Justin Wong
We’ve seen so many small businesses and startups whose Facebook pages have great content and engagement, but who still shy away from spending any advertising money. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to waste any money or maybe they don’t have the right expertise, but either way, there’s a good chance Facebook advertising can help your business get noticed.
Of course, if you’re going to do something like this, you need to make sure you do it right. Here are five amateur mistakes you need to avoid when starting your next big Facebook advertising campaign.
Note that this guide assumes you know the basics of how to set up your own Facebook ads. If you need help with that, my free eBook, Creating your Facebook Empire, goes into setting up your own ads in great detail.
- Insufficient Testing
Always have a few different versions of copy and images to test. Spending $ 5 over a few days for each variation of the ad can help you identify which images and copy really resonate with your audience and which ones fall flat. In an ideal world, we recommend creating different tests for images and copy for different target markets.
If time and money are an issue, narrow it down to at least two or three candidates before investing the rest of your ad budget.
- Extreme Micromanagement
If your ad doesn’t do well within 30 minutes of the ad going live, that’s no reason to pull it down just yet. Remember, your ad gets shown to more and more people as time passes, so a poor performance initially might just be bad luck. Give it at least one full day for your ads to breathe. At Curve, we can’t count the number of times poorly-performing ads have recovered and outperformed our expectations.
Of course, if your ads are obviously doing poorly even after some time, you need to go in and stop the campaign.
- Ignoring Relevance Scores
For those who didn’t read our last blog post about Facebook Relevance Scores, Facebook ads now have an additional metric that determines how successful they’ll be. Facebook looks at how many people like your ad compared to how many mark it as spam. The higher it’s rated, the more people your ad will be shown to.
It usually takes about a full day for a relevance score to be calculated, so make sure to check your ad after 24 hours. If your relevance score is VERY low, that means your ad will be suffering as a result. Consider tweaking your copy and image to emphasize the benefits of clicking on the ad, and less on making a sale.
- Lack of Targeting
It might be tempting to just aim at all of Canada or the United States when setting up your ad. The truth is that the more specific and targeted your advertising campaign is, the better it will perform. While broadly targeted ads WILL be seen by more people, the chances of your ad being relevant and interesting to all of them drops dramatically. This will lead to a lower relevance score, and more importantly, less people who click.
If you want to target a huge audience (like a national campaign), split it up into different ad sets. Try to write separate ad copy and use a different photo for each set to make sure each one is as relevant as possible.
(265)
