6 FB & IG Ads commonly Overlooked Mistakes 鉁嬸煆烩槤馃徎

ads mistakes Jun 24, 2020

While Facebook and Instagram Ads provide your product or service with a big, responsive audience, you have to avoid some of these classic mistakes when handling ads. 

 

Short Term Sight > Long Term Problems

Sometimes, an ad campaign is not sustained. Because the long haul is not considered, the ads come out shortsighted and may result in future inconsistencies. Sometimes it’s just that, shortsightedness. Most often it’s a superficial and impatient approach to doing ads.

A case we see very often: somebody not believing in ads and with zero skills decides to give it a try because he/she sees and hears everywhere about them and maybe is even in touch with people doing them properly. The person invests 1000-3000 euros in ads, sees no results, and go backs to the belief that ads don’t work or they are not for their business.

Having an unlimited ad budget and good intent is not what makes an ad campaign profitable. The only thing that budget guarantees is branding (people recognizing your brand), but we’re talking about an investment that needs to be recovered, not suicidal branding.

A skilled person can make 100 euros in ads more profitable than an unskilled one with 1.000.000 euros because that’s what ads are about: profitability. Ads are not an expense, ads are an investment with a clear goal – make you more money than what you put in.

Educate yourself and start small. Make mistakes fast and cheap while you’re learning by defining and limiting your ad budget to what you can afford to lose. When you find winning ad sets with good ROAS (aka money printing machines), that’s when it’s time to pour money into them.

 

No Goal, No Gain

Every week we have prospects coming to us and telling us that they don’t know what’s wrong with their ads, but they are not performing. They say they have spent thousands of euros already with bad results.

The first thing we ask is “what were you trying to achieve?”, to which the prospect usually responds “more sales” or “more leads”.

The second thing we ask is “what campaign objective was you using?”. Sometimes we hear “what’s that?” More often we hear “traffic” or “interactions”. We say “well, Facebook gave you what you asked it, no more, no less”.

If you don’t have the Pixel installed, do yourself a favor and install do it. Creating a conversion campaign is much, much easier than many think. Especially if you’re following our step by step instructions.

 

Confusing Ads

So, you got your target audience right, you got your message right… Are you sure about it? Show the ad to 10 people. Do they clearly understand what you were planning to convey and what you want them to do? Let them tell you and for your own sake, don’t help them! Let it be a real test.

This little test might surprise you as, of course, everything about your ad is so obvious to you. An ad is a way of communication and if communication would be so easy, there would be no such things as misunderstandings or lack of understanding.

Have a very clear message with your ads, and even when you think it’s perfect, do a little check before launching. Don’t be afraid of criticism. Better know now what might be wrong with your little creation than when it’s open to the general public and consuming your money.

 

Stop-Effect Overkill

We always talk about the importance of a stop effect in an ad, especially on Facebook and Instagram Ads. People don’t spend hours there like we do checking other companies' ads, so if there’s no stop effect, you’re almost guaranteed to be ignored.

The problem is that doing it the wrong way can be even worse than being ignored. Why worse? If somebody just ignored your ad and passed by, they just won’t think about you. If your stop effect was out of touch, your ad would have helped to create a negative impression of your company or product.  

So, be careful using stop effects and ask yourself this: will this look cool and fun or will it make my audience cringe? If you don't trust yourself with the answer, you can always ask friends. 

 

No real A/B testing

What usually happens is that people interpret correctly only the “test” part, so they test, let’s say, 2 totally different ads. What happens much less often is testing and changing creative elements of one specific ad. If the ad works, they let it be, which leaves a lot of untapped potential on the table.

Just as one of the simplest examples: let’s say you have an ad with a white background. What do you think would happen if you changed the color to black? You can never be sure, but we’ve seen this little tweak working and improving the performance of the ads.

The smaller the change, the smaller the impact it will have on the performance of the ad. If you change just a few words from the copy, chances are this won’t make much difference. If you change the main character from an ad, that could have a big impact

What’s also important to take into account is the time you have available for this changes – wasting too much time on too little details can be very counterproductive, especially if your available time is not abundant and you could be working on areas that can generate a bigger impact on your business.

 

Not reading & trying to understand your numbers

Maybe this one is the most common and overlooked mistake from “the classics”. Most people are scared of numbers, graphics, and charts, and what do we do with scary stuff? We ignore them and try to forget they exist.

Unfortunately for them, data is where the gold hides from plain view. Data is good, data never lies. It’s just there, waiting to be interpreted. If you don’t read data, you will have a very hard time understanding what’s working and what’s not. You will have to guess, and guessing always looses to data's hard facts.

What’s usually the problem here? Impatience. Data is not like a simple image you can look and understand in less than a second. You have to take your time and look at it part by part, detail by detail. Don’t try to "swallow" the whole thing in one fast look.

 


 

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