Dominic Sergi
March 8, 2021
Facebook ads can be a powerful and cost-effective arrow in the marketer’s quiver. But just like any other tool, they can be used well or badly… and using them badly really defeats the purpose of using them at all.
There are plenty of ways for Facebook advertising to go wrong. The good news is, there are also simple ways to correct most of the problems that lead to Facebook ad failures. Here we’ll cover four of the most common reasons that Facebook ads fail, and how you can avoid them.
This seems like it should go without saying, but: put in the work. This one is all about the basics. The things your ad should never go live without, if your marketing team is at all competent.
Your ads should never:
All of these seemingly distinct problems are really the same problem.
They’re the result of marketing teams being in too much of a rush to get their campaigns out to bother with dotting their proverbial I’s and crossing their proverbial t’s.
This may sound facile, but really.
The above errors aren’t fictional: they’re all drawn from very real Facebook ads that genuinely happened. And there’s no reason for any of these errors to happen if you’re working methodically and covering all the basic needed steps for launching a Facebook ad campaign.
Putting in the work is the first and simplest hurdle to clear for running effective ads.
Facebook offers powerful tools for targeting specific, curated audiences with advertising. This is great, but it can have a downside: sometimes, marketers are tempted to get a little too specific.
There’s a delicate balance to be observed in targeted Facebook advertising. Targeting makes it possible to:
Bringing all of these together, it could be possible to target an ad for a floral arrangements business at married women in a certain age range with an anniversary within the next month, and who specifically like romance novels and roses.
Here’s the snag: that specific niche might indeed be a fit for your campaign, but it may also be so specific that the real number of people you wind up reaching proves to be far too small to justify the expense.
Ultimately, only a small percentage of any demographic you connect with can be expected to actually click through on your Facebook ad.
If you narrow your outreach too much, you can wind up blunting or even negating the impact of your ads.
Facebook provides an audience meter to help with this very issue. Make use of it and pay attention to when the needle slips into the red: that’s indicator that you’re narrowing your audience too much. (Also stay alert for moving into the yellow, which indicates an audience that could be too broad.)
Ultimately, testing and re-testing your campaigns will provide the final word on whether you’ve gotten your targeting right, but staying attentive to the issue from the jump will save plenty of time and money.
Even after you’ve got the basics in place and refined your ad targeting, there’s another critical piece to keep in mind: making sure your ads look good and read well.
Problems with creative work and copywriting can haunt even big brand advertising campaigns. Some general things to look out for:
These are all common examples of ad creative and copywriting failures that can considerably reduce an ad’s effectiveness.
If it’s at all possible, there should be more than one set of eyes on any ad that you’re generating.
No matter how clean your copywriting and editing skills might be or how flawless your eye for design is, a single person can be vulnerable to missing key flaws in ad copy or creation.
With two or three competent reviewers to check on it, there’s a much better chance that your ads will live up to high quality standards and perform well.
If you’ve rolled out a great-looking ad campaign on Facebook with accurate targeting, gorgeous imagery, and concise and powerful messaging, what should follow is more traffic from social media to your company’s landing page.
If that doesn’t generate a corresponding boost in sales, though, there could be another problem at work: your landing page itself.
There are several common ways for landing pages to fumble the benefits of an otherwise solid ad campaign:
It’s a needless tragedy when a landing page fumbles potential conversions from its advertising.
Fortunately, correcting most problems like this really stems from correcting the mindset you’re approaching the landing page with.
Most of the above kinds of landing page failures are avoidable if the page is thought through with the customer’s perspective in mind.
What you’re a customer, what do you want from a landing page?
Chances are you’d like it to be clear and readable, for it not to have an air of either desperation or minimum-possible effort, and for it to align with your intent when you clicked: meaning that if you clicked through to find and purchase a dog bed, that’s what the landing page should first and foremost allow you to do.
Thinking through your landing pages from a customer-centric perspective is the best way to make sure they’re up to snuff when the ad campaigns roll out.
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