When set up correctly, Facebook Ads can generate some serious returns for a business, whether they’re looking for leads, sales or just brand awareness. However, there are some rookie errors that so many people make when setting up their campaigns, which essentially lead to throwing money down the drain and into Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket.
Here are three common mistakes people make when running Facebook Ads, and why you should avoid them at all costs.
1. Not having a Pixel installed
A Facebook Pixel is a tiny piece of code that sits invisibly on your website. It’s free and very easy to install, and without it, there is absolutely no point in running an ad campaign. That’s right – no point whatsoever!
The Pixel is what allows Facebook to track people’s actions on your site. This includes what pages they’ve clicked on, and what actions they’ve taken on those pages, such as adding a product to their basket, making a purchase or filling in a contact form.
Without the Pixel, you have no way of tracking the results of your ads and whether they’re actually working or not, and you can’t harness the data to run retargeting ads. You can read more about why you need to install a Pixel here.
2. Sending people to the home page
Another really common mistake people make with their Facebook Ads is sending people from their ads to the home page of their website.
Using a home page as a destination from an ad should be avoided at all costs. If you’ve taken the time to set up an ad, and someone has taken the time to read that ad and is interested enough in what you do to click through, you want to make the journey to taking your desired action as easy as possible for them.
The home page of a site presents people with many options, and if people are presented with too much choice, they can get overwhelmed and not make any choice at all, or get sidetracked and do something else.
Ideally, people should be taken to a page where they only have one action they can take. If ads are promoting a product, for example, people should be taken to that product’s specific page so they can make a purchase. If the ads are promoting a service, they should be taken to a landing page specifically promoting that service, talking through its features and benefits. Include some testimonials if possible, with an enquiry form to fill in.
Taking away the choice and making it really clear what people need to do will help to encourage conversions – the home page will inadvertently turn people away.
3. Not defining your audience
One of the wonders of advertising with Facebook is the plethora of targeting options at your disposal. You can target based on location, age, interests, demographics and even shopping habits – with so many options available, it’s easy to create an audience related to your target avatar.
However, many people will still choose to run an ad targeted at the whole of the United Kingdom, for example. With this audience numbering in the millions, unless you have an ad budget of millions, your ads aren’t likely to be seen by many people – and it’s very unlikely that every single person in the UK with a Facebook account is your business’s target customer.
Defining your audience not only ensures that your ads will be seen by people most interested in what you do, but also makes running ads more cost-effective too.
If you’d like to learn more secrets to success with Facebook Ads, sign up for our next free online Facebook Ads Masterclass today.
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