6 common issues with Facebook ads and their fixes

Jackie is a star contributor for Tech in Asia and publishes exclusive, high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from star contributors here.

With over 1.23 billion users to date, Facebook is the world’s largest social media network, and everyone is tapping onto its audience base to market their businesses. While there are many reasons to invest in Facebook ads, they can potentially drain your budget very quickly without getting you the equivalent results.

So, how do you avoid spending too much for too little on Facebook marketing? Here are six reasons we’ve uncovered on why most Facebook ads underperform and our solutions to each.

1. Sharpen your audience targeting

One of the most common mistakes digital marketers make is to target a massive audience pool. Why is this wrong?

From my experience running a digital marketing agency, I found that an audience size greater than 50,000 per ad group was too broad and resulted in high cost per conversions. In these cases, after refining the targeting strategy and reducing the audience size, we were able to maintain a high conversion rate at a much lower cost. Therefore, a huge audience size can mean a huge waste of money, as you are paying for clicks and impressions by people who are not likely to become your customers.

Solution

To get the most out of your budget, your audience should be segmented so you can concisely target the people who matter to your business. Here are a few ways to segment your audience:

• Demographic targeting: Show your ads to audiences based on their demographic information, such as gender, age, location, language, whether they have children, etc.
• Interest targeting: Show your ads to people with certain interests.
• Connections: Selecting audiences based on their connections to certain pages or apps.
• Custom audience targeting: Importing information from a known audience of your own.

Create a few ad groups that each have different targeting strategies and target audiences. Over time, you should be able to tell which segments of audiences are responding best to your ads.

2. Improve your ad creative

Unlike other advertising platforms, your customers do not go to Facebook to shop. So, to get your audience’s attention and distract them from pictures of their high school reunion, you need to have a strong, compelling ad.

Solutions

Keep your headlines short and to the point. Research proves that the most popular headlines are only five words long! Here are some good examples of Facebook ads we have come across.

Show faces. From my personal experience, I’ve found that single image ads featuring faces are better received. Below are images that we used to advertise a client’s wedding show. Though they are both stunning images, the image on the left (clearly depicting the couples’ faces) performed dramatically better (i.e. received more leads at a lower cost per conversion) than the image on the right. 

3. Improve your relevance score

4. Test different variations

5. Retarget, retarget, retarget

6. Prevent ad fatigue