Suh Anons, this dino is back at it again with more FB ads goods. In today's post, we’re covering common newbie mistakes that can be costly for any business or wifi money venture.
No one likes throwing money into the fire. Make sure you have the bases covered and your chances for success immediately 10x.
For those in a rush, here’s the TDLR:
Launch ads before implementing and testing website tracking
Use the wrong campaign objective when trying to drive in sales and leads
Not running retargeting campaigns (only prospecting)
Let’s get sendy!
Launch ads before implementing and testing website tracking
This is the most costly mistake a Facebook advertiser can make. If you don’t implement tracking via the Meta pixel, there’s a good chance you will never see a dollar show up in your ad account.
Tracking is vital for recording user actions within your business assets (ex: website, FB/IG pages, etc.) and feeding those learnings back to your campaigns and ads. After implementing the pixel, it’s important to test your tracking and ensure all events (like a purchase or add to cart) are firing and populating correctly in Meta events manager.
Testing the pixel after setup is important, but it’s also vital to plan for ongoing testing to make sure nothing drops off in the future. I typically test on a quarterly basis but this also depends on the ad account.
If I’m having 10k - 100k spend days, or about to enter a hot period (Black Friday/Cyber Monday), you bet your ass I’m testing to make sure tracking is working right.
Use the wrong campaign objective when trying to drive in sales and leads
This is another biggie that I see newbies make all the time. When performing audits in the past, I’ve seen businesses who want sales spend north of 100k using the wrong objective, never seeing a single conversion recorded in the ad account (don’t be that guy).
This is an easy one to correct if you want to drive in conversions/sales and leads. You literally use the sales objective for sales/purchases (the sales objective used to be called conversions), leads for more leads, etc.
*Note: You can also use sales/conversion campaign objective to generate more leads. All you have to do is optimize your campaigns to find more leads using a lead conversion event if you’re tracking this on your site.
Some wrong objectives to use when first starting out are Awareness, Traffic, and Engagement. Sure there are strategies you can implement to squeeze out conversions using these objectives, but these efforts will typically have more campaigns/retargeting layers to help do this.
I personally don’t like using these objectives much because the quality of traffic tends to be lower. They will typically have cheaper traffic, but cheap traffic doesn’t always mean cheaper purchases and leads.
For the newbies, I suggest against this to start because you have a higher chance of burning cash, fast. This is for the more experienced media buyer who know how to build out a full funnel strategy using more campaigns and channels… and even then, this approach doesn’t always test well.
*Tip: Using these top-of-funnel objectives when retargeting users like site visitors can be a cheap way to get your ads in front of people. You might not see conversions in these campaigns, but if you have a retargeting campaign optimized for sales, this could be a solid strategy. In the end, test it out to see what works best for your business and ad account.
Not running retargeting campaigns (only prospecting)
Another simple mistake I see is not leveraging retargeting conversion/sales campaigns. They’re usually stuck running prospecting campaigns targeting cold users, which tends to cost more with Facebook ads.
Note: You can have success targeting cold users only (not for newbies), but retargeting helps you not leave money on the table by converting users still thinking about taking action. They showed interest once, so why not give them more info and close the deal.
Setting this up is not hard if you have your pixel tracking setup properly and/or you’re able to leverage 1st party data like email lists related to your business. All you need to do is create custom audiences using your Meta pixel or 1st party data as your source (can also use other sources but these are the main ones).
Then import this audience into the retargeting campaign you’re building out, add in proper exclusions if needed and let it rip! Since retargeted users have been to your site, they will be warmer and easier to convert.
For more details on how to do this properly, check out my Facebook Ads Launch Checklist for reference links and step-by-step info.
Final Thoughts
That’s it for this post, stayed tuned for part 2 coming out this month!
As always, if you ever have Facebook ad questions, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a message on Twitter @BowTiedIndomRex.
Keep it real Anon.
#WAGMI