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Facebook has built one of the most powerful advertising platforms the world has ever seen. Use Facebook the right way and it can be one of the best ways to get more clients and grow your business. Use it the wrong way and Facebook will gladly take all your hard earned money. Avoid these 3 common mistakes and I know you will get faster results from Facebook Ads.
1. Not Picking The Right Audience
With Facebook Advertising you need to leave most people out of the party. Ideally you should create a Facebook lookalike audience based on your current website visitors (or your customer email list). Facebook has an amazing algorithm that can look at your existing customers or website visitors and find people similar to them in a way that you and I can not do. It is called a “lookalike” audience.
Too many times I see people targeting very broad interests (or no interests at all). Ideally your target audience should be 100,000-300,000 people. If your target audience is 1,000,000 people or more then you are not targeted enough. You need to leave some people out of the party.
The best audiences are a combination of your competitors’ Facebook fan pages and a lookalike audience of your own clients or website traffic. Start there and you will have a great audience to start with. You can test one audience against another with the same ad to see which one works best for you.
2. Not using conversion pixels for tracking
Most campaigns I look at are just trying to build up likes for their fan page (with no real strategy) or sending the cheapest clicks possible to their website. Facebook has created one of the most powerful conversion optimization algorithms that I have ever seen. They can actually look at people who are converting for your offer and find similar people (like a look alike audience) that are also likely to convert. The crazy part? It works really really well.
But if you do not even tell Facebook what you are trying to do (by telling it what a conversion is) then they can not help you out. Just because you can get cheap clicks to your site does not mean that any of those people will ever become a client.
It is much better to focus on your conversions and ask the question, “How much do I have to spend with Facebook to make a sale or get a new client”? Once you let Facebook know when they have gotten you a new lead or client then they will do a lot better job finding those people for you.
So make sure to set up a Facebook conversion pixel. Set your campaign to “optimize for conversions” too. Otherwise you are likely just wasting your money on vanity metrics (lots of clicks, likes, and web traffic with no sales or leads).
3. Not diving deeper into the your reports
For some reason it seems like everyone wants to use Facebook’s standard reports. The problem is these reports usually don’t tell you very much. Sure it’s nice to see 20 people liked your ad last week but what does that REALLY tell you?
Wouldn’t it be better to see which age and gender categories are becoming warm leads at the cheapest price? You would then spend more money on those people and exclude the ones who are more expensive to aquire.
The problem is without customizing the columns you are looking at in the Facebook ad reports you will never see this.
Start with the standard Facebook Ad report (that you are given). Then remove any columns that are not crucial to your campaign (likes, number of engagements, etc). Once you have the least amount of columns possible add a few in. The big ones you will want are: cost per conversion, Ad score, and CPM.
Cost per conversion – How much are you paying to get a sale or lead? This is really the most important metric that matters so include it.
Ad Score – A high ad score (7,8 or 9) will get you cheaper sales and leads. Look at this because you can quickly cut ads with lower ad scores. Facebook will show these ads less often but you should be able to see them quickly and remove them from your campaign.
CPM – How much does it cost you to reach 1,000 people on Facebook? Some audiences are $10 or more just to show your ad in front of 1,000 of those people. Many are less. Use this column as a guide to help you find lower cost per conversions. Audiences with Higher CPMs usually will have a higher cost per conversion.
So those are the 3 most common mistakes I see most people making with Facebook Advertising. Follow the advice I gave you to fix them and your Facebook campaigns will finally start working for you.
Facebook is a powerful advertising platform. But you must use it correctly to get the fastest results possible.