Facebook advertising is a part of every online business owner’s life. As appealing as setting up your own advertising campaigns to grow your business is, not doing it correctly can only cost you wasted advertising dollars.
We do manage multiple Facebook Business Accounts through Boostify. While onboarding new businesses, we go over their Facebook account structure and make sure every business on our platform can get the best out of using our tool. While doing that, we came across some major mistakes that prevent business owners from running efficient and profitable Facebook ads.
If you’re running Facebook ads, make sure you’re not making the same mistakes. Here is a list to make sure your account is set up for success.
1- Not Setting Prospect (Acquisition), Retargeting & Remarketing (Retention) Separately
As a business owner, you need to know the cost of acquiring a first-time buyer. That is a very important metric for your future growth. You need to make sure you’re not targeting your current customers with your Acquisition (prospect) ads. We have spent running digital ads for pioneer direct-to-consumer brands through our agency, and this is how we - and you should - structure your account to make sure you’re building a customer journey, and also calculating the cost of acquisition for each step of that journey.
When building your ad account for the first time, make sure you start with at least two campaigns: one for Acquisition and one for Retargeting. If you own a business that’s been selling online for a while, you can add a Retention campaign to increase repeat purchases.
Your Acquisition campaign will only target people who haven’t yet been to your site or purchased from you. Your Retargeting campaign will only target people who already have been to your site, and your Retention campaign should only target previous customers.
2- Not excluding customers & site visitors from Acquisition campaigns
For the account structure above to work properly, while setting your ad sets in under your Acquisition campaign, you should exclude all site visitors & previous buyers.
Same as above, you need to exclude your previous buyers from your Retargeting campaigns to make sure you’re not targeting buyers with your Retargeting ads. This is extremely important to calculate your first purchase CPA vs. repeat purchase CPA.
3- Not setting a proper budget for each ad set
This step is crucial for a healthy Facebook account structure. If you’re already running ads on Facebook, you might have heard about the “Learning Phase." Once you set your ad sets, the learning phase will start. During this phase, Facebook will try to determine the CPA for your ad set. If Facebook cannot determine that CPA, your ad set will run as “Learning Limited." That is not a phase to spend your money. Most of the time, when your ads are running with Learning Limited, your CPAs are higher than they should be.
In order to exit the Learning Phase, your ad sets need to acquire 50 conversions within seven days. This means, if your ad set CPA is $10, your 7-day budget should not be lower than $500 - thus, you need a daily ad set budget of around $70. If you do not have a high budget to pass that phase, it’s better to consolidate your ad sets to make sure per ad set budget is high enough to get conversions.
4- Adding too many ads under each ad set
As a rule of thumb, it is never a good idea to add more than four assets under each ad set, no matter what your daily ad set budgets are. As ads start to convert or show low performance, you can pause the low-performing assets and new creatives to test out side by side. The more ads you have, the longer it could take for your ad sets to convert & determine the CPA.
5- Not testing creatives & audiences
Creative testing is one of the most important aspects of advertising on Facebook. Given we more or less have 3 seconds to grab the attention of social media users, your creatives - especially the initial 2-3 seconds - are crucial to increase your view rate, click-through rate and thus reduce your CPCs.
There’s another thing that’s just as important as testing out different creatives. And that is testing out different audiences. Throughout our long years of advertising on Facebook, one of the most important things we’ve learned is to target different audiences that match the different aspects of your product or service and to use assets that speak to that audiences differently. Constantly testing audiences is just as important as testing creatives.
Bonus: Not checking your campaigns as often as you should
Facebook advertising is not easy. There are too many moving pieces. If you don’t pay attention, you can spend your not-so-easily earned dollars on ads that are not profitable or beneficial to your business.
An ad CPA that was very low one day can go extremely high on another. If you don’t take action quick enough, you might run through your full ad set budget with assets that do not convert. New audience targeting might work or might not work. You need to know all the tests you’re running, so you can take action before your account becomes inefficient and you lose money and hope.
That is the reason why we built Boostify, to allow advertisers of all sizes to take a break from living on their ad account, and focus on other aspects of their businesses.
Boostify runs around the clock optimizations from the latest data-backed technology. With the use of AI, our software eliminates human error and scale your campaigns in real-time.
