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As digital marketers, we have had the opportunity to audit and review countless ad accounts for a variety of businesses. Through this experience, We’ve found a few common mistakes that could be stopping your ads performing at their best. In this article, I’ll be sharing with you the top 5 mistakes that we see in Facebook ad accounts and how you can avoid making them in your own campaigns. By learning from these common pitfalls, you can save time, money, and frustration while maximising your ad spend and improving your results. So let’s get started!

Over complicated ad account

• Too many campaigns or ad sets per budget
• Multiple top of funnel or retargeting campaigns (for a small budget)
• Launching lots of new ad sets, and only allowing them to run for a small period of time

Recommendation:

• Reduce the number of campaigns or ad sets that you have live, allowing attributed events to be located to a small number of assets (rather than attributed events being spread too thin)
• If launching new ad sets does not result in improved performance, then continuing to launch new ad sets will not improve account efficiency, in fact it will make it worse. A new creative strategy is the key to improving performance at this stage.

Over spending on retargeting

• Retargeting should give you the best CPA and ROAS, however this doesn’t mean you should increase spend here necessarily.
• Many ad accounts we audit over invest in retargeting, thus making this part of the funnel less efficient.
• How to know if you’re over spending on retargeting:
  • A high frequency, we recommend aiming for a frequency of 3 over 7 days, or less. Unless of course it is during a marketing campaign where you want to over serve ads to your retargeting customers (a new product launch or sale period)
  • A majority of purchases are view-through, not click-through. 

Recommendation:

• Adjust budgets to 80% top of funnel (prospecting) and 20% retargeting. 

Optimising based on view-through conversions

• If are you over spending on retargeting, or you have a large activity of marketing happening off-Facebook, then it’s possible you are at risk of having a large majority of view-through conversions. While view-through conversions are useful, it can be a mistake to optimise your campaigns and ads using view-through, because they are potentially not incremental sales being driven by your ads.
•  If your campaigns or ads aren’t actually driving sales (click-through sales) and you increase spend, based on a good CPA / ROAS (based on a majority of view-through sales) this means you are increasing investment into marketing which is not driving incremental sales.

Recommendation:

• Monitor your split between view and click through conversions, ideally you want at least 80% of sales to be click-through.
• Use 7 day click attribution window only (remove the ability for view-through conversions to be attributed to your ads.)

Poor Creative Strategy

• Over focusing on one creative concept:
  • Hook or key message
  • Pain point or solution
  • Audience messaging
  • Creative format
• Testing small adjustments between new ads
• Poor creative testing process:
  • Testing too many variables in one new creative
• Not testing dynamic formats (Dynamic Creative Testing or Catalogue ads)
• Not providing assets in a variety of formats such as Stories or Reels

Recommendation:

• Invest time, budget and resources into your creative strategy, it will be the element that takes your account (and likely your brand) to the next level. However it won’t happen if the foundations of your account are faulty (due to the other 4 issues in this thread).

Poor Budget Management

• Not reducing spend when performance declines
• Not increasing spend against campaigns or ads showing opportunity
• Spreading budget too thin between lots of campaigns and audiences
• Only using Ad Set Budget Optimisation, and not testing / using Campaign Budget Optimisation

Recommendation:

• Set a budget, KPI and work towards hitting it, account efficiency (or inefficiency) can be what makes or breaks your ad account. 
• Cashflow is king!
• We’ve never had an audit request which has started with the client saying “our account is making us too much money”… there’s a reason for this.

Hopefully now you can go away and spruce up your facebook ad accounts, save a bit of money and time and get the most out of your facebook ads. 

Need some support? At Hello Earth Agency, we specialise in helping businesses navigate the complex world of digital marketing, including Facebook advertising. With our team of experienced professionals, we can help you overcome these mistakes and thrive in your ad efforts.

Our team will work with you to audit your ad accounts, identify any issues or opportunities for improvement, and implement strategies to ensure that your campaigns are set up for success. We also offer ongoing support and guidance to help you continue to optimise and grow your ad campaigns over time.

Don’t let common mistakes hold you back from reaching your advertising goals. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you overcome these challenges and thrive in the world of Facebook advertising.