The Five Biggest Facebook Ad Mistakes

Now, I’m one that is all about promoting using paid traffic strategies within your whole eCommerce marketing plan because I know firsthand how quickly they can help you scale your success!

However, there are few common trip ups people make when setting up their ads.

There’s a science and steep learning curve that comes with running ads and managing ads yourself so there’s a few pitfalls that I see people fall into time and time again that you can avoid.

Setting the wrong objective

When you are setting up your Facebook or Instagram campaign, one of the first very things it will ask you is what is your objective? Is it traffic? Is it conversion? Is it engagement? Is it page likes?

It is the most important button to click when setting up your ad but most people get it wrong!

Because Facebook algorithm is very smart, if you set your objective at this level of the campaign as traffic, Facebook will show your ad to people it knows are clickers versus people that will click through and then hopefully buy.

You will definitely get lots of traffic (probably quite cheap traffic) but what you’ll find is you probably will get very few actual purchases or conversions. 

Now on the flip side, if you were to set that campaign objective as conversions and purchases, you will find you get less traffic from that ad spend however you will hopefully get more conversions or you’ll get closer to conversions.

Facebook is all machine learning, it’s not a human being sitting there going ‘we know Jodie would actually prefer conversions over traffic so we’ll make sure we try and get some’.

It’s all bots. It’s all this algorithm, it is all automated. So if you want conversions, you have to program it and say I want actual purchases here. 

Setting too small a budget

When you’re first starting out in your business, it’s natural to be apprehensive about spending too much within your Facebook ads. I

t’s scary, it’s a gamble, it’s a risk, we never know whether we’re going to get a return on that money and I totally get that.

However, we remember we have to spend money to make money.

I know right now for my business iland co. it’s costing me anywhere between $25, up to sometimes $100 to get a sale, that’s the cost per conversion of getting a sale for me. 

When setting your ad budget, you need to consider the lifetime value of your customers, the cost of the goods sold, whether or not you have enough margin in there to risk and spend that much.

For argument’s sake, let’s say my average cost per conversion is $50 per day.

If I want to make five sales a day, from that particular campaign, I am going to need to make sure I’ve got enough budget to do that.

If I’ve looked in my Facebook Ads Manager and seen that the average is $50 per conversion on that campaign, I’m going to have to set that budget at $250 a day at least, to try and get those five sales a day.

So when I see people go look inside their ads manager and are running an ad at $10 a day, and let’s say the $50 is their average conversion.

It’s no wonder you’re not making lots of sales. If you’re only spending $10 a day, you’re only going to make a sale on say, perhaps day six once once you’ve already spent that $50.

So if your budget is too small, it’s going to be a very, very slow, slow road and take you six times as long, or however you’ve divided your budget before you actually get those sales. 

Poor creatives

Now more than ever, our creatives are the most important piece in our Facebook ads.

The reason for that is after all of the iOS changes, we have less visibility around audiences, we have less tracking options and interest settings that we can pinpoint our audiences down.

Now, we’re using fairly broad audiences, because so many people have opted out of being tracked, it’s very hard to target a very specific audience group so having a really strong creative because that will matter more than the audience that you select.

When I say creative, I mean either the photo or the video or the slideshow, and then the message that is attractive to potential customers.

There are some parameters with the audiences that you still need to select things like are you targeting women or men and age brackets and location.

You might want to put in a few different interests, I always go for engaged shoppers, for example.

However, we can’t get as granular on those audiences as we once could so we have to make sure that the creative is doing the heavy lifting.

Sending them to a wrong or broken link

Sending your potential customers to a broken website via an ad or sending them to our homepage versus the specific products that you’re talking about in the ad is another no go.

You need to make sure that you’re sending them to the product page that you are featuring in your ad to make it as easy as possible for customers to go ahead and then purchase that product.

If you’re sending them to the wrong collection or a wrong product, the user experience isn’t going to be great.

They’re not going to spend much time digging around looking for what it is that they want and they’re going to click off and exit and we don’t want that.

Investing too early

Mistake number five is investing in Facebook and Instagram ads before you’ve yet got a proven product or a viable product.

I see this a lot with drop shipping businesses where people have not even seen the product that they’re selling.

They’ve got some grainy looking photos, and it’s coming from the slow boat from overseas.

They just think the missing piece of that whole puzzle around getting more sales is Facebook ads. And often, that’s not the case. 

If you don’t have a strong or viable product or offer, a product that you’ve seen that there’s a demand for, you’re probably just going to waste even more money on Facebook and Instagram ads.

You’ve got to put that product in front of as many people as possible who are willing to give you money and buy it versus friends and family who might just give you a pat on the back.

You want to see if people are willing to put down their hard earned cash and buy that thing from you.

Then, once you’ve got some sales under your belt and you can say confidently that people do want your product, then you obviously go and you build the foundations of that business which is something I teach in my program online store success.

Once you’ve got all of those foundations built, you then look at paid traffic ads!