Facebook ads can be a bit of a minefield, especially if you’re new to the game. In light of the current situation, eCommerce is booming so ensuring your Facebook Advertising strategy is working for your brand is crucial.
However, its important to remember that not all products, services or businesses are wanted by consumers. And it’s quite normal for ad accounts to be unsuccessful.
But, there are certain measures you can take to help you land on your feet when navigating your Facebook ads account.
High Ad Frequency
Facebook ad frequency refers to the number of times an average member of your target audience is shown your ad. So, if you have a frequency of 5 that means an average audience member has been shown your ad 5 times.
It’s important to note that this does not mean your audience members have seen your ad 5 times. For some, it will be far more while others won’t have seen your ad at all.
Rather, it’s only the measured frequency of your ad appearing to your target audience, in the mechanical sense.
That in mind, it makes sense that elevated ad frequency can be quite problematic.
Facebook doesn’t renew audiences automatically. Therefore, it’s easy for your ads to become fatigued if your frequency gets too high – it’s that notion of one having too much of a good thing.
The ideal ad frequency is between 2-3. Anything above 3 will very likely lead you to see a drop in your results.
If your ad is performing badly, you should check your ad frequency.
The most effective ways to deal with high ad frequency are…
- Check your audience size and ad budget, the smaller your audience and the larger your budget, the faster your ad frequency will rise because you are plugging the same ads to the same audience at a fast pace
- Change your ad creative, in order to keep people interested in ads that promote the same thing you must use innovative creative and formatting; videos, new ad copy, exciting imagery
- Target a different audience, this is where using a lookalike audience can be extremely effective; an audience based on the people in your original audience who have taken your desired call to action – many lookalike audiences end up being more successful than their original cold counterparts!
The only time it’s appropriate for your ad frequency to be above 3 is if you are running a re-targeting campaign to a warm audience.
Because warm audiences are likely more interested in your product, you have more leeway when it comes to ad frequency.
Research has shown great success with ad frequencies as high as 10 when they are targeting warm audience members.
Low CTR
CTR or Click Through Rate measures the ratio of how often someone clicks on your ad to how many times your ad has been viewed. According to research, a good CTR for Facebook is between 2-5%.
Clicks are pivotal and are responsible for driving costs up or down depending on the quality of your ads.
And the quality of your ads depends on your creative, audience targeting and ad engagement.
If your CTR is dropping below 1.5% then you might consider looking into the following in order to improve it.
- Narrow your target audience
If you’re serving one variation of your ads to a very broad audience then the message must be quite generic in order to be relevant to such a wide audience. Narrowing your target audience should always be the first step to increasing your CTR.
- Improve your ad creative
Narrowing your audience means you have something specific to target with your ad creative. For example, an ad for a cold audience wouldn’t use copy such as “Did you forget about us?” because they likely haven’t engaged with your brand yet.
Instead, ad copy for a cold audience should be informative so they get to know who you are and what you do at a glance. The former kind of copy would suit a hot audience, who are ready to make a purchase from you.
- Testing
The benefit of getting creative with your ads is that you can try out different variations of the headline, copy or imagery and see which ad performs the best for which audience.
It’s important to keep an eye on the metrics within your Facebook ads account as this is how you will know what’s performing well.
Low ROAS
Your return on ad spend is definitely a metric to keep your eye on. If your ROAS drops below 1, you’re likely making a loss. You should aim for a minimum of 3.
Return on ad spend lets you know the effectiveness of your ecommercenmarketing campaign in terms of how much revenue it’s generating for every £1 you spend on Facebook advertising. Hence why you want your ROAS to stay above 1; dropping into negatives means you’re not covering the amount you are spending.
Here are a couple of ways that you can improve your ROAS;
- Use a variety of audiences – if you’re not seeing positive results then narrowing your audience and focusing on people who relate to your niche will likely drive more sales
- Use innovative creative – changing up your ad creative to see what drives the most audience engagement is a great way to improve your ROAS; you should be releasing at least 3 variations of your ads
- Use different types of ads – secondary to changing up your creative is changing up the format of your Facebook ads, e.g. video, carousel, dynamic; different ad types will have different effects on your audience
Being aware of the mistakes made regarding these specific metrics could save your Facebook ads account.
And, as you can see, recovering these mistakes have three things in common… audience / ad creative / testing
This leads us to the next common mistake that people often make in their ads account.
Not Using Automated Rules
Automated rules monitor your campaigns, ad sets and ads on a set schedule and either notify you of potential problems or make changes based on rules that you have created.
When you create your automated rules you can decide what triggers the rules, what action the rule takes and which campaign, ad set or ad you want the rule to affect.
These are a great tool for agencies who have multiple clients and not enough time to check each campaign individually. However, there are certain restrictions.
- You can create a maximum of 250 rules for each ad account
- If your ads contain political content then they don’t qualify for automated rules, they must be monitored and changed by an individual
- You can only set one condition per rule
So setting your automated rule could be a great time-saver and an easy way to influence those three common elements that can help you avoid common mistakes in your Facebook ads account.
That being said, it is also important to take a personal approach to your ads account and be vigilant about your content. Especially if you want to avoid our last fatal mistake!
Violating Facebook’s Policies
There are many policies set by Facebook to which your ads account must adhere to in order to be accepted by the platform. If you violate Facebook’s policies they can reject your ads and even disable your account.
While sometimes it can feel like there’s no rhyme or reason to why Facebook disables accounts, there are some common threads that it pays to be aware of.
- Repeated late or declined payments
- Low Facebook page quality
If you frequently break community guidelines on your Facebook page then you will be given a low-quality score and your account may be disabled or banned. You can check the quality score of your page by clicking ‘more’ on the menu at the top of the page.
Perhaps the most common reason why ads accounts get disabled is the frequent rejection of your ads by Facebook. Reasons why your ads might be rejected include…
- You’re advertising prohibited or restricted content like weapons, drugs, payday loans or unsafe supplements like steroids
- You’re violating community guidelines with content that looks like/is spam
- You’ve made a technical mistake in your ad such as adding too much text over an image (the rules is 20%)
- You’ve made a technical mistake on your landing page like the URL not matching your ad content, your landing page including spam, content that doesn’t correspond to your ad or is a dead-end page
This really just touches the surface and we do recommend being aware of all the Facebook ads guidelines before you set up your ads account. Falcon.IO offers a really comprehensive breakdown of the most common reasons why ads accounts were rejected throughout 2019.
We know this is a lot of information to take in, especially if you’re new to the game.
But hopefully having this overview of the common mistakes made in Facebook ads accounts will help get you off to a smooth start, or fix any issues you may have run into.
Tom Welborne founder and director The Good Marketer is a Marketing Agency in London which drives more traffic, generates conversions and increases sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.
Facebook ads stock photo by PixieMe/Shutterstock
