In the ever-growing world of online marketing, Facebook and Instagram have become essential platforms for advertising. Discover the biggest mistakes businesses make in Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls and optimize your social media ads for maximum effectiveness.
You probably already know the potential of these platforms, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article. But there are also enough challenges and mistakes that are often made when creating ads in the meta environment and can severely impact performance.
In this article, I’ll show you the most common mistakes I discover when taking over our clients’ advertising accounts and provide solutions so that you can avoid these mistakes and make your advertising more effective.
- Incorrect tracking
A significant and usually very obvious error concerns tracking. The problem that often occurs is that the tracking is incorrect. Be it due to an incorrectly placed pixel or even the lack of a pixel. Without correct tracking with the Meta Pixel and, ideally, the Meta Conversions API (CAPI) or server-side tracking, you cannot understand exactly how your ads are performing and what measures are necessary to make improvements. In addition, the campaigns cannot be optimized to the goal to be achieved (e.g. the completion of a purchase), which results in a loss of performance.
- Different audiences in one ad group
Another common mistake is combining multiple audiences into one ad group. Each audience has different interests and behaviours, so it’s important to create separate ad groups for different audiences. This allows the algorithm to better identify people with these interests and shows your ads to exactly this group of people. Therefore, always note that another ad group should always be created to promote products with a different target group. A separate campaign only becomes necessary as soon as the goal of the new ads differs from the goal of the existing ads.
- Wrong formats for wrong placements
You’ve probably seen a square image in a story ad or scrolled through the feed and seen the subject of an ad cut off, right? Choosing incorrect placement formats can significantly impact your ad performance and can make your business look unprofessional. It is therefore best to ensure that subjects are stored in the correct format for each placement to avoid this error.
Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy, because: If you select the “Dynamic ad design” option at the ad group level and thus leave it up to Meta to decide which subject format is displayed in which placement, it often happens that the system assigns the formats incorrectly and the images are displayed cropped. The seemingly useful feature of the advertising manager can also go in the wrong direction. Personally, I hope that this dynamic design will be revised soon and that misrepresentations will be avoided as much as possible.
- No strategic planning
If you read this subheading, you are probably thinking that a lack of strategy cannot influence the success of the advertisements, because Meta cannot know whether there is a strategy behind it or not. But, spoiler: you can clearly tell from the performance whether a well-planned strategy is being pursued or not.
Because: With almost every change to your campaign setup, the learning phase starts again and the algorithm starts working again. During this time, the ads are not yet optimally optimized for the specified goal and the budget is not yet spent precisely.
If new product categories are constantly being advertised and paused at different times, it is sometimes necessary to comprehensively restructure the account structure in order to reach the target groups in a targeted manner. This means that not only the new ads are often in the learning phase, but also all existing ads, which can significantly influence performance.
So it’s best to always plan your advertisements for the entire season or six months in advance so that you and/or the agency can take future promotions and special campaigns into account in the campaigns and your budget is spent in an optimal way.
- No appealing subjects
The quality of your ads is crucial to the success of your campaigns. In the flooded landscape of social media platforms, standing out from the crowd is crucial. Appealing and meaningful subjects are the key to this. They are the first visual elements that need to grab users’ attention and leave a lasting impression. From engaging images to entertaining videos to compelling copy, creatively designing your ads is the first step to capturing your audience’s interest and motivating them to take action.
It is also important that your target group recognizes within 2 seconds which product or offer is being advertised. Otherwise, the user has already scrolled further in their feed without knowing that the product might be exciting for them.
- Activation of the audience network
Meta Marketing Lahore defines Meta Audience Network offers expanded reach for advertisers, but there are some drawbacks to consider.
Because as an advertiser you have less control over the placement of the ads, which can lead to undesirable placement environments. Traffic is often lower quality than on the Facebook and Instagram platforms, which can lead to lower conversion rates. There is also a risk that the ads may appear in inappropriate environments, which could affect the brand image. Therefore, you should always carefully consider whether it makes sense to also display the advertisements in the Audience Network. As a paid social media manager, I always deactivate this function because I have not had good experiences with it in terms of performance and inappropriate placements.
- Lack of retargeting
At the end, I would like to briefly discuss the retargeting options for social media ads. To maximize the full potential of your advertising campaigns, I highly recommend running retargeting ads. This allows you to re-target people who have already shown interest in your ads or your company and thus increase the conversion rate. Although the CPM for retargeting ads is usually higher than for target groups that have not yet interacted with your company, the conversion rate is always much higher than for cold target groups that do not yet know your company.
Therefore, my clear recommendation is to always create at least two campaigns or ad groups: One campaign with the goal of reaching new users and a second campaign with the goal of leads or sales, which is played out to people who have already been on your website or with the ads have interacted. It is again of central importance that the tracking should work properly so that converting users can be excluded and other website visitors can be included.
Summary and conclusion
In summary, the importance of thoughtful planning for successful Facebook and Instagram advertising cannot be underestimated and all settings in the advertising account should be selected carefully. This way you can ensure that your social media ads have a good basis to achieve the best possible performance.
If you want to make sure that your advertising account is set up optimally and that you are exploiting the full potential of your campaigns, you are welcome to contact us about a social media audit.
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