However as a do-everything-yourself entrepreneur, it may be frustrating to find just how much trial and error and studying is involved in the beginning, particularly as you bet real on real outcomes.
The great factor is that many of us tend to make the same mistakes, particularly once we’re starting out.
Whether your Facebook adverts haven’t gotten you a single sale or it feels such as you’re not seeing the suitable return on what you’re spending, listed here are some common (and sometimes costly) Facebook advertising mistakes and the way to fix them.
1. Not Investing In Audience Research Upfront
Which one do you think is more likely to perform better?
ads in front of the incorrect people? Or mediocre ads in front of the right people?
I would probably put my cash on having the suitable audience first.
Facebook is home to diverse viewers and, depending on what you’re promoting, your viewers might be larger, smaller, or even fully different from the one you set out to goal.
You’ll have to check out some audiences in the beginning, before you begin testing particular stuff like advert copy or format. However, that doesn’t mean you might not give yourself a head-start with some educated guesses.
A great way to look at targeting is to ask yourself when you’d be willing to bet money on the odds that these people could be excited about buying your product (because that’s technically what you’re doing).
For instance, you may think people who like “Starbucks” on Fb could be excited about buying your specialty coffee. Perhaps a few of them will, however lots of different people like and drink Starbucks (over 33 million on Fb in fact). You want to discover a niche that aligns with your merchandise.
When you’ve chosen a niche product (e.g. t-shirts for people who own pugs), you’ll have a much simpler time than somebody whose merchandise don’t have specific viewers.
One of the best methods to seek out interests you can target is to place yourself in the shoes of whoever you think your buyer is:
- What would they Google?
- What pages would they “like” on Fb?
- What influencers or celebrities would they follow?
- What apps would they use?
- What publications/blogs do they learn?
- What opponents are they already buying from?
- Where would they hang out on Reddit?
Do some exploring and find what you were taught about the interests that make them unique compared to the masses.
If you could find a Facebook Page that relates to what you’ve found in your analysis, go Like it under your personal profile. Fb will recommend related pages that offer up even more interests you may potentially target. Again, ignore those that don’t have a powerful connection to buying intent in some way.
You could use Fb’s Audience Insights tool to help brainstorm further targeting ideas based on the interests and qualities you have a great feeling about. You may also use it to get some insight into how that viewer behaves, how they spend, and more when you’re curious.
2. Focusing on an Audience That’s Too Broad
A common mistake with paid promoting, regardless of platform, is going too broad with the audiences we select to focus on.
You may think everyone is a potential buyer, however what you’re paying for is the people your advertisements reach. Why pay to reach the wrong people?
A potential viewer that’s between 500K to 1.5 million is commonly a great size, to begin with for many e-commerce companies.
In case your viewers are too large, try narrowing it with interests that your major viewers “must also match for”. If it’s too small, try adding interests to create a larger pool of customers until you discover your sweet spot.
3. Impatience
With any type of paid promoting, it could feel such as you’re losing cash when you’re not getting any results immediately. Sometimes you might feel compelled to take control of your adverts and tweak things to “optimize” them so they can perform better as soon as possible.
However at first, particularly, gathering data and insight is essential.
That’s why it’s essential to have a clear idea of how much you’re truly willing to spend to get one buyer.
Let’s say your price of products is $17 and you’re promoting the product for $50. That provides you around $33 to spend on acquiring a customer to break even. Be willing to go beyond that with your budget in the beginning as you take a look at your viewers and adverts.
Try not to make any decisions about your adverts, like pausing or tweaking them, until you’ve reached 1000 people. At that point you’ve got enough data to at least learn something from your adverts’ performance, even if they don’t get any sales.
The other method that impatience ends up harming your performance is if you don’t give Facebook the chance to learn over time. In case you haven’t installed your Facebook Pixel (which is super easy to do on your Shopify store), you need to definitely do so. Fb’s advertising platform uses the Pixel to track and learn based on performance data to enhance its targeting.
For instance, when you set your Marketing campaign’s objective to optimize based on purchases at the start, Fb might not know what a “buying” customer looks like if you’ve had zero sales. However as you rack up more purchases, that data set becomes better informed.
4. Not Isolating What You’re Testing
In marketing, insight is usually undervalued in the pursuit of outcomes. And while it’s strongly encouraged that you experiment and test things with your adverts, you may only really learn as you go when you test one variable at a time.
