With almost 2.5 billion active users, Facebook advertisements are a surefire way to reach your target audience, no matter your industry focus. When it comes to creating a comprehensive marketing plan, it is essential that you are aware of and follow best practices for optimal Facebook ad performance.
Chances are, if you’re not following the best practices, the ads you’re running aren’t going to perform well—which means you could be losing money and new clients.
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Common Mistakes That Affect Facebook Ad Performance
Many marketers assume that Facebook advertising works like any other kind of advertising—you have a product, you post an ad, and you instantly have sales. Wrong.
That’s not how ads work on Facebook. It is a social media platform, which means your potential customers aren’t looking to buy anything when they log in.
Users are on Facebook to post a status about how amazing a player is on their favorite football team or get a good laugh from a funny video.
If they come across a salesy ad, they will most likely continue scrolling rather than click through.
We are not stating that Facebook ads aren’t effective; that’s the opposite of what we’re saying here. However, for your ads to be truly successful, they need to be crafted with intention and optimized with your target audience in mind.
First, let’s cover the common—and easily avoidable—mistakes that some marketers are making.
Selecting the Wrong Marketing Objective on Facebook Ads
Without setting a clear goal, you can’t measure the success of your campaigns. Creating a marketing strategy with a full inbound funnel in place is one of the Facebook ads best practices. Facebook makes you select one of three marketing objectives when you are creating an ad.
Awareness Facebook Ad Objective
When you select the awareness stage, you will be able to create brand awareness or reach ads. This is known as top of the funnel (TOFU) marketing and starts attracting customers so you can turn them into potential leads.
Consideration Facebook Ad Objective
The goal of consideration stage ads is to drive engagement. Facebook allows you to do this using traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, or messages.
The consideration stage is where you educate your target audience about your products and services. This is known as middle of the funnel (MOFU) marketing.
Conversion Facebook Ad Objective
The conversion objective focuses on getting users to take the desired action. Facebook will allow you to select a goal of conversions, store visits, or product catalog sales.
At the conversion stage, the goal is to get your target audience to make a purchase. This stage is called bottom of the funnel (BOFU) marketing.
Using the Wrong Facebook Ad Type
You need to understand your audience to select the ad type that will provide the best Facebook ad performance.
Facebook offers several ad types:
- Images
- Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
- Collection
- Instant Experience
You also can place your ads on mobile, desktop, or the right-hand sidebar.
It’s important to know which ad type is going to work the best in order to have a successful campaign.
Image, carousel, and slideshow ads are versatile and can perform well for almost any type of company, whether it’s B2B or B2C. Alternatively, since they are geared toward selling consumer goods, e-commerce and retail companies will see more success than a B2B company would by utilizing video, collection, and instant experience ads.
Abandoning Facebook Ads
Many marketers create great ads and then abandon them for weeks after deployment.
To follow Facebook ads best practices, Facebook ad performance must be analyzed often to optimize and ensure that your campaign is achieving its intended goals.
Factors to Check Daily for Optimal Facebook Ad Performance
- Ad frequency
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Number of leads generated
- Performance by type and placement
- Clicks by interest
Through monitoring ads, it will be apparent if you need to make any changes. As a marketer, you already know the importance of data. This data will allow you to improve productivity and ensure the success of your campaign.
The 5 Elements to a High-Converting Facebook Ad Campaign
The elements of a high-converting Facebook campaign are going to be the same no matter what type of business you’re running ads for. If you incorporate each of these elements into your campaigns, you’re sure to see improvement in your Facebook ad performance.
1. Offer
You need to be sure that you’re crafting a great offer. If your offer is bad, your ads aren’t going to work well. To offer something your target audience is interested in, think about how your market would value your product and its competitors.
2. Ad Targeting
Make sure that your targeting is specific, but not too specific. Ensure that the size of your audience isn’t too small or too large. For example, you should aim for the potential reach to be between 500,000 and 5 million on awareness stage ads. You can stay one step ahead of your competition by thinking of interests that they wouldn’t think to target.
3. Ad Copy
If you can’t create an enticing copy for your ad, more than likely, your offer isn’t good enough. You should think about your value proposition and try out different ad copy to see how your target audience responds.
4. Ad Creative
Ensure your ad creative is engaging and visually in line with your company’s brand guidelines. If someone comes across your ad and can immediately see that the ad belongs to your company, you’ve done a great job with your creativity.
5. Ad Scent
This means that what your ad is saying is consistent with the landing page you’re sending viewers to. If your ad copy does not convey the same message as your landing page, you will find that your conversion rates are low. For example, if your ad is promoting dog training services, you don’t want to send users to a landing page to buy the best dog treats.
11 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Ads
Everything can always be improved, and your Facebook ads are no different. Keep reading to discover how you can make your ads better than ever before and reach your marketing goals.
1. Conduct Conversion Tests
Conversion testing allows you to change different variables of your ads—such as creative, audience, or placement—to see what performs the best. This method can benefit the campaign you’re testing, but your findings can also help enhance the creation of future campaigns.
Once you’ve decided on the variable you want to test, your budget is automatically divided between the two variations and exposure of each ad will be equally split.
A/B testing your Facebook ads is recommended when you’re trying to measure changes to your advertising. This is a tool to test new strategies rather than informal testing, which requires manually turning your ad sets or campaigns on and off.
2. Target Your Audience
Keep your buyer personas in mind during every step of the ad creation process. Remember that this goes beyond the demographics of your audience. Think about their intent and interest.
