7 Reasons Why Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Profitable

By Author: iDigitize Infotech LLP
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Are your Facebook Ad campaigns not giving you desired results? Are you accidentally making mistakes eating away your marketing budget? Are your ads helping Facebook to grow or your business to grow? In this blog, all your queries will be answered. Here, we shall throw light on the most common errors made with Facebook ads and how to fix them.

1. Flooding Multiple Interests In A Single Facebook Ad Set:
Ever had a Facebook ad that delivered amazing results for a few days and then stopped working soon? Or created a campaign that worked really well but you have no clue how to repeat it? These kinds of issues come up while you’re in the creation phase of a Facebook ad campaign.
To start with, most of the social media marketing experts would run a Facebook ad to new audiences, spend time researching relevant target audiences sets they would like to tap. The error lies here, they then run a set of advertisement campaigns including all the set of target audiences, all in one. Utilizing this fast track approach makes it difficult to analyze which specific interest/target audience set gave you optimal results.

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Facebook Ads - Audience setting
Let’s Fix It:
a. We recommend you come up with a list of all of the interests you want to target and group the interests into several sub-categories.
b. Then create multiple advertisement posts and target each one of them to a single group of interests.
c. Following this, you’ll know which audience category works best for your brand. You will also gain insights like how large each audience catagory is, and how to find similar interest groups.

2. Too Many Facebook Ad Campaigns With Too Little Budget:
One mistake most marketing managers do is, trying to fit things within budgets forcefully. They overdo the campaign with minimum costs involved. This means you run too many campaigns, too many ad sets, and too many graphic posts. This approach to Facebook ads leads to chaos. It would lack efficiency, your costs will get higher eventually which would conclude into poor results to your ad campaign.

Managing Facebook Ads Budgets
Let’s Fix It:
a. Collate audiences into ad sets with larger budgets. This allows you to feed Facebook more data, which gets you the desired CPA(Cost per action) rapidly, and then scale up effectively.
b. Combine the lookalike audience: Consolidate the lookalike people who landed on your sales page in the last 30 days.
c. Similarly, place all your digital marketing people, small business owners, and Facebook page Admin audiences into one combined ad set. This shall ensure more reach to the Facebook ad campaign.

3. Selecting the Wrong Facebook Campaign Objective:
Most managers are under this misconception that Facebook ads will enable them to sell their services and brand products too quickly. This objective routes all your ad campaign designs to cold sell your products or services. This also makes your current followers withdraw their interest from your social media pages as they consider it to be a sales page.

Setting the Right Objective - Facebook Ads
Let’s Fix It:
a. This rapid results approach is an inappropriate method of social media marketing as it breaches the golden rule of social media advertising: You must give before you ask.
b. As a social media marketing expert you need to provide something of value to your targeted audience well in advance i.e. before selling.
c. This is a great medium to start valuable conversations which will in turn help you build relationships with your audience. Gradually, these strong relationship bonds will ensure conversions.

4. Running Facebook Ads With No Follow-up Management:
Once your ad campaign is active most managers go into their casual shell. This brings us to the fourth error marketing managers make, is not managing campaigns after they’re active. Try this, set up a campaign and let it run on its own. It is sure to limit the effectiveness over time due to Facebook ad fatigue.

Facebook Ads - Follow up Management
Let’s Fix It:
a. The key to developing efficient Facebook ad campaigns is to analyze your campaigns on an on-going basis. This will allow you to invest in an effective campaign and disinvest from a poorly performing campaign. You can also play around with your target audience if you sense poor traction from a certain target audience set.
b. Look at your Return on Ad Spend and the cost, relevance, frequency, and CPM metrics and then make adjustments to ad creative and copy for your desired results.

5. Building New Facebook Ads Instead Of Managing Previous Successful Ads:
In the race for unique, new and fresh advertisement campaigns we miss out on feeding the advertisement campaigns that were the greatest hit. Most social media marketing managers have the publisher mindset, where they feel the need to create a steady stream of content. They have a one-track mind, X number of posts per day and Y number of ads per day. But we fail to realize that we are not a newspaper that has to publish fresh news each day.

Nurture old profitable Ads - Facebook
Let’s Fix It:
a. Instead of designing more fresh campaigns, we recommend you put more money into your proven winners. We at iDigitize(https://idigitize.co/) continue to feed campaigns who have been proven winners for years. Rather than putting 500 bucks on each new campaign, go back to analyze and adjust winners before they stop working for your brand.
b. Remarketing has been an effective strategy in social media marketing, that even when done poorly, it often yields fantastic results. But if you’re remarketing the same graphic, targeting the same audience, you’re saying the same thing over and over again. This will do less good. We suggest you change that creative and say something specifically relevant to the users in that target audience bucket.

6. High Dependency On Automatic Placement For Facebook Ads:
This mistake has its own pros and cons. It definitely speeds up the creation of your Facebook ad but on the other hand can eat up your budget by showing the advertisement to the non-relevant audience set. That said, the placement of your ad directly influences the cost and performance of your ad sets and campaigns. In this way, Audience Network placements can chomp through your ad budgets without offering many rewards.
To illustrate, Facebook’s Audience Network placement (often the cheapest of placements) can be great for reach, but it will also eat through your budget if you’re not careful. How? If your Audience Network placement is performing well and reaching high numbers of people, Facebook will automatically push more budget into that placement because it’s cheap.

Facebook Ads Campaign - Manual Placements
Let’s Fix It:
a. Did you know, Facebook ad placements can be edited? This button will be active if you deselect Audience Network. This will allow you to control your spending. If you realize that your budget is underspending, you can always get back to enabling Automatic Placement.

7. Creating Facebook Ads Without Knowing Overall Campaign Settings:
Lastly, we have realized that most business owners run their Facebook ads without understanding the implications of the settings they choose while boosting posts. A mistake done here will have several bad implications like wasted budgets, bad ad placement and wrong audience targeting. Did you know? Opting for Automatic Placements will place your ads not only on Facebook but also on Instagram and across the Audience Network (sites off of Facebook).

Know Facebook Ad functionalities before starting
Let’s Fix It:
a. Facebook ads have proven to work wonders for a wide variety of businesses. Successful results are highly dependent on doing the right testing and proper ad setup.

b. If you aren’t familiar with Facebook ad set-up settings, you must consider going through an online tutorial or taking up personal training for yourself or someone on your team. This shall ensure you don’t waste money and move away from the myth that Facebook ads don’t work.

Nowadays, every business is prioritizing social media marketing(https://idigitize.co/why-social-media-marketing/) and you as a marketing manager need to know how to get it right. If you overlook the above-mentioned parameters while managing Facebook ad sets, your ad campaign is sure to give you poor results.