The Most Common Facebook Ad Mistakes in 2022 and How to Avoid Them

Most people know Facebook as one of the world’s largest social media platforms. Still, Facebook is not only that, but it’s also one of the world’s most sophisticated and efficient advertising platforms. It offers in-depth tools that allow you to fine-tune and find the precise audience to whom you want to display your ads so that your conversion rates can soar.

However, with the amount of depth present within Facebook’s advertising platform, it’s easy to make mistakes and overlook things that may cost you dearly. In this article, we’ll be discussing the most common Facebook ad mistakes many advertisers make when they’re first starting with Facebook advertising.

Table of contents:

• Not being specific enough while targeting on Facebook
• Inadequate monitoring of Facebook ads
• Testing multiple interests in a single Facebook ad set
• Running too many Facebook ads with an inadequate budget
• Monitoring Cost per Lead instead of Earnings per Lead
• Selecting wrong Facebook ad campaign goal
• Producing new Facebook ads instead of improving already running ones
• Relying on automatic placement for your Facebook ads

Many advertisers who just started with Facebook advertising think that targeting numerous people will result in higher conversion rates as there’ll be a higher chance of the relevant people coming across your ad. This, however, is not true. When you have a large group, most of them will be irrelevant to your product, and they will not respond favorably to your Facebook ad. As a result, your conversion rates will plummet.

We have come across a statement that Facebook ad campaigns can target as many as 20 million people, which is absurd. While setting up your ad campaign, we highly urge you to be realistic about how many people you want to reach with your brand or product. If you notice that your conversion rate is low or getting lower day by day, you may have selected the wrong audience.

This will be a great moment to narrow down your target audience and aim at more niche groups of people that will actually respond favorably to your product ad. You can determine how to narrow your audience by observing different demographics with whom your product resonates. Some common demographics to observe include age, region, and gender.

Inadequate monitoring of Facebook ads

Monitoring your ads after they go online is absolutely essential for your ad campaign’s success. Facebook offers handy automation tools that can handle the monitoring of your ads to a certain extent. But many advertisers rely a little too heavily on these tools. As a result, you may find that your Facebook ad campaigns show great results when they are first set up and launched, but after a few weeks, the results start to plummet and become disappointing.

This is because you’re not paying attention to what your target audience wants, and you’re not changing your ad campaign accordingly. A great way to identify your audience’s sentiments is through reading their comments on your Facebook ads. This gives you an accurate measurement of whether your ad campaign is effective or if it’s just a source of annoyance for them. It’s also imperative that you don’t target the same people with the same ads repeatedly. All this will do is make them think about your brand in a negative light.

Testing multiple interests in a single Facebook ad set

Have you ever run an ad that performed exceptionally well, but you had no idea how to repeat that same success in future ad campaigns? This often happens when you’ve tested multiple interests in a single ad set. As a result, it makes it difficult or even impossible to identify which specific interest was the one that played the biggest role in your ad’s success. 

It is essential to test an ad in fairly adequate isolation to effectively identify the interest that has the highest impact on viewer interactivity. The same goes for variables. Many advertisers do not isolate one variable to test, making it nearly impossible to identify which factor had a hand in a more positive reaction among your audience. 

When you can’t identify the interest that has had a significant impact on audience engagement, it makes your ad impossible to scale. Instead, you can create a list of all the interests (and spy on your competitors to get some ideas, too) and then target and group all interests into several categories. After doing this, you can create multiple ad sets and target each one using a single set of interests that you’ve made. With this approach, you will easily identify which interests resonate the most with which types of audiences.

Running too many Facebook ads with an inadequate budget

We’ve been talking about complex mistakes that are relatively easy to make when you’re just first starting with Facebook advertising. But, one reasonably simple mistake many advertisers tend to make is running too many Facebook ads without a big budget. As you can probably imagine, this will lead to a lack of efficiency and reduced profit margins. If you do not address this problem, it can ultimately drive your online business to the ground. 

Here’s what you can do to bring your ad campaigns back on track if they have become overly complex and too big for your allocated budget to handle:

• Consolidate different target audiences into ad sets that have larger budgets. Not only does this allow Facebook to feed more data, but it also allows it to scale up the ad campaign more rapidly. 

• Combine lookalike audiences. A great way to do this is to combine the lookalike (1%) of your buyer audience and the lookalike audience of your landing page visitors into a single audience. Similarly, you can also combine your digital marketers, small business owners, and Facebook admins to a single audience as well. 

Once you’re done combining audiences to make fewer, bigger audiences, you can start running Facebook ad campaigns created especially for these new audiences. Having fewer audiences means they will be easier to monitor, and you will be able to easily see which ad campaigns are effective and which ones are not. 

Facebook’s algorithm needs about 50 to 100 conversions per ad set per week for the ad campaign to be entirely successful. So you need an ample budget to make your ads happen. For example, for a $5 lead, you should set your ad budget to a minimum of $35–$50 per day.

