.
Mistake #5: Your ads are being displayed too often
If people are seeing your ads too often, they may start hiding them. This is really something you want to avoid because this helps to drive up costs and drive down relevance scores.
Luckily Facebook gives you the option to set frequency caps in your ad sets to limit the number of times people see your ads in a certain timeframe. You can even consider setting up sales funnel ads using custom audiences based on those who have interacted with a certain ad already, and then exclude them from initial campaigns once they’ve made their way down your sales funnel.
Conclusion
While there are many different mistakes that can impact your Facebook ad campaign, this article has just touched on some of the more common ones. To make the most out of your Facebook ad campaigns, make sure you know about, and understand, all the different options that Facebook has to offer.
If you would like to learn more about social media marketing go to Digital School of Marketing and check out the assortment of accredited marketing courses they have on offer.
