List of Most Common Facebook Targeting Mistakes: Every Newbie Should Avoid

Common Facebook Targeting Mistakes

Are your Facebook ads not getting you a single sale or it feels like you’re not seeing the right return on what you’re spending? Are Facebook ads not helping you to get better results?

Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the most robust advertising platforms for businesses of all sizes to reach their target customers. 93% of social marketers are using it due to the ease of use and variety of options and getting good results.

However, getting a good result out of your Facebook ad campaign can be difficult if you do some common Facebook targeting mistakes. As an entrepreneur you do-everything, but sometimes it can be frustrating when you don’t get good results. Especially the new marketers are the easy victim when trying their first advertising on Facebook.

Further, in this article, we’ll discover the most common Facebook ads mistakes and discuss how it happens.

Let’s take a glance before moving forward:

  • Not look at the main Elements of a Facebook Ad
  • Poor targeting
  • Lack of customer’s value proposition
  • Abandoning creating ads
  • Using ads for the only sales funnel
  • Ads that Fail to Draw Attention


#1 Mistake: Not looking at the main Elements of a Facebook Ad

There are three main steps to the creation of a Facebook ad which people ignored:

  • Defining objectives
  • Ad targeting and strategy
  • Ad creation

If you’re going to plan advertising on Facebook, the initial step is to determine your ad objective for the campaign that you are running. This should be the holistic marketing campaign strategy that you are building and will help to ensure that your marketing and advertising efforts are worthful.

For example, if you have a video ad and want to show that ad to people who are most likely to watch it, choose the Video views objective.

You always need to set relevant objectives and serve relevant ads depending on the stage of your audience. For awareness, you need to create a warm audience, reach, traffic, engagement objective ads. However, each business is different and so their goal also different. Always test different objectives with different types of ads.

 The next step is to determine your ad targeting and strategy. This includes Audience, Placements, Budget, and Schedule. Therefore, it is recommended to focus on a niche audience, being strategic about placements, and monitoring your budget and schedule regularly.

Further, the most important step is ad creation. Here, you require building out your ad’s format, creating any media assets, and developing any additional creative utilized within the ad. Remember, the more complex the ad is, the more advanced functionality.


#2 Mistake: Poor targeting

Are your organic Facebook posts getting down and having less engagement? This is probably due to poor targeting. This is the top Facebook advertising mistake that almost all do when new to Facebook advertising. The key is to use targeting properly. Selecting specific audiences through Facebook’s built-in targeting features will allow you to reach the right type of people.

Targeting options include purchasing behavior, life events, existing contacts, similar or lookalike audiences layered targeting using location, demographics, and behaviors.

So, the best way to handle it,  you need to clearly understand your audience, have your audience segmented, then you can take the next steps to target and retarget current and potential customers.


#3 Mistake: Lack of customer’s value proposition

What’s the best way to make your customer take action?

Your value proposition is the factor that urges people to want to interact with your ads. If you ask the people for purchasing directly, they are not going to make until they know your products. They want to know what’s in it for them. This is your unique value proposition. In short, it tells consumers the benefit of your product or service and what makes you different from the competition. Your value proposition should communicate to the user what they would get from clicking your ad and using your product or service instead of your competitors.

Neglecting your value proposition can seriously affect the performance of your ads. An ineffective value proposition can make even your ideal audience not engage with your ads because they do not understand what you are offering.


#4 Mistake: Abandoning creating ads

Most of us make the mistake of creating ads and then abandoning them. Here you need to analyze the performance of your ads regularly in order to see optimum results. For instance, if you don’t check your ad analytics on a daily basis, Facebook can show the same ad to the same individual multiple times during the day. Monitor your ads regularly would also help you know if you are meeting your campaign objectives.

You can check your ad progress by the following metrics:

  • Ad frequency
  • Click-through-rates vs. conversion rates
  • Ad engagement rates
  • Click by interests
  • Relevancy score
  • Number of leads
  • Ad performance by placements


#5 Mistake:
Using ads for an only sales funnel

Using ads only to sell products is just as if a direct salesperson pushing products on you, it feels unnatural. The good brands that win create an experience through their Facebook ads using storytelling, relatable creative, and copy, as well as an intention that meets the audience where they are at. So, consider creating Ads that build trust by sharing your success stories, benefits delivered, testimonials, industry recognitions, etc.


#6 Mistake:
Ads that Fail to Draw Attention

If you’re targeting a niche Custom Audience and you have a brilliant ad message but that’s not relevant to this audience, they won’t read your ad copy. Apart from this, if your ad image and headline fail to catch attention in the Facebook newsfeed, many people will skip over your ad.

There are two reasons that Ad images fail to draw attention:

  • The ad doesn’t use bright colors, which might reduce its viewability
  • Ad image contains ambiguous elements that don’t match the offer

More colorful ad images creation helps to more engagement with people and they will notice your ad, read it, and take your preferred action.


To wrap it up:

Facebook advertising is a powerful tool to reach your customer base, but it needs to use effectively. With these six tips under your belt, you’ll be better prepared to avoid the Facebook ad mistakes that can ruin a campaign. To fix the Facebook ad mistakes you can contact digital marketing in India.