6 Advertising Mistakes to Avoid in the World of Performance Marketing- Part 1 Facebook Ads

In the World of Marketing, especially in the Digital Marketing Ecosystem, the dynamics of advertising have been changing very rapidly in the last 3 years. Since adverts play a pivotal role in businesses and impact hundreds of thousands of dollars for companies, here’s a listicle of expensive mistakes to avoid when advertising digitally. We have divided the listicle into 3 parts considering 3 major advertising platforms viz Facebook, Google and Apple Search Ads. The first part is about 6 mistakes particularly for the most common advertising platform, Facebook.

1. Insufficient Ad Budget

No matter what historical data you have and what platform you choose to advertise on, you need some budget to try out and figure out the winning ad set(and kill the non performing ones).

When your ad budget is too low, you’re not going to get enough data, i.e., the sample size will be too small. Therefore, the information you get is not enough to draw any conclusions on the audience, ad placement, or the product.

On the contrary, if you set the budget too high, you end up burning a lot of money/budget which isn’t ideal, either.

The question is how do you balance the optimum budget? 

The key to this doubt is in "testing". 

You can get started with a campaign and choose a budget of about $25(or a daily budget of $5) – this will be your test. Run the campaign for some days, for as long as it’s necessary to have a big enough sample size depending on your product and niche.

You can play around with daily budgets in your test campaign and try to identify what works and what doesn’t.

2. Avoiding Campaign Budget Optimization(CBO)

Before discussing CBO, let’s understand ASBO or Ad Set Budget Optimization which is when you set the budget at an ad set level. Each ad set can have a different budget. 

While in CBO, you set a budget on a campaign level, then Facebook allocates and optimizes the spend. Instead of setting individual ad set budgets, you set one overarching campaign budget. This budget has flexibility to spend more on ad sets with the best opportunities, and less on underperforming ad sets.

In ASBO, it might be possible that there’s an ad set that works really well but because of ASBO, it can’t spend more that day. Or that you’re wasting your budget on an ad set that’s not producing good results. 

But if you choose CBO, Facebook decides for you – it lets the algorithm allocate the budget. So if a particular ad set is performing well, the algorithm will put more money towards that ad set. 

This also allows you to see where the money was spent and optimize your campaign according to that. 

3. Skewed Understanding/Lack of Clarity about your KPI/Goals/Objective

Picture Source: One Strategy HQ

Different companies may have different KPIs/Objectives with their ads. But one thing is clear and common. Everybody needs ROI. Without defining KPIs, it’s impossible to measure the performance of your ad campaigns. 

You need to have a clear goal as well as indicators of progress toward that goal. It will help you know what to look for and what to strive for. 

At Turnkeyz, we categorize client KPIs in

CPA(Cost per Acquisition)- In case you’re running digital acquisition/purchase/conversion ads, CPA is what matters. This can be calculated by your total ad spend divided by the number of purchases.

ROAS(Return on Ad Spend)- If you’re driving a funnel that involves multiple steps of purchases such as driving webinar registrations followed by a purchase in a webinar, we define it more broadly as the return on ad spend. You can calculate this by dividing the total purchase value and the total ad spend.

CPL(Cost Per Lead Generated)- In businesses where the buying process is more complex and lengthy, especially B2B organizations, we focus more towards generating leads instead of conversions. 

CPI(Cost Per Install)- For our customers that want to promote their app and want actions like “in app purchases” after someone installs their app, Cost per install becomes an important factor.

4. Targeting the Wrong Audience 

The key to the right ad strategy on facebook depends upon the right audience and at Turnkeyz, we deliver the right ads to the right clients at the right time.

On facebook, you broadly have 3 categories of audiences viz

Core Audiences

Define an audience based on criteria such as age, interests, geography and more factors.

Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences allow you to connect with people who have already shown interest in your business, whether they're loyal customers or people who have used your app or visited your website. You can use Contact Lists, Website Visitors or App Users to create an audience.

Lookalike Audiences

Picture Source- Xola Blog

Lookalike Audiences are a fast and effective way to connect with people who are likely to respond to your ads. All you need to do is create a source audience of people you know. Your ads will then reach people with common interests and traits.

5. Missing out on advanced pixel settings/deep links/sdk

The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. So if your goal is to direct customers to a landing page, and you want them to take actions, make sure you define these actions as clearly as possible. You can read more about installing a pixel here.

Picture Source: Neil Patel

A deep link is a link that goes not only to your app, but to a specific piece of content within your app. With deep linking, you send people directly to information they are interested in when they open your app for the first time.

Consider the ad above. Amazon is directing you to buy the Painting Art Set(to relevant audiences of course). 

By using deep linking in your app ads, you are removing extra steps between clicking the ad and getting to the content that made someone want to open your app. This provides a more seamless customer experience. Without deep links, people will have to search through your app for the content they are looking for, and you risk them losing interest.

6. Not Utilizing Retargeting Ads(Especially Dynamic Retargeting)

Facebook retargeting is the process of finding people who've visited your website or browsed your app and then using their data to find them and remind them of what they had forgotten. You run advertising campaigns to target those people and convince them to head back to your website/app/product.

With retargeting for dynamic ads, you can remind people about the products they've browsed and/or purchased on your website, mobile app, Marketplace, and Instagram Shopping. When you use dynamic ads, people may automatically see the products or similar products to what they saw previously.

Hope you liked this content and will be more careful while advertising next time. In the next part of this Listicle, we will be talking about Google Ads.