There are three different types of audiences you can use with advertising on Facebook: cold, warm, and hot. A cold audience consists of all users on Facebook and can be narrowed down with detailed targeting. A warm audience can be users that are connected to your page or a custom audience. A hot audience consists of users that know your business and those who have specifically visited your website.
When targeting different audiences or buyer personas, be sure to create separate campaigns for each one.
3. Test Multiple Ad Designs
Just like testing multiple variations of copy, you should be testing multiple designs. Consumer behavior and the Facebook ad platform are continually changing, so you should adjust accordingly.
When creating your ads, come up with at least three different design variations and test them. Different audiences are going to respond differently to your ads, and the stage your user is at in your sales funnel will also heavily influence how they react to your ad. You won’t know how a user responds to your ad until you try it out.
4. Test Different Lengths of Ad Copy
It’s a common misconception that ads with short copy perform better than ads with long copy. It’s an even larger misconception that any post on Facebook performs better if the copy is shorter.
The length of your copy will greatly depend on your product and your buyer personas. You need to keep who you’re writing for in mind when you’re creating your Facebook ad copy. Ask yourself, “Will this marketing message resonate with my audience?”
It’s vital that you’re testing different lengths to help determine what your audience responds best to.
It’s a good idea to have test ads with long, medium, and short copy. This way, you can figure out the preferences of your audience and improve your Facebook ad performance.
5. Choose Ad Images That Stand Out
Facebook’s News Feed is packed with advertisements competing for your audience’s attention. That’s why you need to use images that stand out for optimal Facebook ad performance. The right creative can be the difference between a user clicking through to make a purchase and scrolling right past.
Keep in mind that your image doesn’t have to be complicated to catch the attention of your potential buyers—just make sure that they’re crisp and uncluttered.
6. Address Logic and Emotion
Your potential buyers’ emotions have a lot to do with their purchase, and their logical side may tell them to hold back. It’s your job to convey the features and benefits of your product or service so you can appeal to both their logical and emotional sides and increase the likelihood of a conversion.
Features will explain what sets your product or service apart from others and make it unique. Benefits will detail what makes those features beneficial to your consumer.
7. Consider the Psychology of Color
If you aren’t taking advantage of the psychological impact that different colors can have, you’re missing out on a vital creative opportunity to improve your Facebook ad performance. It’s no surprise that colors evoke emotion.
A Quick Summary of the Emotions Each Color Evokes
- Red – While red signifies danger, it can be used in campaigns that intend to evoke strong emotions.
- Orange – This is a dynamic and energetic color that isn’t perceived as dangerous as red. It is lively in nature and can be used successfully when you want ads to stand out.
- Yellow – Bright and full of energy, yellow signifies joy, intellect, energy, and happiness. Darker yellows (bordering on gold) can give a feeling of prosperity and security.
- Green – Firmly linked with nature and the environment in most consumers’ minds, green is also associated with reliability, safety, stability, honesty, and freshness.
- Blue – Blue sparks trust in the viewer. It can be serious but also suggests intelligence, loyalty, calmness, and power.
- Purple – Combining the stability of blue and the energy of red, purple is associated with luxury, royalty, dreams, mystery, and elegance. It stimulates problem-solving and creativity.
- Black, Grays, and White – Neutrals depict traditionalism, conservatism, and neutrality, which can be used very effectively in advertising.
8. Optimize Facebook Ads for Mobile
Optimizing your ads for mobile is critical if you’re trying to enhance your Facebook ad performance. Over 94 percent of the platform’s ad revenue comes from mobile. The truth is, behaviors are different when on mobile—attention spans are shorter, for starters. One of the best ways to appease these short attention spans is to create video ads that display your brand information and key message immediately.
9. Add Social Proof
One of the main reasons someone may be deterred from purchasing is fear. Your potential customers are scared of losing money. This is also known as loss aversion, the tendency for someone to prefer avoiding losses rather than acquiring equivalent gains. This is why offers like free shipping, discounts, and free returns are effective.
Rather than extending offers, you can add social proof to your ad design or copy. This is showing your potential buyers that other consumers just like them have used your product or service, and it works for them. This will not only comfort your buyer but also get them excited about what your business has to offer.
10. Create a Sense of Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency also follows the principle of loss aversion; no one wants to miss out on a deal because they were too late. Creating urgency in your audience could include offering a deal that’s too good to pass up or using action-evoking phrases like “hurry,” “for a limited time only,” and “last chance!”
11. Hire a Marketing Agency
Our final tip to improve your Facebook ad performance is to hire a marketing agency. Facebook is constantly changing, and keeping up with evolving policies and features can be time-consuming. It only makes sense to leave that to someone who can constantly monitor these changes and adapt your company’s strategy accordingly.
A seasoned expert can adjust your strategy based on analytics that go far beyond what Facebook displays. In addition to improving your advertising strategy, hiring an agency can save you money, and you may even get more out of an agency than you would out of a salaried employee.
Take Your Facebook Ads to the Next Level
Now you know what you can do to optimize your ads and meet your Facebook ad performance goals. If you have any questions, we would be happy to help. You may be feeling overwhelmed with all of these potential improvements and questioning where to start.
If you aren’t sure if partnering with a digital marketing agency would be the best decision for your company, consider scheduling a complimentary strategy session with one of our business results specialists.
During this call, you will get real one-on-one advice tailored to your business goals from a real marketing expert. We look forward to learning more about your business!
