Because this holiday season is shopping season, now is the time for you to up your Facebook advertising game. With numerous brands vying for your audience’s attention, you must burst into the scene with a strategy that surpasses your competitors’. To do so you, must evade certain bad advertising habits that decreases your campaign’s effectiveness. This season, stay out of the naughty list by avoiding the eight bad advertising habits listed below.
1. Not Refreshing Your Ad Creative
As a good advertiser, you must maintain the habit of refreshing your ad creatives every two weeks. If you run the same ad with the same copy and image, your audience will experience a phenomenon called ad fatigue. Individuals suffering from ad fatigue will glaze over your ad after having seen it numerous times. The ad, instead of catching your audience’s attention, merely blurs into the background, among the cacophony of Facebook posts and ads.
2. Not Thinking of an Objective
As reiterated on this post and this post, starting a Facebook advertising campaign without a clear objective in mind is a grave fault. Without an objective, you cannot create an ad that garners positive results. Before you start a Facebook advertising campaign, ask yourself what you want your ad to do for you, what you want it to achieve. Do you want your Facebook ad to collect customer’s information for you? Do you want it to drive people to your brick-and-mortar store, to compel them to like your Facebook business page or purchase your product?
Your ads’ features and optimization depend on your objective. To get the best out of your Facebook ads, you must know which Facebook advertising objective to pursue.
3. Not Budgeting Wisely
Don’t carelessly spend money on Facebook advertising without knowing how much you can afford. Will you be able to afford your ad’s CPC, CPA, or CPMs? Will you be able to afford A/B testing, a process necessary to run a successful advertising campaign? Although you want to ensure that you can afford Facebook advertising, you must also avoid spending too little lest you lose to other Facebook ad bidders. Because Facebook advertising is a bid for placement on its platform, the lower you pay for Facebook ads, the lower your chances of winning a spot and reaching a larger audience.
4. Not Using Specific Targeting
If you target an audience that is too broad, you will be spending more and gaining less, especially if you’re paying per impression. To save money and receive bigger gains, target a specific audience you believe will likely convert. Fortunately with Facebook’s targeting tools, you can do exactly that. Although you can no longer target by race, you can target an audience by age, gender, interest, location, purchasing habits, among many others.
5. Not Testing Images
Your ad’s image is the first element that catches your audience’s attention. Because it is an important part of your ad, the part that potentially determines whether or not it will get noticed, you must test images against each other to see which one performs better. For instance, Sketchdeck, a company that provides online design tools, tested multiple image ads against each other. It found that images with no text performed better than images with text; images of women performed better than images of men; and images without a logo performed better than images with a logo. In this experiment, Sketchdeck learned that you must never assume which images will work well.
6. Not Linking to the Correct Landing Page
Your ad’s message must coincide with the correct landing page. For example, if your ad promises to offer 50% discounts on women’s shoes, your landing page must be a product catalogue of discounted women’s shoes. If your ad’s CTA button is “Learn More,” your landing page must lead to somewhere that gives customers more information about your brand, services, or products. To do otherwise would be deceptive, leaving your customers frustrated, annoyed, and skeptical of your brand.
7. Not Analyzing Your Data
After you’ve run your ads for a few weeks, A/B testing them against each other, you must then analyze the data Facebook records for you. Facebook’s free data gives you insights into the demographics of your audience, the relevance score of your ad, and the amount of engagement, among numerous other vital information. Analyzing data allows you to see what works and what doesn’t. It allows you to improve your campaign to gain better ROIs.
8. Not Using the Facebook Pixel
Facebook pixel, a piece of JavaScript code that allows you to measure, optimize, and build an audience for your campaign, monitors conversions by tracking actions as a result of an ad. It also allows you to market to those who interact with your website and to create a lookalike audience after the pixel has tracked a minimum of 100 conversions.
If you don’t use your Facebook Pixel, a free tool courtesy of Facebook, you will allow these three benefits to slip from your fingertips:
- Obtain basic analytics on website visitors.
- Re-marketing to visitors who have visited specific pages of your site.
- Run custom audience insights on the visitors of your website.
If you found yourself practicing one or a few of the bad habits listed above, no need to worry. You can change your advertising strategies now.
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