Facebook has attracted some controversy in recent years, from privacy breaches to malpractice with ad targeting. Some marketers believe that Facebook as an advertising platform is past its best and isn’t worth advertising on Facebook.
But the truth is that Facebook is still an important channel for digital marketers, whatever they feel about the company and the platform itself. Some small businesses would tell you that Facebook has been essential to their success and brand growth.
But on the other side of the coin, many businesses find that they struggle to bring in a return on ad spend and swear that Facebook Ads are a waste of money.
Like all things in life, you need to know how to do it properly to get the best out of something. And the truth is that Facebook is a marketing tool with incredible reach with more than 1.88 billion monthly active users worldwide. To understand why some brands struggle with Facebook Ads, you need to understand some of the pitfalls.
Why Do Facebook Ads Fail?
If your Facebook Ad didn’t do that well, chances are you’re making some mistakes that will cause you to waste money.
Not Getting the Audience Right
Understanding your core demographic is one of the most important steps in getting the most out of your Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads targeting can be precise, allowing you to target a comprehensive spectrum of people by area, interests, demographic and more.
Without identifying your relevant audience, your ads are dead in the water. You’d as well throw your marketing budget out of the window. For example, college students can’t buy a luxury sedan. No matter how good the ad copy is, they won’t buy it. Targeting a broad audience might cause the same trouble as well.
So to tackle this and get a worthy conversion, build a customer persona of your ideal customer. This will allow you to build better ads and make it worth advertising on Facebook.
Setting Unclear Objectives
Your goals and objectives for a Facebook ad are some of the most important things for your strategy. Primarily, goals help you map out a path leading to a specific result. They can also be used to measure your ad’s success and analyze it.
That being said, hitting publishes without knowing what you want to achieve can be a recipe for wasted money. Some of the most common objectives for Facebook ads are awareness, conversions, boosting your company profile, etc.
Setting clear objectives before production and publication is the best approach to get value and a better ROAS from your Facebook Ads.
Poor Ad Copy
Sometimes it’s best to leave it to the professionals, especially when it comes to written content and ad design.
Facebook is primarily a social platform, meaning that people are here for fun and engaging content. Great images, catchy titles, and shareable content are the best way to succeed. Things like the appearance, content, and titles are all important parts of your ad copy that need expert hands to make.
Read up on tips for a copy that makes your Facebook Ads convert better.
Not Connecting Your Ad to a Landing Page
A landing page is where you convert that potential lead into a customer. These landing pages are created to optimize conversions from ad visitors, so understand how these work, and you will find that you will get much more value from Facebook Ads.
Understand the Value of Organic Content
To make it worth advertising on Facebook, make sure to focus on the quality of your Facebook page too. And post regular information that is relevant and interesting to your audience. This focus on organic content can help build customer loyalty and brand awareness.
Not Testing & Analyzing your Ads
Testing and analyzing give you an idea of where you could improve your campaigns and understand where you’re going wrong.
So to see the future of your campaign, make sure to run A/B testing on your Facebook Ads to see what works best. This type of testing is an ongoing process, so regularly check your ads and understand how you can improve everything from images to text.
Types of Facebook Ads
Facebook allows you to run ads across several different platforms. Firstly, on Facebook itself, you can run ads in these formats:
- Single Image/Video
- Carousel
- Collection
Additionally, Facebook Ads can run on Instagram, the Audience Network (mostly banner ads in games and apps), and their Facebook Messenger app.
It’s wise to build ads specifically for each of these platforms rather than creating a general ad to run across all of them. This allows you to optimize each ad and make it more worth running ads on Facebook.
You’ll need to set a bidding model that can define the amount spent for every CTA with your budget set.
Here’s a table that shows these bidding models and their average cost:
| Bidding Model | Average Advertising Cost |
| Cost-Per-Click | $0.97 |
| Cost-per-Thousand-Impressions
(the number of views) |
$7.19 |
| Cost-Per-Like | $1.07 |
| Cost-Per-Action
(Download/purchase) |
$5.47 |
These averages will vary depending on your location, industry, keywords, and a few other factors.
Measuring Success of Your Facebook Ad
Measuring your Facebook Ad success is an important stage of your marketing campaign and crucial to getting the best value from your ads.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is probably one of the most important metrics, as it suggests the actual profit your ad made.
Generally, we divide the total number of conversions by interactions. These conversions are counted in terms of lead generation, sales, or any other CTA. On Facebook Ads, the average conversion rate across all industries is around 9%.
Return on Investment (ROI)
When we discuss paid marketing, ROI is the most common term thrown around.It suggests a rate of return you get depending upon your investment for the ad.
Understanding ROI allows you to see if the profit is good enough compared to the amount, time, and effort you spent on an ad. In short, this is where you can see if it’s worth advertising on Facebook.
Reach
Many brands launch a Facebook ad campaign to spread awareness about their brand. To measure this awareness, your reach can be the best metric. It shows the number of unique profiles your ad reached and how many profiles visit your page.
Frequency
Whenever you have a smaller target audience, Facebook will show your ad to the same people again. To stop the ad at the right time, you need to know how often your ad was delivered to the same person.
If a person sees your ad a few times and is not engaging, this might suggest your ad is either poorly designed or not well-targeted.
The Final Word
The truth is that Facebook Ads is a massive platform with a tremendous reach. Most businesses understand that advertising on Facebook Ads is worth at least part of their marketing budget. Make sure to focus on quality ads, and don’t neglect your organic content on Facebook too for the best chances of conversions.
Check out: Best Facebook Advertising Tools For 2021