July 19, 2020
Facebook advertising has exploded in the past few years: in 2019 alone, advertisers spent more than $1.57 Billion on the platform.
Part of this success comes down to Facebook’s intuitive self-service platform: anyone can ‘advertise’ with just a credit card.
And yet over 62% of small businesses* claim that Facebook advertising has ‘failed’ them.
To help maximize the efficiency of your Facebook advertising campaigns, we asked Dany Benavides – a professional performance marketer and coach in GrowYourAgency’s Copy Paste Agency program – what the ten most common Facebook advertising mistakes were.
Dany Benavides, coach in Copy Paste Agency
One of the most common Facebook advertising mistakes is a simple one: not ‘giving’ Facebook enough angles.
In advertising, ‘angles’ are different approaches to promoting a product or service. This is most commonly a creative, piece of copywriting, or a combination of the two.
When creating a campaign, it is essential to provide multiple angles to test against one another. Posting a single advert, in a single ad set, in your campaign is unlikely to yield results. By testing multiple angles, you can see what works and replicate it, or what doesn’t and remove it.
The one problem with creating multiple angles – and testing multiple ad sets – is that you tend to minimize engagement across all Facebook adverts.
Those valuable likes, comments, and shares – which are unlikely to benefit an advert directly but will signal social proof to other users – are lost.
However, it’s actually possible to use an existing advert in a different ad set, without creating an entirely new post. To do so, under Identity change ‘Ad setup’ to use existing post.
Speaking of which… why is engagement so important?
If you’re running a campaign with the objective of driving traffic/ conversions, it’s unlikely you’ll want to focus on engagement. Ultimately, the client doesn’t care about how many likes or comments a post gets… but you really should.
Facebook uses myriad factors to determine how many people to serve an advert to, and if it is of high quality. One of the most obvious indicators of success to Facebook is… engagement.
If people are viewing an advert, liking it, commenting on it, sharing it, saving it, or doing anything to show they have an interest in it… it’s more likely to perform well.
Of course, this isn’t to say that you should focus on sharing memes or being controversial to court more engagement – just that you should be conscious that your advert should make people stop and engage with it. Headlines with questions, angles that are contrary to popular belief, or anything funny will help with engagement.
This may seem like an obvious one but failing to comply with Facebook’s increasingly-long Advertising policies is the downfall of many advertisers.
Note, failure to comply doesn’t just mean that your adverts are disapproved (or worse, your ad account is shut down) – it can also lead to delays in the rest of your campaign going live, and restricted performance.
Take something as simple as the 20% text rule in images. Creatives with more will still run – but their reach will be limited.
Frequency is a hot topic when it comes to Facebook advertising. There are some who try to keep it as low as possible, and others who’ll let an advert run and run until people are sick of seeing it in their feed.
Those in the former camp have legitimate concerns: ‘banner blindness’ (where users automatically tune-out adverts), increase in CPM and decrease in CTR can all occur with increased frequency. Whilst those in the latter tend not to be making a conscious decision but instead seeing that an advert works – or once worked – and leaving it there.
We actually err on the latter side and will let frequency go as high as 10. As long as adverts are performing, there’s no need to artificially cap frequency.
Community management – a fancy term for monitoring comments – is one of the most crucial elements of a high-performing Facebook advertising campaign.
Time and time again we’ve seen client results massively benefit from something as simple as hiding negative comments, and responding to customer queries. Especially with high ad spend, one critical comment can damage an entire campaign.
We recommend setting profanity filters to ‘high’, automatically blocking certain terms (particularly those which you know are damaging to your client), and recommending that they respond promptly to questions.
You can have the most high-performing, well-designed, impressively-copywritten Facebook advertising campaign in history… but if the offer isn’t good enough, it won’t perform well.
One of the great virtues of Facebook advertising is that it gives almost instantaneous-feedback: within 12-24 hours you should be able to see whether or not anyone is interested in your offer.
If you have no results in this timeframe, and you are already questioning whether the offer is good enough… it’s not.
Go back to the client, explain and use something else.
One of the most important aspects of onboarding a client is getting to know their audience.
Your advert’s copy should resonate clearly with your target audience: by knowing how they speak, what they relate to, and the language they use, you’ll dramatically increase your engagement and CTR.
Earlier we spoke about testing.
Testing is great and can improve the performance of your Facebook advertising campaign infinitely.
But as good as testing is, the method of testing is more important. This is where variables come in.
Audiences, creatives, copy, landing pages and placements all come under ‘variables’. By testing these variables, you should be able to constantly improve individual adverts and the campaign as a whole.
But in order to do so, it’s necessary to isolate the variables.
This means that in a single test, only one variable should change. If you pitch two different adverts, in two different ad sets, how do you know if the copy and creative or audience were responsible for the performance of the better advert?
When testing, it’s important to control variables, and isolate only a single change.
The internet is full of Facebook advertising advice.
It’s no surprise that the majority of it… isn’t very good. But as this is just another article offering Facebook advertising advice, we can only offer one tip: keep it simple.
Any course/ guidance/ advice that you follow that overcomplicates Facebook advertising is probably doing so to impress you – not to help you.
Facebook advertising comes down to four things:
>Great creatives and copy
>Clever targeting and retargeting
>Converting landing pages
>Compelling offers
If you’re interested in learning high-level service delivery through Facebook advertising, check out Copy Paste Agency – GrowYourAgency’s program for established agency owners.
Sources:
*”62% of Small Businesses Fail with Facebook Ads. Here’s How to Fix That” – NeilPatel.com
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