Advertisers are obsessed with Facebook and with good reason. The growth in ad dollars flowing into the platform is still accelerating reaching nearly $33 billion in 2018.
Why? Because the combination of Facebook’s massive global scale and ability to target ads to niche segments makes it appealing to companies of all sizes.
A restaurant can easily run locally targeted ads to people that live near their location.
A mid-sized company, like a hotel chain, can target ads across the U.S. to travelers that want to visit cities they operate in.
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And a large global business, like an airline, can use Facebook to target a variety of customer segments in nearly any country that they operate in.
I have personally worked with a wide range of travel brands on thousands of Facebook advertising campaigns.
During that time, I have witnessed some incredible success. I have also seen my fair share of mistakes.
Mistakes that I hope to help you avoid, whether you’re new to Facebook marketing or a seasoned veteran.
Here are three of the most common Facebook advertising mistakes advertisers make, and tips on how you can avoid them.
Common Mistake #1
You are not optimising for your ultimate business objective and measuring results.
While it sounds simple, you should be optimizing for your ultimate business objective and constantly measuring results.
This starts with defining clear goals and outcomes that you want to measure for your campaigns.
For example:
- Are you trying to increase awareness of your brand? Increase sales of an online product?
- Sell tickets?
- Upsell customers to a better package?
- Drive people into a physical location like a store?
- You’re trying to do all of these at once?
These goals are all different and require different campaign ad creative, targeting setups, and approaches to measurement to inform and improve subsequent campaigns.
While you have various campaigns targeting different stages of your marketing funnel, you ultimately need to measure your results and optimize based on your real business objectives.
Facebook has many measurement tools that help advertisers understand their campaign performance and track their target KPIs.
The solution you use will depend on your campaign goal. For example, you can use brand lift if you are focused on growing your brand or conversion lift to measure the uplift in sales.
Whether you are optimizing for brand recall or ROAS, make sure that you are measuring and spending on what matters.
Common Mistake #2
You do not have an always-on testing strategy for creatives.
As digital advertising becomes increasingly complex, testing should be at the core of your marketing efforts.
This may be even more important on Facebook. Facebook has many different ad formats and placements that advertisers can take advantage of, but figuring out best practices for your brand can be tough.
You need to be producing creatives at scale and testing, learning and optimizing all components of the creative on an ongoing basis.
This is a huge contrast relative to the traditional creative process that most brands still follow.
Facebook empowers advertisers to deliver highly relevant creatives, but it’s up to advertisers to maximize the results they achieve on the platform.
Common Mistake #3
You’re not using AI and machine learning for your A/B testing.
Everyone wants to use AI and machine learning to improve campaign performance.
But, very few travel marketers have the time, tools, or expertise to develop it. Or they believe that access to this technology is limited only to a select number of enterprises.
Because the number of variables that one can A/B test is nearly infinite, from creative executions to targeting setups and other optimizations it gets complex very fast.
A manual approach to optimizations just isn’t feasible to get the most out of your budget.
Some technology providers have developed AI-powered marketing assistant for clients (in our case: we call it Marvin).
These products use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically test and optimize the performance of Facebook campaigns.
While I love Marvin, of course, there are lots of other AI tools out there that work across a wide range of platforms like email, display ads or search.
The bottom line is that there is sophisticated artificial intelligence available to marketers, even with small budgets. If you’re not using it to improve your campaign performance, you should be.
2.3 billion reasons to work with Facebook and Instagram
With nearly 2.3 billion people on Facebook and 1 billion people on Instagram, it’s obvious that the opportunity for marketers on Facebook properties is massive.
By making yourself aware of these common marketing mistakes you can avoid wasting time and money and focus on attracting new customers and increasing conversions.