Facebook advertising is gaining momentum as a viable option for many businesses. Paid advertising can put your content and business in front of more people, generate leads and sales and build your social media following.
The problem is for every successful Facebook advertiser, there is another one who claims Facebook ads are a waste of money and don’t get results. That’s most likely because they made one (or more) of the following mistakes and killed their own advertising campaign.
Not Targeting the Ad
As with any type of advertising, when the audience isn’t interested in what you have to offer you’re throwing money away. You want to find people who are likely to engage with your content, that is, click on the ad and become a customer. Facebook allows you to decide who will see your ads based on demographic profile, specific categories (such as parents of a certain age group or followers of a political party) and by their expressed likes and interests. There is no reason you should place ads in generic categories. Be more specific, and use Facebook’s tools to put your ad in front of demographics like women over age 35 with teenage children and an interest in gardening.
Not Performing A/B Testing
Even if you have a handle on what appeals to your target demographic, there is some level of assumption involved. If you run Facebook ads without running A/B tests and experimenting with different combinations of images and text, you could be unintentionally limiting the appeal of your ad. No matter how well you think you know your customers, perform an A/B test to confirm your assumptions. You might be surprised by the results and gain more leverage than you anticipated.
Overstaying Your Welcome
Regardless of the format — TV, radio, print or Facebook — when you’ve seen the same ad a million times, it becomes part of the background. Facebook users continually scan their feeds for new content, so your boring ad that’s been there for weeks will lose effectiveness over time. Ideally, you should plan to change your ad several times over the course of the campaign to ensure that it stays interesting.
Ineffective Copy
You have barely a second to capture a user’s attention on Facebook. You don’t want to lose that with a boring or irrelevant ad. How you grab user attention depends on your goals. If you’re building a brand, include your company name. If you’re after sales volume, highlight unique offers or features. You have 135 characters to work with, but you don’t have to use them all, so focus on clear, concise and compelling copy that includes a call to action. The more you can entice them to click, the more traffic you’ll get — and more traffic means better search ranking.
Not Tracking Performance
Many advertisers wait until their campaign ends to evaluate results — and attempt to speculate as to why the effort was successful or not. One of the best aspects of Facebook advertising is the ability to make changes on the fly, so it’s important to continually monitor your campaigns and make changes as necessary to improve the response. Don’t wait till you have spent thousands of dollars to discover you used the wrong image or targeted the wrong users.
Inappropriate Piggybacking
We’ve all seen them: Facebook ads encouraging you to discover a particular celebrity’s secret to great skin or a well-known expert’s strategies for wealth and prosperity. Only when users click on these ads, they realize the advertiser has nothing to do with that person. Facebook advertisers target their ads to people who liked a particular brand or person and use that connection to attract customers, but this becomes a problem when the advertisement reads as if the product is endorsed by that person or brand. If you are going to use this form of targeting, tread lightly, as such implications could lead to claims of copyright or trademark infringement.
Not Understanding the Lingo
Before you spend a penny on Facebook advertising, learn everything you can about the pricing structure and how ads are displayed. Facebook does not have a “rate card,” per se, where advertisers pay a set fee to reach a pre-determined number of users. The cost of advertising is determined by whether you choose CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, or CPC, cost per user who actually clicks on your ad. Facebook also allows you to bid on the amount you’re willing to pay for CPC or CPM; the higher your bid, the more likely your ad will be seen by your target audience. Do your homework and you won’t blow through your budget in a few hours, or worse, have your ad displayed only two or three times.
Advertising on Facebook shares many similarities to advertising in other mediums, but it’s also unique in many ways. The key to success is understanding these differences and using them to your advantage.
