7 mistakes beginners make with Facebook and Instagram Ads
Mastering Facebook (and Instagram) paid advertising is no easy task, it’s a complex world with a not so slick user experience (sorry Ads Manager!), so it is inevitable that people often run into the same issues when starting out.
However, these same mistakes that we all make at the start, often discourage smaller businesses and entrepreneurs from continuing to use the very powerful marketing tool because they don’t get the results they want.
After 6+ years experience of managing Facebook Ads I will lay out 7 mistakes you can avoid so you can start seeing the results of your work, and stop despairing!
7 mistakes beginners make when starting out with Facebook Ads
Boosting posts
Investing too little
Choosing the wrong objective
Not installing the Facebook pixel
Optimizing for traffic instead of landing page view delivery
Thinking that broad campaigns is bad targeting
Running too many campaigns/ad sets/ads
◼︎
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with three small businesses about their Facebook Ads needs.
They had all already started using the tool in some way or run ads before, but sadly, were all making the same mistakes or assumptions about Facebook Ads that usually leads to unsatisfying campaigns.
The consistency of the accounts from all of them compelled me to write this quick blog so that I can warn more people of these pitfalls, and encourage them to start running smart and creative campaigns.
1—Boosting posts
The premise of boosting posts makes so much sense, make your post go further by giving it a little ‘boost’ to reach more people, and have more eyes on your product, service or brand. However, boosted posts rarely get desired result from beginners running Facebook Ads, as the function doesn’t end up bringing them customers or visits to their website.
The reason why this is is simple, the ‘objective’ of boosted campaigns is always engagement, which most of the time is *not* the objective of the marketeers running the campaign, so it doesn’t deliver.
Additionally, you are limited with the ability to moderate the bid that you are placing in the Facebook auction, for your desired objective—with boosted posts you can only control the budget.
Furthermore you have very limited targeting options, as you can only target people who like your page, friends of people who like your page, and use Facebook’s interest targeting, which I will talk about in the next ‘mistake’.
Perhaps even worse is that you also cannot exclude people from your targeting which is important as you probably don’t need to be targeting everyone to be smart in your approach to Facebook Ad marketing.
2—Investing too little
If you are not getting the results you want, the hesitancy to spend more makes total sense. However, with Facebook Ads, you need to give it enough budget to at least exit its learning phase, which usually happens only once you have a minimum of 50 optimization events within a week period.
Up until that point, just as the name suggests, Facebook is ‘learning’ about what your ideal client or user looks like. I find it quite helpful to personify the Facebook algorithm.
Imagine you gave money to someone and told them to get the most amount of customers they can for your daily budget (and depending on your bid selection, your maximum bid amount too).
If they have a low budget, they don’t have many resources to go out and find your ideal user, this also may lead to low spend and beginners may wonder, why aren’t my ads spending? Because it isn’t competitive enough in auctions, and your spender is feeling too hesitant to know who they should bid on.
◼︎
3—Choosing the wrong objective
If you opt to boost a post, we already know its likely you have not selected the optimization method you actually want, but also I have found that beginners who run their ads through Facebook Ads Manager, often select the wrong objective.
The rule is really simple so I won’t complicated it. Facebook’s algorithm is smart. They would probably argue smarter than your marketing team. So you have to tell it exactly what you want it to do, if you want that result.
If you want people to buy things from your website, set that up as the conversion event, and run a conversion campaign. If you want people to visit your website, set up a traffic campaign.
4—Not installing the Facebook pixel
Not installing the Facebook pixel is a very common mistake I see amongst beginners. Many beginners can be slightly afraid of the pixel, what is it? Will I need a tech person to set it up? Well good news and bad news is that can or cannot be true.
Facebook has many integrations with website builders like Squarespace which make it super easy to set up, and you could do it yourself, so installation may not be as daunting as you think.
But why should you install it? One it will allow you to retarget people who visit your website. Have you ever viewed a product on website and then been targeting with similar ones, or that product on sale by a Facebook ads? That would be the nifty work of the pixel.
