6 Facebook Ad Mistakes That Can Squeeze Your Marketing Budget (and How to Avoid Them)

Facebook ads can be a great promotional option and can provide significant benefits, both in terms of increasing brand awareness and increasing sales. But not all Facebook ad campaigns are created equal.

Often, even a seemingly simple oversight can cause you to quickly deplete your Facebook advertising budget, without getting the results you want.

Like any marketing platform, Facebook Ads require more than just engaging copy and standout visuals (although each is also critically important). By avoiding some simple and common Facebook advertising mistakes, you can maximize your chances of getting the results you want.

Here are six common Facebook advertising mistakes you should avoid.

1. Run ads anytime

As with traditional advertising mediums like TV and radio, you shouldn’t run the same ads all day and night.

If you don’t set a limit on how often your ads run, you run the risk of overexposing your target audience. In fact, research from Battery shows that users can start feeling campaign fatigue within three days of launch, if you’re not careful.

One of the best ways to avoid this is to set a custom schedule for your Facebook ad campaign. This allows you to only run your ads on the days or times that are most relevant to your target audience.

By reaching customers when they are most likely to buy and minimizing the risk of overexposure, you will see a better response to your campaign(s).

2. Irrelevant landing pages

An engaging Facebook ad is only half of the equation, you also need to consider where your ad takes users after they click.

For most brands, their ads will lead to a landing page, where you have to deliver on the promise of your initial promotion and deliver what caught their interest.

Unfortunately, many advertisers get it wrong at this point. Some marketers will run a promotion for a specific product, only to direct engaged users to a generic landing page – or even a completely different offer.

Your potential customers clicked on your ad because of what it promised. If the landing page associated with that ad doesn’t deliver on that promise, with copy, visuals, and the like, those leads will click through and your marketing dollars will be wasted.

Make sure your landing page matches your ad. This is a fundamental part of the performance of Facebook ads.

3. Constantly tinker with your campaign

Facebook can be a remarkable and powerful marketing platform, but that doesn’t mean your campaign will always produce amazing results right off the bat.

Facebook’s advertising system uses machine learning to optimize for the best results, but in order to maximize performance, it needs time to measure user response and then adjust accordingly.

Facebook explains this as a “learning phase“, in which it collects and evaluates initial performance – according to Facebook:

“The learning phase is when the delivery system still has a lot to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, the delivery system explores the best way to deliver your ad set. Performance is therefore less stable and cost per action (CPA) is usually worse. The learning phase occurs when you create a new ad or ad set or when you significant change to an existing one.”

Research of ClientBoost found that most campaigns will take 24-48 hours to get enough data to fully optimize ad serving. Impatient marketers who launch short campaigns or start tinkering after just a few hours will never reach that point and end up wasting their budget on unoptimized ads.

It can be tempting to make quick changes – especially when real dollars are at stake – but it can be worth waiting, if possible, or launching your campaigns in defined phases, to ensure that you get optimal response.

4. Do not enable Facebook Automated Rules

Even the best-run campaign will become less effective over time, and if you don’t have the ability to constantly check and monitor your results, you run the risk of overlooking key issues. It can increase your cost per acquisition and eat into your marketing budget – but using Facebook Automated rulesyou can avoid this.

Facebook Automated Rules allow you to automatically disable a campaign or ad, or adjust a campaign budget or bid, based on set conditions.

According to Facebook:

“When you create automated rules in Ads Manager, they automatically check your campaigns, ad sets, and ads, then update or notify you of any changes. In addition to these automatic checks and notifications, the tool will also take the necessary actions for you.

Your automated rules can include thresholds on cost per acquisition, number of impressions, daily spend, and more.

And while, as noted, you can let Facebook make automatic adjustments, AdEspresso recommended that you have Facebook just sends you a notification, so that you can make the necessary changes yourself. This will ensure that you remain in control and aware of all campaign changes.

5. Continue to market to converted customers

Remarketing can be a very beneficial approach, but you don’t want to keep sending the same ad to someone who’s already clicked on it. If someone has already converted after seeing your ad, they probably won’t want to see that ad again the next time they browse their feed.

To avoid this, be sure to exclude people who purchased the advertised product in the last month (or took the corresponding campaign action) in your custom audience settings.

This will ensure that your ads reach new audiences who have the potential to become paying customers, without annoying those who are already familiar with your brand.

6. Not experimenting with different ad types

Every audience is different, which inevitably means they will also react and engage in different ways with different types of promotions.

Far too many brands funnel all of their Facebook marketing dollars into the standard News Feed or right-hand column ads, while you have the opportunity to create potentially more engaging campaigns by experimenting with different media options, like videos or GIFs.

In case study shared by Facebook, Champs Sports increased its return on ad spend by using 6-second video ads instead of 30-second ad blocks.

“In this case, the 6-second ads generated an 11% increase in estimated ad recall, a 12% increase in return on ad spend, and a 271% increase in video completion rate, which proven to be the most effective in driving results for the brand. The 6-second ads also resulted in incremental increases in several other key metrics, including conversion rate, average purchase value, and click-through rate.”

Facebook marketers are leaving money on the table if they don’t A/B test different ad formats – finding the most effective ad format for your unique audience will help you get the most out of your budget.

As noted, Facebook marketing can be a major boon to your marketing efforts, especially with the continued rollout of new features like search ads and mid-roll video ads. But whether you use these new options or traditional Facebook advertising, you should always keep in mind how the platform works.

By optimizing your campaigns for Facebook audiences, you can be sure that your ads will stay within budget and deliver meaningful, tangible results for your business.