7 Tips to Avoid Failing at Facebook Ads

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How to Make sure your Facebook Ads make you Money instead of costing you money.

Are you wondering whether or not your Facebook ads are getting you the ROI they should? Having run 1000s of ads in many different verticals I’ve seen it done right and really, really wrong. I’ve personally made a lot of mistakes so I want to help others as I didn’t have someone to show me where I could have improved my marketing skillset.

Whether you’re running the marketing yourself, have an agency, or are the owner of the business and you’re just trying to understand your marketing better, the 7 points below should help you to see where things could go wrong.

  1. Have there been no new Facebook ads in 3 weeks? If not then at some point soon your campaigns will flop and flop hard. No matter how successful your campaign/ad is, you should always be testing new images or audiences. If you keep running the exact same ad for a long time it’ll eventually fail. That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep a winner running, it just means you need to continually test so you have your next winner lined up when one starts to die off.
  2. You’ve got no video ads – Video ads are the future of lead generation. Customers are more likely to engage, and when they engage, they’ll be there longer. Whether this is on Facebook or during retargeting, you should be using videos to engage your audience.
  3. You don’t know or track your metrics. This isn’t to say metrics like impressions but rather metrics that matter like revenue generated by leads that your campaign has generated or revenue directly attributable to your campaign. If this information isn’t readily available then that’s a giant red flag.
  4. Your metrics have been down-trending for 6 weeks or longer without anything turning around. Often times in marketing you’ll need to test and test until you find a winning campaign. Those campaigns have a shelf-life that will expire. Some will expire in a few days, others last months, and a very few can last years but no matter how long they last at some point they’ll become less effective. At that point, it’s time to kill it off and move on to the next one. 
  5. Marketing has less than a 10 to 1 ROI. This means that if you’re spending 10k in advertising/marketing and you’re not getting 100k back in customer lifetime value then you’re overspending or you don’t have a full product suite to take advantage of the marketing that is generating leads for you. Your minimum should be a 4 to 1 ROI on your marketing. Really, anything below that, except for a few niches, will be unviable. Ask your marketing team or agency what the ROI on their marketing is right now.
  6. You don’t have custom audiences and there’s no retargeting occurring. Custom audiences are groups of people that have engaged with your brand in some manner. These are people that may have hit your website, your landing pages, watched a video, etc. These audiences should be retargeted to either get them to watch another video or to opt-in to something. Facebook ads for retargeting are key to generating the best ROI possible. 
  7. Your campaigns are rated as below average on Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking and Conversion Rate Ranking. While you may fall to “below average” on some of these you’ll never want to be there. This is an indication that your offer, your audience or your pitch is off.