You can also create lookalikes of your website visitors, which can be a smart way of refining your targeting audience.
Additionally you can exclude people who have already purchased on your website (you can do this through other ways too, but this is one) or you can target those same people to up-sell them.
The options are plenty, and very exciting, but in short you can think of the pixel as your measuring tool that will help you understand the impact of your ads on various different actions people take on your website.
To set up the pixel in a compliant way, that adheres to GDPR laws, you will need to have a cookie banner that explicitly mentions that people are opting into the use of ads.
◼︎
5—Optimizing for traffic instead of landing page view delivery
When you run a traffic campaign - meaning that you are trying to bring people to your website, there is a little box that sits in the ad set settings section. Which specifies whether your traffic campaign will optimise for link clicks or landing page views.
What’s the big difference between these two? Well though it varies from company to company - there is always a disparity between the two. Link clicks are just people who clicked the link, and landing page views mean they stayed enough for the pixel to fire - so likely that they actually read the content. And you want people who care enough to stay around and look at your content right?
So one is that you want to tell Facebook to find more of those type of people, and another is more technical. Some sites have a really slow load time, meaning that people may click on your ad (link click) but don’t wait the 5-6 seconds it takes for your website to load (landing page view).
It’s fine people get impatient and leave (and you should sort that out!) but that’s not what you want so you don’t want to communicate that a link click only is valuable to you.
Meet your must-have doc when it comes to planning professional and organised Facebook (Meta), Instagram and TikTok ad campaigns. Save yourself time planning and managing your campaigns, foster collaboration with people you are working with, and know where each penny is being spent, and how.
This planner was created by the founder of WADED School of Marketing, a senior media buyer who has spent millions on ads, and worked for large tech companies and unicorn start-ups. This planner offers you as a beginner, the ability to start thinking in a more advanced way, and therefore be ahead of a huge chunk of small businesses running Facebook (Meta), Instagram and TikTok ads today.
6—Thinking that broad campaigns is bad targeting
Since I am updating this blog, it’s interesting how things have changed in the Facebook ads landscape. It used to be about gaming the system to get the most precise targeting. But now, you have to approach achieving that precision in a different way.
And though it may seem counterintuitive when you start out - broad targeting isn’t a bad strategy to help you get sustainable results, at scale, if you’re willing to put enough budget to allow the algorithm to learn. It’s actually fine to ‘go broad’ and by that I mean, country, maybe language, and age only if you have serious evidence to support that a certain age either cannot use your product or service, or consume your content.
You achieve the precise targeting you are looking for by creating ads that speak and serve the specific audience you are looking for. So think about it like this: instead of different ad sets with different targeting, you can just use the ads themselves as the targeting.
7—Running too many campaigns/ad sets/ads
Last mistake on the list is running too many campaigns in an account, ad sets in a campaign, and ads in an ad set. Whoo, that was a mouthful. The lesson here is really more important having a prescribed perfect number of campaigns/ad sets/ads you should have. It’s learning something that is fundamental to understanding digital media buying.
However before we go into the lesson - I’ll give you this as guidance. No more than 3 ad sets in a campaign and 4 ads in an ad set. Number of campaigns is too business dependant for me to say generally, but I hope the former helps!
Every time you split out an ad set or campaign, you are also dividing your budget into parts, when you divide the budget you also divide the learnings. So what the algorithm has learned about how to get the best result for you and your businesses. And learnings can exist on all three levels.
If you don’t have a high budget and you split it up you will get worse results than if you were to put that budget in one or less places. This - I promise you. In the world of paid media you will often find there will be a lot of ‘it depends’ but this is one that’s unequivocally true, especially post IOS14.5.
This is because with more budget the algorithm gets more signals (basically data points) to understand what’s working and what’s not and that’s what it needs to really make the magic happen. So don’t restrict it!
So there it is, 7 of the top beginner mistakes you now don’t need to make with your Facebook Ads. Did you find this useful? Join me on Instagram for on the go tips about Facebook Ads and tell me what you thought about the post.