There are a few key mistakes marketers make when running ads that absolutely butcher the results, read on to find out what they are and how to mitigate them.
1. Overly branded content.
You know the type, logos and brand colours and not a single human on there. A good rule of thumb is to create tiktoks not ads, create reels not ads, create blogs, not PPC hooks.
We’ve developed ‘ad blindness’ so when we see that ad/sponsored we can literally ignore every word of the post like a big black hole in the Instagram feed. In B2B it’s a little different but most of us are in services right, we can show our faces, our team, our expertise!
2. Boosting posts.
Onn every Instagram and Facebook post you create from a business account there’s a button to boost it. It can work, it’s quick, it’s easy, and if you’ve got a well-performing post and just want the engagement, boost away.
If you want to A/B test, create multiple and really specific audiences and ads specifically for conversions, be able to track all your conversion points then you want to do it in Ads Manager. Another mistake is thinking this is ads manager. This isn’t, it’s still the primary school of Ads University.
3. Targeting the obvious.
A big one is targeting what’s super obvious. Affluent areas, similar brands, celebrities who also wear the ‘thing’. These big and obvious target markets will have way more people targeting them than more specific audiences and you’ll end up paying more per click.
You can get these extra targeting ideas from your Google Analytics to see what other interests your traffic has, trialling multiple ad sets and audiences or paying for the research and insight, there are plenty of options.
4. Not considering the customer journey.
The final and worst offender is not considering the full journey. A good marketer cares about their work actually converting. It’s not enough to drive traffic and say ‘well we did our bit’. You could be shovelling all these people into the top of the conversion funnel whether that’s a lead or to the website or a free trial sign up. But if you look at the stats, none of them are converting!
There could be a really obvious blocker to converting and no amount of money on paid ads is going to increase your sales. It could be that there’s a broken link, not enough payment options, or a slow loading website.
You could be targeting all the wrong people who were never going to convert anyway or loads of bot accounts rather than humans are clicking who are never going to buy. If the conversion rate is low already, dropping more of the same people into the blocked funnel won’t improve it. Check the full end-to-end and keep on top of measuring it.
A final point would also be to stop over and under-spending on your ads. Make sure the budget is distributed evenly through the month and monitor all your ads and spend in one place.
Sign up for your free trial of Pacr’s Facebook Ads spend tracking tool.
