I regularly see business owners throwing away their hard-earned money on ineffective Facebook ads. This makes me incredibly sad, because often all it takes are a few minor tweaks to make their ads explode.

We have literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t!

In this article, I’ll share 5 of the most common Facebook Ad rookie mistakes I see business owners making when it comes to their Facebook ads. Avoid these at all costs!

1. Creating audiences that are too general

One of the most powerful things about Facebook ads is the ability to target with laser focus. Yet I find many business owners get hung up on reaching MORE people, even if that audience is very general.

The problem with this strategy is this: you’re going to end up spending a lot of money on a lot of reach, but see very few conversions. You may be reaching a lot of people, but you’re not reaching the RIGHT people.

Testing out different audiences for your ads can make all the difference. For “cold audiences” (people who don’t know you) we recommend a highly targeted audience size of 500,000 to 1 million people for digital products.

For “warm and hot” audiences the size of the audience will be determined by the size of your email list, the number of Facebook Fans or the number of people reaching any piece of content you have pixeled.

“Cold Audiences” be 500,000 to 1 Million People in Size

We’ve found these audiences are MUCH more likely to engage with our ads…which means a lower cost and higher conversions.

Want to create these highly-targeted audiences for your own ads? See my post 7 Facebook Ad Audiences That Crush It!

2. Spending all your money before Facebook has optimized your ad or campaign

You likely already know that you can choose what you want Facebook to optimize your ads and campaigns for. Some examples include actions, daily unique reach and clicks.

To be clear, what you optimize for can be different than your objectives (e.g., your objective can be impressions while still optimizing for clicks).

Basically what this means is that as your ad is shown, Facebook will tweak the delivery of that ad based on what kind of results they’re getting. For instance, if they see that your ad is doing well with women in the 25-34 age group, they’ll show your ad more often to users in that group.

The problem is, if you let your ad or campaign run too quickly, you could be using up your entire ad budget before Facebook has had a chance to optimize your ad or campaign.

The fix? Make sure you give your ads at least 3-4 days to run before spending your whole budget, or before pulling, editing or pausing your ads.

3. Not using the right objective

Facebook lets you choose from a number of objectives when creating your ad, including traffic, engagement, lead generation and conversions.

I find many business owners get sucked into choosing “conversions” as the objective for most of their campaigns…because who DOESN’T want their ads to ultimately achieve conversions??

However, the objective you’ll choose can have a huge impact on how effective your ad is (Check out this blog post to see how Digital Marketer went from a cost per lead of $7.81 down to $1.38 simply by changing their objective).

Here are some basic objectives you may want to consider (besides conversions!):

• If you want lots of people to visit a blog post on your site, choose “Traffic”
• If your goal is to get more people to sign up for your list, choose “Lead generation”
• If you just want to get your name out there in your local community, try “Local awareness”
• If you want to grow your Facebook page, choose “Engagement” and then “Page Likes”

4. Using only one graphic in your ad

Your image is arguably the most important element of your entire Facebook ad. Yet many business owners are content to use one image and hope for the best.

A much more effective strategy is to split test up to 6 images for each ad you create. Facebook makes split testing easy by randomly splitting your audience up into segments. They will then show 6 versions of your ad (each with a different image) to these various segments (note: All 6 versions of your ad will be part of the same ad set).

Use 6 Graphics and Facebook Split-Test to find the WINNER!

They’ll keep every other element of your ad (headline, ad copy, etc.) the same, so you can tell for sure how your image is performing.

Some image ideas to test in your own ads include using images of real people, using surprising or eye-catching images that will make people take a second look and using bold designs to create “pattern interrupt” (getting your ad to stand out from everything else in the newsfeed).

5. Not using videos in your ads

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have noticed that I LOVE Facebook video ads. We find them to be highly effective, particularly in terms of user engagement.

Video ads work much the same as regular ads, and you even have the option to optimize for video views (which I highly recommend!). This will allow Facebook to automatically tweak your video based on who’s most likely to view it.

Another strategy I recommend for making the most of your video ads is to create video engagement custom audiences based on how long people have watched your videos in the past (you can specify this when you create your ad audience).

You can choose to have your ad shown to people who have viewed:

• 3 seconds of your video
• 10 seconds of your video
• 25% of your video
• 50% of your video
• 75% of your video
• 95% of your video

Of course, you can also create lookalike audiences using this same strategy.

It can take some trial and error to figure out the best strategies for using Facebook ads. However, avoiding these 5 mistakes will give you a great start.

Looking for more guidance with your Facebook ads? You might be interested in my ULTIMATE Facebook Ads Jumpstart Guide!

Are you making any of these rookie mistakes? Let us know in the comments!

About Author

Kim Garst

Kim Garst is one of the world's most retweeted people among digital marketers. She is a renowed business strategist, keynote speaker and an international best-selling author of Will The Real You Please Stand Up, Show Up, Be Authentic and Prosper in Social Media. Kim helps business owners grow their business using social and digital media.

She is the founder of KG Enterprises, LLC, a business strategy consulting company that helps business owners create more sales using the power of digital and social media.

Kim is also internationally recognized as a thought leader in the social media space. Forbes named her as one of the Top 10 Social Media Power Influencers. Her blog is one of the top social media resources in the world.

You can find more great content from her at www.kimgarst.com/blog.

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