4 mistakes to avoid when launching a Facebook Ads campaign

To equip yourself well before launching your campaign, Adintime offers you a quick reminder on the mistakes to avoid when using Facebook ads to promote your business.

1. Using an inappropriate objective
2. Targeting too narrow an audience
3. Using a message that's too long
4. Not installing the Facebook pixel

Using an inappropriate objective

The first thing to do when you create a Facebook advertising campaign is to choose the campaign objective. While they are quite explicit in their naming, it's important to know that they have common characteristics. These similarities can complicate the choice of the optimal objective for the result you want to achieve.

For example, Facebook ads offers you a choice between campaign objectives like "reach" and "brand awareness." With "reach," Facebook aims to reach as many people as possible, which is relatively close to seeking awareness. The difference when you choose the "brand awareness" objective is that Facebook will try to reach people most likely to remember your brand.

In both cases, you aim to maximize the display of your ads but for different purposes. So, they are two different objectives but with a very similar communication base. You'll find this type of subtlety among many Facebook objectives (website traffic, conversions, engagement, likes, etc.).

Targeting too narrow an audience

The targeting tool in Business Manager is incredibly precise: it allows you to advertise within a radius of up to 1 km around a specific point. It also lets you target people based on their interests, age, people with similar behavior to your customers, or visitors to your website. You have a considerable number of criteria that you can combine as you like. However, using too many criteria can be counterproductive.

The first reason is that the information provided by Facebook ads may not necessarily be accurate, as it's not always supplied by Facebook users. If you're targeting 18-34 year-olds, some of your potential customers may have entered incorrect birthdates. This can happen for most demographic data, which can often be incorrect or simply not provided (place of residence, profession, etc.).

Interests can also be problematic. Let's take the example of promoting a real estate program. You might be tempted to target people interested in real estate. However, many people interested in the real estate market use Facebook without necessarily being active on pages related to this domain.

So, you often have to be clever to find the right targeting that allows you to close as few doors as possible while remaining consistent.

Using a message that's too long

It might sound obvious, but it's an important reminder. Your video or visual always comes with a headline text. It's crucial to work on your headline to make it as impactful and concise as possible.

First, because the attention span you have is very short (less than 5 seconds to capture attention). Second, because a too long text is often truncated depending on where your ad is displayed. The desktop preview will often show your full text. But if you check mobile previews (which make up the vast majority of views), you'll be surprised to see your text cut off by a lovely "show more" button. So, you need to be able to cut and keep the essentials.

Not installing the Facebook pixel

We finish with campaign tracking. Facebook's Business Manager and digital marketing, in general, now allow you to evaluate return on investment through a multitude of statistics. These data are extremely valuable for advertisers. They allow you to understand your audience, your potential customers, even better. Without the Facebook pixel, advertising on Facebook ads is reduced to knowing how many people clicked on your ads and how much your campaign cost.

Installing the Facebook pixel on your landing page will allow you to harness this valuable data. Knowing who visits your site, what actions are taken, which Facebook ad is the most effective, gathering customer data... These are all possibilities that will make Facebook a highly effective channel for your digital marketing!

To assist you in launching your advertising campaigns on social networks, we can help you set them up according to your goals:

• Creating a social media advertising campaign with a brand awareness goal
• Creating a social media advertising campaign with a traffic goal
• Creating a social media advertising campaign with an acquisition goal
• Creating a social media advertising campaign with a conversion goal

>>> Also discover In-feed advertising format on TikTok