The global pandemic has accrued to all social networks a significant uplift in their relevance within companies’ marketing strategies, as their importance in consumers’ daily routines has become even stronger. No wonder that so many business are looking at Facebook Ads, lured by the prospect of accessing a vast audience.
However, we are seeing many businesses let down by poor campaign performances: let’s examine what you might do wrong.
The two types of mistakes that are nastily impacting on your Facebook Ads
According to Facebook Ads guru Tara Zirker, behind your campaign predicaments there can be both technical and creative mistakes.
Let’s break down what technical mistakes could be.
Maybe you set up your Facebook pixel in the wrong way. Or, you might have chosen an ad format which is not appropriate to your purpose. Also, your budget might not have been allocated properly. These are all too common technical mistakes, that can hinder your ads performance.
Another type of problems, more subtle and certainly more complex to fix, is connected to the so called creative-mistakes.
Creative mistakes usually concern the message, your texts and copy, and the visual assets (images or videos) of your ads. But they may also concern the message, the copy, the visual assets and the User experience of your destination page.
Trouble-shooting: how to fix technical and creative problems
As for technical mistakes, we recommend you to summoning a professional marketer or agency, to set-up and roll out your campaign, or to assist you in doing so.
DIY can be risky, given the number of components that you would need to take care of.
Among others, if there is one thing that can cause trouble in the future, that’s the wrong selection of the campaign objective, among those suggested by the platform.
If we want, for instance, that our user signs up to our newsletter or fills in a form on a destination page, the most appropriate and most effective selection would be a “conversion goal”. The more popular -and more approachable- “website traffic” objective would make the algorithm serve your ads to the wrong audience –i.e. people who are usually clicking on things on Facebook, but who never take action- with an obvious drawback for your campaign performances.
Setting up a campaign is not as easy as it can seem and you may want to rely on professionals with the right skills and expertise to help you out.
Now, how can you fix creative problems? First of all, we need to single out the elements in your communication which are failing to resonate with your audience.
Have a look at your unique CTR (Link Click-Through Rate), to get a sense of how many people click from your ad to your landing page.
If this metric is under 1% then you may have a problem (a healthy CTR scores 1% to 2%).
To understand what elements of your creativity need tweaking, arm yourself with great patience. It’s easier said than done, unfortunately, and it means you’ll likely have to A/B test a lot.
How to test your ads.
If you suspect your copy ad is the problem, you may try testing out between different text lengths:
- Short copy: a couple of sentences
- Medium copy: a couple of short paragraphs
- Long copy: more than two short paragraphs
There isn’t a blueprint for every situation: different ads can perform differently, regardless of their text length. The trick is finding which length best suits your ads and resonate with your target audience.
As for the visual, consider testing pure pictures with post-edited ones and dynamic visuals like gifs and videos.
The storytelling of your visuals is at least as important as the quality of their execution. Consider dishing up at least two different creative layouts, which will allow you to make split tests and compare their performances.
How about the headline? This can sound a little counterintuitive, but creative titles score far much worse than straightforward, ordinary titles. So, you’d better put your creative writing efforts in the bodycopy and make headlines concise, straight to the point and very descriptive.
Don’t forget to take into account how people talk and express themselves in real life: adopting users’ natural language is the best way to make your messages resonate with them. You can get hunches of your users’ semantics by looking at popular keywords on Google or at discussion threads in other online places, like customers’ feedback section on your website, for instance.
When the problem is your destination page
If your ads enjoy a decent CTR, but still your campaign is struggling to meet marketing objectives, you might want to have a closer look at your destination page to spot possible flaws, which can concern the user experience in its whole.
Many marketers are finding valuable to A/B test different versions of their landing pages and the good news is that tools for this purpose are plentiful on the web: take Google Optimizer, a free service that allows you to compare different landing pages and to track users behaviour on both, for as long as you run the split test.
Finally, there’s a last issue worth mentioning, which might not have nothing to do with your campaigns at all: your unrealistic expectations! Before rushing to conclusions and blame your ads, or the platform, for your poor performances, make sure that the goals you’ve set for yourself are measured upon your market and audience profile and that you are not demanding miracles from advertising. Remember that your ultimate question should always be: is my product really desirable?
Author: Silvia Podestà
Photo Credits: Pixabay
Social FAQ- Why are my Facebook Ads underperfoming?
