Stop Making These 10 Facebook Ad Mistakes!

Over the last few years, myself and my team have spent tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars at this point, on Facebook ads. And there are quite a few common mistakes that brands and advertisers make when they're running ads on Facebook that I'm going to cover in today's video. Two words: entrepreneurship. This video will hopefully help you improve your ad buying game a little bit and potentially identify some things that you might be doing currently that you should probably avoid doing. Let me jump straight in. You know what I like a lot more than materialistic things? Knowledge. So the first mistake we see people making is they don't optimize for the lowest step in the funnel or the lowest funnel objective. When you run any sort of advertising campaign, there is an end goal you have in mind. There is a main campaign objective. And what lots of beginners do is they do not choose in the campaign settings within Facebook. They do not select the correct conversion objective. Investments, diversified portfolio, words. If I run an e-commerce brand and I'm selling products online, the conversion objective that I should be optimizing for is most likely purchases. If I wanted more leads for my local dentist practice, then I would be running a lead gen campaign on Facebook. In most cases, the last thing that you want to do is have a campaign objective that doesn't match or doesn't correspond with your end goal, the end goal of the ad itself. In lots of cases, beginners will run traffic campaigns or video views or landing page views, and you'll get cheap CPMs, you'll get cheap clicks. The ads will look like they're performing quite well, but they won't usually get very many purchases. And it's because you're telling Facebook that you want people that are likely to click on a video or watch a video rather than actually purchase something from a video or sign up through a lead form. For example, it's not called living with your parents if you pay them rent. Now, what I just said is almost always true. There are some cases where it makes sense to run a different objective for your campaign or for your general advertising strategy. Some people will run an add to cart and initiate checkout objective and then a purchase objective just to warm up the pixel data. So they'll start with add to carts till they can get some more volume with the add to carts, and then they'll move on to initiate checkouts, then they'll move on to purchase. Purchases. And this does vary brand to brand. In some cases it does make sense to do that and it's going to be more profitable and higher returning. But in most cases it makes sense and you should be optimizing for your lowest funnel objective. Who has done it better than me? Nobody. To conclude that though, if you are a beginner, you should be optimizing for the lowest funnel objective. So if it's purchases, it's purchases. If it's leads, it's leads, and so on and so forth. The second mistake people tend to make, and this tends to be dropshippers making this mistake versus people that are actually trying to build a real e-commerce brand— I'm an entrepreneur— but it's not using original content. When you are running ads and you are posting content in general, you should not be stealing content from other people. A, it's against the rules or the laws in most cases. Usually content is copyrighted or owned or trademarked by the person that's created it, and stealing their content isn't allowed. Stay focused. But B, you are then under the risk of getting DMCA'd, which is essentially another brand taking you down because you're stealing their content, or you're at risk of getting shadowbanned or blocked by the algorithm or have higher advertising costs. Though now with the DMCA, you'll know because you'll get contacted and if you're running on Shopify or another platform, you're— but with something like a shadow ban or higher advertising costs or just worse results from the algorithm, you won't be explicitly told by Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever platform you're running ads on. You will just get worse results. Oh, nothing from Shark Tank still. Why am I not on there? My idea is amazing. Social media for dogs. And that's because the social media platforms survive and exist because of original content. Their users want to see original content every single day. You don't want to see the same meme every single day when you're scrolling through your feeds. You want to see new content. So the second people start taking content that's already been posted, the algorithms are typically able to detect that and they deprioritize that content because it creates a less enjoyable user experience and it means that people spend less time on the social media platform, which means they can show less ads and make less money. So at the end of the day, it comes down to how much money can you make Facebook and Instagram? And if you're stealing content, they'll see you as a lower quality advertiser and they'll be less likely to give you good advertising costs and put you in front of the people that spend lots of money on Facebook because they want to keep those people really happy. In conclusion, do not use someone else's content. Focus on creating your own content and your own ads from scratch. Shopping for a Rolls-Royce with a $600 beanie. The third mistake that people make, and this is definitely one that could be debated by more experienced advertisers, but the third mistake is not using exclusions in your advertising or targeting at all. Now, when you're showing ads to a group of users, it usually makes sense to exclude a certain amount of people. An easy example is if I was selling Pete Davidson merch and I was targeting Pete Davidson fans, but I also knew that Kanye fans probably didn't want to buy the merch and dislike Pete Davidson, that it would make sense for me to exclude Kanye fans. That's not necessarily the best example, but I hope it helps you understand how you might use exclusions. There are plenty of videos on YouTube explaining how to use exclusions with much better examples than the ones that I could just come up with on the spot there. Now, the fourth mistake that people commonly make is they run the same ads on their top of funnel as well as their retargeting. Now, when you're running top of funnel ads to complete strangers, you typically have a slightly different strategy than the one that you're running to people that have already visited your website or already added something to cart, or maybe are even already a customer. And that's because people at the top of funnel, people that have never heard about your brand or product before, usually need some more education than somebody that has already gone through your website and added something to cart. With retargeting, people are typically just facing objections. Maybe the shipping times are too long or the shipping cost is too high. Or if I was selling bedsheets, maybe they don't know the exact sizes and don't know how to figure out if it's going to fit on their bed or not. And that's an objection that you would solve within the retargeting ads. But making ads for your top of funnel that talk about sheet sizing and how to measure the sheets correctly probably wouldn't make very much sense. As cold ads, you are more than welcome to try that, but on your cold side of things, it wouldn't make that much sense. It would be something that you would want to run with retargeting. When you're running ads for the first time or you're new to running ads or you're running ads in general, you should have 2 separate campaigns or 2 separate