Running Facebook Ads is a constant learning process, even for Facebook Ads Managers like me.
I still get stumped as to why a campaign isn't performing well, but there are some common mistakes that are simple to fix and can help your campaign go from losing money to making money.

1. Not optimising your budget correctly

Budget control is vital in making sure you keep to your ad spend and also in telling Facebook how to optimise your budget. You have 2 options when choosing how to spend: Lifetime and Daily.

Lifetime: This allows you to set a total budget you want Facebook to spend within a certain time frame. But note: this isn't a good option if you're going to be making lots of changes to your budget or schedule as it will mess with how Facebook prioritise your budget.
Daily: This method works well if you run evergreen campaigns with no end date but be aware that Facebook will spend your daily ad spend, every day!

2. Over segmenting your audiences

One of the major benefits of running Facebook ads is the targeting options from Look-a-Like to Custom to Interest Based.
But be careful that you're not casting your net too wide OR too narrow.
Over segmenting your audiences can mean that you're not giving Facebook a big enough pool of people to learn about and target, and chances are Facebook will end up not having enough data to learn from.

If you're creating too many audiences within different ad sets you could risk never leaving the "Learning" phase and ending up in "Learning Limited" where your audiences are too small to optimise for.

3. Optimised for wrong campaign objective

Choosing the right campaign objective from the get-go is VITAL. It's like setting your sat nav at the start of your journey rather than relying on that old folded map from twenty years ago!

You need to tell Facebook EXACTLY what you are looking to achieve from the start. This will set the pace and give Facebook the information it needs to find the people MOST LIKELY to take the action you want.

This first step is where most people fall! So remember:
Traffic: Most likely to click the link in my ad
Lead Generation: Most likely to fill in my form
Conversion for purchase: Most likely to buy my product

4. Too big an audience overlap

Did you know that you can serve your ads to the same person even if you have created different audiences?
Well, you can and this can be costly!
Think about it: You're targeting football fans in one audience, but in another, you're also targeting supporters of Liverpool FC. You can have the same person in both of these ad sets, meaning you are paying twice to target the same person.
It can also alter the data on how well an ad set is actually performing.

By using multiple audiences at the same time without checking the overlap can also cause ad fatigue to set in quicker.

One way to avoid this is to check your audiences in the "Audience Overlap" tool in "Audiences" You can check two different audiences to see how much they overlap. You want to be under 20%.

Go to Audiences, select 2 audiences and then click the three dots next to "delete" and then click "show audience overlap."

5. Lack of Funnels

Another reason ad campaigns fail is that there is no funnel in place to nurture cold leads into sales.
Campaigns try and go straight for the purchase without thinking about the user/buyer journey.

Think about it:

Why not drop me an email to discuss how I can help your business.

Facebook Ads can be a minefield, but I help businesses through 1:1 sessions or management services to take the stress away and also educate on how to run Ads successfully. If you need support with your Ads, click the “contact me” button below to get in touch.

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