Facebook Advertising Budget Burn – Common Mistakes
Develop A Clear Objective to your Campaign
Before you spend anything, anywhere, you should have a clear vision of what you are hoping to achieve when you reach the audience you want to reach. If this is not front and centre of your mind when developing your purpose and content, it will not flow through to the correct targeting choices that you can invest in when spending money on Facebook ads.
You should have a clear idea of what you want your audience to do when they enter your Facebook “funnel”. What is the purpose of the campaign?
- Lead Generation
- Brand Awareness
- Consumer Engagement
- Site traffic
- Conversions
If there is no clear objective Facebook’s algorithm will mismatch your target audience to your intended milestone. Define this before creating the ad creative and assets. Select the matching objective in the Facebook ad campaign that most closely complements the purpose of your advertising.
Target Market is Too Broad or Too Small
Facebook Default Targeting – Our Simple Recommendations
Facebook has built in targeting tools based on their audience user data, therefore there can be a lot of intelligence in the way Facebook knows where to put your ads.
- Location – Geo-targeting is a handy way of promoting locally and Facebook makes this easy but allowing you to just drop a pin on a map in a location and set a distance radius around the pin which will target your ad to all the users within the target circle.
- Age – You choose your target age demographic from a between 13 and 65+ which will identify those in that group within your location target.
- Gender – Here you can specify all, male or female – perhaps controversially these are the only options.
- Demographics – This can be useful for drilling down on your target audience further, but you may compromise the number of people you intend to reach, it can however be useful for extra engagement.
- Interests and Behaviours – It’s widely considered that this category is a bit of a misrepresentation and is better skipped completely as it can be too broad and mis-representational of the audience you hope to get, with the result being ad spend wastage.
Creating a Custom Audience Specifically for this Campaign – Facebook Pixel
Thankfully Facebook has made this a streamlined process, but there is one that is a must if you plan on using Facebook advertising for lots of campaigns.
- Website traffic – you may have heard of the “Facebook pixel” which is a snippet that you add to your website and tracks conversions from Facebook clicks, this allows you to collect custom audiences based on website visitors. Effectively this can combine the power of marketing to people on Facebook who fit your Facebook demographic profile who are already clocked as visitors to your paid media, amplifying the opportunity to send messaging to your target visitors gender, location, or age.
Budgeting Your Spend Can Be Confusing
One of the strengths of Facebooks ads and why it can be so popular for all budget sizes is that your target market will not change for your campaign, it will only get bigger or smaller or advertised to for longer. If you target right, you can get some tangible ROI.
Optimising Ad Delivery
This should match your campaign objective, when booking your Facebook ad, you will be confronted with different choices for optimising the delivery of your ad. Depending on where you want your audience to end their journey through your campaign funnel, decide whether you would like the viewer to click on an external link. Choosing impressions as the end goal of the campaign will tell the Facebook algorithm to expand the audience to those likely to see it, rather than focusing on those who are more willing to engage with the ad.
When should you schedule the feed placements?
A common pitfall is not properly allowing the campaign to run long enough for Facebook to run the ad to its optimal ability. Setting a start and end date to define the campaign length will also allow Facebook’s algorithm to correctly budget the target spend to the ad demographic and reach. The accepted and minimum time your ad should run is about 4 days, this will allow Facebook to gather enough data to optimise the ads to the audience effectively.
Don’t be afraid to tweak as you go
While it might be a little bit daunting to interrupt the flow of Facebook’s built-in intelligence, particularly if you are running a lengthy ad campaign, there is no harm in experimenting a little with the demographic and the spend as you go. While there is caution to not interfere too often, sometimes your objective may shift and you may wish to alter the goalposts, and that is why Facebook has a large paying clientele for ads – in the long run it allows experimentation without too much loss, once you gain confidence with you targeting and your spend, you may invest more into creating longer campaigns to engage or to sell.
Facebook has become the backbone of most business ad campaigns because of the ease it presents for anyone to give it a try.
Make sure you get Facebook Ads first though; this will help you craft your audience and your content especially for the platform’s unique social landscape.