strategies for targeting people that are cold customers that have never bought anything from you before, or cold prospective customers versus warmer audiences, which are people that have already interacted with your brand in some way. The 5th mistake I see lots of people making, including lots of the e-commerce gurus out there, is not following Facebook policies. Now Facebook has a ton of policies and it takes a while to learn them, but lots of brands get shut down on Facebook just simply because they have keywords on their website or they're using practices that Facebook doesn't allow. Now, when you hear people talking about getting shut down and how Facebook's always banning people, that is typically not the case. In the several years of, of working with Facebook ads, being a Facebook partner and working with dozens and dozens of brands on their ad accounts, we've only ever seen, I think, one business manager go down and two ad accounts go down for reasons that didn't seem to make sense. If someone's telling you that Facebook bans are common and happen all the time, it's likely because they're violating a lot of policies, which can be a whole host of things. Whatever it may be, it's usually because they're violating policies. So you can go on to Facebook's policies on Facebook's website. You can study and learn the policies. And remember that the policies don't just apply to the ads and the copy that you're running on Facebook, but they also apply to your website and your landing page as well. Facebook is looking at the whole funnel. And when you launch an ad on Facebook, Facebook sends between 30 to 50 bots bots onto your website to scan all of the content, the, the visual content, the creative content, the copy, the functionality of the website, because they block certain types of pop-ups and how many pop-ups you can have. So make sure that you learn Facebook policies, and if you do face, uh, rejected ads, go and study the policy that caused the ad to be rejected in the first place. Because if you have too many rejected ads, it will lead to an ad account shutdown, which can eventually lead to a business manager shutdown and a Facebook account permanent restriction as well. You can be permanently restricted from advertising for the rest of your life. The second thing to talk about is placements and incorrect placements. Beginners typically place things incorrectly and this causes lower ad returns. So when you're creating an advertising campaign, keep in mind that ad placement is just as important as the ad creation itself. No matter how good your ads are, if they're not placed correctly, they will not perform. And what I mean by placements is ads designed for stories should be posted on stories only. They should not be running on feed, on newsfeed, and on banners and on audience network. They should be running on Instagram and Facebook stories only. The same applies to a feed ad running on story placements. Feed ads, ads that are square or slightly vertical, should be running on feed only. And in some cases it makes sense to run them on stories. In some cases they perform really well on stories. So that's something that you can test, but typically you want your feed ads to be running on the feed and you want your story ads to be running stories only. The seventh is not checking links. This is the shortest and most simple out of all of the mistakes, but you'll be surprised at how many people look over this and just miss it completely. Always make sure to check your entire funnel before launching an ad or a campaign. All of the links that you're trying to send traffic to should be functional. Make sure that your website is fully functional and working. It's live and ready, and don't add any links to sites or landing pages that aren't working. One of the fastest ways to get banned on Facebook is to run an ad to a link that's either non-existent or not fully functional. So avoid that at all costs. Now that's a major key alert. The 8th and one of the biggest mistakes people make surrounds tracking. Now tracking and attribution is a complicated topic. It takes a while to understand fully. So if you're a beginner, don't expect to learn exactly how attribution and view windows and click windows work overnight, but there are a couple of basics that I'll go over that you should have set up. First and foremost, make sure that your Facebook pixels are firing correctly. You can use Facebook Pixel Helper to double check that your, your pixel is actually firing and tracking events correctly. But based on your website or based on wherever you're sending traffic to, you should have a few different types of events that people would take on the site. For instance, with e-commerce, popular events are landing page views, view contents, which is like a product page view or a landing page view, add to carts, initiate checkouts, and purchases. On top of having events set up correctly and tracking, you should have Conversions API turned on and you should have aggregated events turned on with the funnel objectives ranked by priority. So if I was selling a product on an e-commerce store at the top of my aggregated events selection, I would have purchases as the top event and then I would have initiate checkout then I would have add to cart and I would go lower and lower down the funnel. Now, the way that we set it up for most businesses at Flax is we start with purchases, we use value optimization, and we suggest using value optimization. And we actually like to use, I believe, 6 value points under value optimization. And then we just have initiate checkout and add to cart. But you rank it in order of priority and in kind of like a reverse funnel order. So if your purchases is the bottom of the funnel, if that's the main funnel objective, when you're running the ads. You flip the funnel on its head, and that's how you set up your aggregated events. The last and 9th mistake that people typically make is they set budgets too low or they don't test correctly. You should always be meaningful with how you test. You shouldn't just run ads for the sake of running ads. You should run ads with a specific goal and target in mind. If I'm going to spend $100, how much money do I want to make? How many orders do I want to get? And what do I want to spend per order. That's just a rough guideline. Now, the more money that you spend, the faster you get answers. So if I want to run a $100 test, I could spend $100 a day or I could spend $10 a day over 10 days. Now, we suggest spending more budget in shorter timeframes as you get data sooner. So you can spend your entire life testing or you can get that testing done in shorter timeframes and figure out what works best and actually scale your winners or your your top performers. I don't really recommend starting with less than $50 a day. It will take a while to test. You might as well go and try to build up some more capital by running some more organic marketing or figuring out how to get sales through other means and then coming back to advertising. But once you have a decent budget and a proper hypothesis when you're testing, you'll see much, much better results. If you're looking for more guidance with Facebook and you run an e-commerce brand doing at least $25,000 a month, feel free to book book in a call with me in the description below. If you're not quite at $25,000 a month yet, feel free to message me on social media platforms, ask questions, leave comments on this video for questions, suggest videos that you would like me to make. And other than that, subscribe to me. Money— I don't call it money anymore. I call it fuel units. You must have enough fuel units.