Facebook ads can have a tremendously-positive impact on your small business. From increasing brand awareness and the number of subscribers to your email list, to generating website traffic, to driving conversions and sales, Facebook ads are an incredibly powerful online marketing tool. It’s also incredibly easy to misuse Facebook ads, ending up in frustration that you aren’t seeing the results from your ads that you hoped. We’ve previously discussed 3 of the most common Facebook ad mistakes. And in this blog post, we’re going to look at 4 more common Facebook ad mistakes small business owners make.

4 Facebook Ad Mistakes Small Business Owners Make

• Not setting up your Facebook Pixel The Facebook pixel is a line of code that you generate for free inside your ads account. You then take that code and paste it onto your website. Once your pixel is on your website, you can start tracking and accumulating people who visited your website while logged into Facebook. Those tracked website visitors are then added to one or more custom audiences. As those audiences grow, you can turn around and advertise to those people who have already been to your site. Advertising to a warm audience instead of a cold audience tends to be more effective and less expensive. Plus, the pixel is required if you want to track specific website events or conversion events. More about setting up your Facebook pixel here.
• Not setting up – and then not using – custom audiences Creating and installing your pixel isn’t enough…don’t forget to set up the audiences you can create from that pixel traffic! There are limitless possibilities here, but a few examples would be all website visitors, visitors to certain pages or blog posts on your site, and visitors who landed on your Add to Cart page but never reached your Order Confirmation page. Also, you can create an audience of people who watched your Facebook videos, engaged with your Facebook Page, and are on your email list. Advertising with custom audiences will beat out cold audiences almost every time.
• Changing more than 1 thing when split-testing ads Which audience, copy, and image are working best for you? The only way to know *what* part of your ad is making the difference in performance is to change only 1 element of your ad each time. So, use the same ad copy and ad image, but different targeting. Or use the same targeting and copy, but different images. Or use the same images and targeting, but different copy. If you run 2 ads as a split test and have only the same ad copy, you have no way of knowing if it’s the audience/targeting or media (or some combo of the two) that is the cause for the ad performance differences.
• Advertising with no strategy Let’s be realistic – one single ad is not going to revolutionize your business. Just like if you’re hearing of a business or product or service for the very first time, the odds of you purchasing straight-away are very, very low. However, if you are served a series of ads about a small business over a period of several weeks or months, you are given the chance to move through the sales process of Know, Like, and Trust, and then you’ll be ready to buy. That’s precisely why you need to lay out a strategy for a series of ads that all work toward the same end goal. Make sure those ads touch on different pain points of your customers and how you alleviate them, and different ways and reasons why your small business is awesome.

If you’d like a seasoned Facebook ads pro to audit your Facebook ads account and provide feedback as to what’s worked for you, what hasn’t, and how to improve, learn more about our Facebook ads audit service. And if you want some training on how run your own Facebook ads, we can help with that, too.