Testing different audiences, each presented with different adverts, at different times won’t let you know much even when you stumble across something that gets you better outcomes. Was it the viewers? Was it the advert? Was it the timing? Was it a mix of a few things?
As much as you may, try to isolate one variable to check so you may go ahead after the experiment with the knowledge you may act upon. In the beginning, especially, you need to be testing at the Advert Set level with the audiences you’re focusing on.
Remember what you may change and test at each level of your Advert Manager account:
- Marketing campaign: Your objective that Fb will optimize based on (add to cart, purchases, and so on)
- Advert Set: The viewers you’re focusing on, placement, and schedule.
- Advert: Hyperlinks, format, creative, and so on.
5. Not Squeezing the Value Out of Your Advert Spend
Even if your primary purpose is to get sales, that’s not the only possible return you may get on your adverts.
In fact, there’s lots of additional worth you may get from an advert that “failed” to get you any customers.
You may:
- Collect emails from visitors to your website.
- Get more likes and comments on your post to construct social proof for your advert over time.
- Engage directly with people who comment on your adverts to help them buy.
- Retarget visitors to your website as “warm traffic” in the future.
- Arrange an email sequence to recover any abandoned carts you might’ve gotten.
- Invite people who have liked or reacted to your page post to additionally like your Fb Page (simply click on the reactions of the post itself).
There’s also the priceless insight you may collect from your paid traffic.
I strongly recommend that you arrange Google Analytics and Hot Jar (both are free) and check out how your traffic is actually behaving on your site. It will help you identify whether your problem is your viewers, your site layout, or some other issue.
Hot Jar, in particular, is helpful because it permits you to visually see how traffic is behaving on your site: how far down the page visitors are scrolling before leaving, what they click on, in addition to recordings of actual individual visits.
6. Not Optimizing Your Advert Creative for Attention and Clicks
When you’ve found out your viewers, a great creative for your adverts might help you enhance your outcomes.
Lots of different things go into a great advert, however, listed here are some greatest practices to help:
- Have a focal point in either the picture, copy, or video thumbnail that grabs the eye.
- Think about using emojis to add personality and visual elements in your copy.
- Collect social proof (likes, comments, shares) over time each time you run an advert, which makes your advert that much more highly effective.
- Create multiple clickthrough opportunities with hyperlinks and product tags (you’ll want a Facebook Shop, which you could simply add via Shopify).
- Experiment with different advert formats within the similar Advert Set, particularly video as Fb has been known to favor this format.
For more advert inspiration, ensure to take a look at the Adicted.io ad gallery.
7. Not Taking Advantage of All Your Available Insights
Lots of the options in the Fb Advert Manager get lost in its own complexity, particularly when it comes to getting a view of your performance to glean insights.
The default columns you see in the Advert Manager, for instance, don’t show all the data that’s actually helpful to you. You need to definitely customize your columns to get further information.
Consider adding the following to get a greater idea of advert performance, along with whatever else you think may help:
- CTR: Click-through rate is the percentage of people that clicked on your advert after seeing it.
- Cost-per-click: How much you’re paying for every click on your advert.
- Website Purchases: The variety of purchases the advert brought in.
- Website Purchase Conversion Worth: The whole worth of purchases made attributed to the advert.
- Frequency: How many times on average each person you’re reaching has seen an advert. Generally, you’ll see your advert performance significantly dip, and it’s because Fb is just showing the advert to the same people multiple times.
- Attain How many unique (not repeat) people you’ve reached.
- Relevance Score: How relevant your advert is to the viewers you are focusing on, based on your first 500 impressions (this has a big effect on your prices).
- Budget: How much money you’ve dedicated day by day or in total to the advert set.
- Cost per Result: How much it cost to get your campaign goal.
- CPM: How much you’re paying for 1000 impressions.
You may also use the “Breakdown” choices to research your advert performance based on a number of factors, such as the devices that sales were made on, and the way gender impacts performance.
A super easy, however highly impactful practice you may also adopt is utilizing a standardized, meaningful naming convention across your Advert Manager account at each level. This way, at a glance, you may tell things like what audience you’re focusing on and what you’re testing.
Fb advertising can take some time to get the hang of, however as one of the most efficient methods to distribute any message, it is definitely value investing in and learning from the experiences of others.