Monitoring Cost per Lead instead of Earnings per Lead

This problem can be generalized by saying that advertisers tend to look at the wrong factor or variable when judging the success of their ad campaigns. One of the most common factors that advertisers look at when evaluating their ad campaigns is the Cost per Lead. Judging your ad campaign’s effectiveness by monitoring your CPL can often paint a very inaccurate picture because it can only be reduced to a certain point, and it’s also subjective to your Earnings per Lead. Your EPL refers to how much you earn for every person who goes through your sales process. 

Let’s say you have an ad generating EPL of $100 at a CPL of $4. This is a highly profitable ad as your earnings per lead are 25 times the investment. However, if you’re only monitoring the CPL and not the EPL, you may want to shut down this ad in favor of an ad that has a lower CPL, say, $2. While this new ad may have a lower cost per lead, there’s a high chance it may not be as profitable as your former ad. 

Selecting wrong Facebook ad campaign goal

Selecting the wrong campaign objective in your ad campaign structure can be catastrophic. It can lead to skewed and inaccurate results that won’t give you an accurate picture of how well or poorly your ad is doing. Many advertisers looking for leads tend to select lead ads, engagements, or clicks as their Facebook ad campaign goal. In contrast, they should set goals such as conversions and make optimizations for leads.

A great way to choose your Facebook ad campaign goal is to identify what you’re trying to achieve with your Facebook ad. What do you want Facebook users to do when they stumble across your ad? Do you want them to learn more about your brand, visit your website, or convert and buy a product from you? These are all questions you should ask yourself every time you set up an ad campaign.

First, determining what you want your ad to do will help you identify your campaign goal. Choosing the wrong Facebook ad campaign goal will not only send you down the wrong path in Facebook’s ad manager but will also result in you spending a large sum of money on ads that won’t be effective at all. Yet, this is one of the Facebook ad mistakes people make every day.

Producing new Facebook ads instead of improving already running ones

Often, when advertisers first start setting up ads on Facebook, it’s common for them to set up too many ads. You will find many new Facebook advertising accounts that are just littered with an overwhelming number of ad sets. This ultimately hurts the effectiveness of your ad campaigns because, as we mentioned earlier, Facebook’s optimization algorithm needs a minimum of 50 conversions per ad set per week to do its job effectively. 

Thus, if you have an overwhelming number of ad sets, all of which have only a few conversions, then you are actively preventing Facebook’s algorithm from optimizing your ad campaigns and limiting your reach. 

Another important thing related to creating too many campaigns is that often, many advertisers make new ads instead of going back to their old ads that have proven to be successful. This is understandable as many Facebook advertisers think they have to churn out content continuously to maximize their reach. Still, the truth of the matter is that you are not a newspaper. 

Many successful advertisers on Facebook have ads that have been running for years, and they can sustain these ads for years because they keep making regular improvements. Spending money and improving your already successful ads can increase their longevity and help maintain a constant stream of an audience to your brand and product page.

Relying on automatic placement for your Facebook ads

Automatic placement can be a very useful tool as it can help you save time and speed up the creation of your ads. It's easy and convenient, and if you’re not too familiar with Facebook’s advertising system, it can also help you by stopping you from making the wrong placements for your ads. 

However, you should know that the placement of your ads has a considerable impact not only on its cost but also on its effectiveness. While we realize that automatic placement is easy, it’s worth studying how ad placements work and affect the performance of your ad so you can make manual changes and adjustments that will help boost your ad and extend your reach. 

Second, an over-reliance on Facebook’s automatic placement can cost you a lot of money without yielding a fruitful result. An example of this is Facebook’s Audience Network Placement. This placement is often the cheapest, and it can be great for reach. However, let’s say that your Audience Network Placement is doing great and reaching many people. In this case, if you have automatic placement on, then Facebook will automatically allocate more budget to that placement. As a result, this placement will eat through your budget without offering an adequate return. 

Conclusion

Due to the amount of depth and layers that Facebook’s advertising tools offer, they can be tricky to comprehend. It makes sense to have mistakes when you’re first starting out because there are many aspects where you can mess up with running a Facebook ad campaign.

We advise you to take your time and get acquainted with every aspect of Facebook’s advertising platform before you start creating ad campaigns. It may seem complex and tricky at first, but it can be gratifying once you get the hang of it. 

If you advertise on various platforms, be sure to check Top Ten Amazon Sponsored Ads Mistakes to Avoid.

About the Author

Anthony Bui-Tran – From his home in Houston, Anthony built his first 7 figure Amazon business at the age of 23, and has since empowered thousands of others to learn from his journey through Seller Tradecraft. Anthony is an expert at driving paid traffic, leveraging social influencers, online arbitrage, private label, and more. He is also one of the partners at Pixelfy.