Read the experts’ advice on the most common mistakes you can do with your Social media campaigns.
The global pandemic has accrued to all social networks a significant uplift in their relevance within companies’ marketing strategies, as their importance in consumers’ daily routines has become even stronger. No wonder that so many business are looking at Facebook Ads, lured by the prospect of accessing a vast audience.
However, we are seeing many businesses let down by poor campaign performances: let’s examine what you might do wrong.
The two types of mistakes that are nastily impacting on your Facebook Ads
According to Facebook Ads guru Tara Zirker, behind your campaign predicaments there can be both technical and creative mistakes.
Let’s break down what technical mistakes could be.
Maybe you set up your Facebook pixel in the wrong way. Or, you might have chosen an ad format which is not appropriate to your purpose. Also, your budget might not have been allocated properly. These are all too common technical mistakes, that can hinder your ads performance.
Another type of problems, more subtle and certainly more complex to fix, is connected to the so called creative-mistakes.
Creative mistakes usually concern the message, your texts and copy, and the visual assets (images or videos) of your ads. But they may also concern the message, the copy, the visual assets and the User experience of your destination page.
Trouble-shooting: how to fix technical and creative problems
As for technical mistakes, we recommend you to summoning a professional marketer or agency, to set-up and roll out your campaign, or to assist you in doing so.
DIY can be risky, given the number of components that you would need to take care of.
Among others, if there is one thing that can cause trouble in the future, that’s the wrong selection of the campaign objective, among those suggested by the platform.
If we want, for instance, that our user signs up to our newsletter or fills in a form on a destination page, the most appropriate and most effective selection would be a “conversion goal”. The more popular -and more approachable- “website traffic” objective would make the algorithm serve your ads to the wrong audience –i.e. people who are usually clicking on things on Facebook, but who never take action- with an obvious drawback for your campaign performances.
Setting up a campaign is not as easy as it can seem and you may want to rely on professionals with the right skills and expertise to help you out.
Now, how can you fix creative problems? First of all, we need to single out the elements in your communication which are failing to resonate with your audience.
Have a look at your unique CTR (Link Click-Through Rate), to get a sense of how many people click from your ad to your landing page.
If this metric is under 1% then you may have a problem (a healthy CTR scores 1% to 2%).
To understand what elements of your creativity need tweaking, arm yourself with great patience. It’s easier said than done, unfortunately, and it means you’ll likely have to A/B test a lot.
How to test your ads.
If you suspect your copy ad is the problem, you may try testing out between different text lengths:
There isn’t a blueprint for every situation: different ads can perform differently, regardless of their text length. The trick is finding which length best suits your ads and resonate with your target audience.
As for the visual, consider testing pure pictures with post-edited ones and dynamic visuals like gifs and videos.
The storytelling of your visuals is at least as important as the quality of their execution. Consider dishing up at least two different creative layouts, which will allow you to make split tests and compare their performances.
How about the headline? This can sound a little counterintuitive, but creative titles score far much worse than straightforward, ordinary titles. So, you’d better put your creative writing efforts in the bodycopy and make headlines concise, straight to the point and very descriptive.
Don’t forget to take into account how people talk and express themselves in real life: adopting users’ natural language is the best way to make your messages resonate with them. You can get hunches of your users’ semantics by looking at popular keywords on Google or at discussion threads in other online places, like customers’ feedback section on your website, for instance.
When the problem is your destination page
If your ads enjoy a decent CTR, but still your campaign is struggling to meet marketing objectives, you might want to have a closer look at your destination page to spot possible flaws, which can concern the user experience in its whole.
Many marketers are finding valuable to A/B test different versions of their landing pages and the good news is that tools for this purpose are plentiful on the web: take Google Optimizer, a free service that allows you to compare different landing pages and to track users behaviour on both, for as long as you run the split test.
Finally, there’s a last issue worth mentioning, which might not have nothing to do with your campaigns at all: your unrealistic expectations! Before rushing to conclusions and blame your ads, or the platform, for your poor performances, make sure that the goals you’ve set for yourself are measured upon your market and audience profile and that you are not demanding miracles from advertising. Remember that your ultimate question should always be: is my product really desirable?
Author: Silvia Podestà
Photo Credits: Pixabay
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