Building a successful Facebook campaign is a lot of work, and with almost every step there is a risk that you could make a mistake if you aren't familiar with the Facebook Ad Manager interface, options, and best practices for building your campaign.
Here are 3 mistakes that you won't be making in your next Facebook ad campaign.
Optimizing for the Wrong Facebook Campaign Objective
After all of the prep work for your campaign is in place, creating your Facebook campaign and choosing an objective will be one of the first steps you take in putting your campaign in motion.
There are many options available to you, and some can be very similar, such as website click ads and conversion ads, both of which drive traffic to a website as part of meeting the objective.
To understand which campaign objective you should choose, think carefully about what you want to get out of your campaign. Do you want people to like your Facebook Page? Do you want to increase engagement on key Facebook posts? Do you want to drive traffic to a landing page and build an audience you can use for retargeting? Do you have an offer that you think will convert visitors immediately when they visit?
Understanding what your ultimate goal is and which of the campaign objectives most closely matches your key success metrics will help you decide which campaign objective you should choose for your campaign.
Why should I care?
The campaign objective you choose will influence key factors at the heart of your campaign:
- Which metrics Facebook will track and report on - If you want people to download an app, but choose a website clicks campaign to drive traffic to the landing page where the app can be downloaded, Facebook will keep track of the traffic you drive, but it won't track how many people from your campaign (and only from your Facebook campaign) downloaded the app.
- How Facebook optimizes your ads - The objective you choose will impact the way Facebook understands and optimizes your ads. If you want to convert traffic on your website but choose a website clicks campaign, Facebook will automatically give more exposure to the ads that drive the most traffic, but those may not be the ads that are driving the most conversions. There are also some cases where options like being charged per 1,000 impressions or being charged each time your objective is met won't all be available to you when choosing your campaign.
Clearly, taking the time to choose the right campaign objective for your goal will help you make the most of both the manual options and automatic optimization that Facebook provides for your ad campaign.
Not Understanding Facebook's Ad Targeting Options
Another mistake to watch out for is setting up your detailed ad targeting to include all of your options in one box. When you do this, you're telling Facebook that you want to expand the audience to include anyone who meets any of the targeting criteria. Adding new options actually makes your audience larger and more generic, rather than creating a smaller, more targeted audience.
The Right Way to setup Your Facebook Ad Targeting
If your goal is to make your audience broader then that's fine, but if you want to only reach people who meet all of the targeting criteria you're setting for your audience, be sure to use the "Narrow Audience" link just below the box you select your detailed targeting options to add an additional box for each targeting option that you want to absolutely require your audience to meet.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Facebook excels at helping you reach a specific target audience. If members of your target audience only have to meet one of your targeting criteria to see your ads, rather than all or multiple targeting criteria, you will end up with a less targeted audience and most likely a very different audience than the one you intended to reach. The text and images you carefully selected to appeal to your target audience will likely not resonate and your Facebook ad campaign's results will suffer.
Don't Overuse Text in Your Photos
Facebook has loosened the 20% text in photos rule, and will now approve ads with images that contain text in more than 20% of the photo. That doesn't mean you should start sticking as much text as you can fit into your images though.
While Facebook no longer outright refuses to approve ads with too much text, you will still be penalized if your images have too much text, with your ads receiving less or no distribution depending on how excessively you've covered the image in text.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
In some ways Facebook's new rules are even more restricting than the 20% rule, as having any more text than just a logo in your photo will guarantee that you're at least somewhat limiting how much exposure your ad will receive.
It actually doesn't take much text at all to severely limit or even completely kill your reach.
Now that you know about these 3 common mistakes advertisers make when building a Facebook ad campaign, you can avoid making these same mistakes in your next campaign.
This blog post is based off of content from our guide to Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign. It's a premium, step-by-step guide that makes building successful Facebook ad campaigns easy! If you'd like to learn more about building campaigns, the various options and settings, and learn from our tips and in-depth explanations along the way, purchase the guide!
It includes the PDF guide, a full set of walkthrough videos, and an Excel spreadsheet full of tools that will help you build better campaigns faster and with more consistency.
