Facebook ad mistakes are like mines in the Minesweeper game. When creating your first Facebook advertising campaigns, your goal is to avoid making the rookie mistakes.
Once you lose focus and hit the wrong square, you’re out.
Be careful to avoid rookie Facebook ad mistakes – image source
It’s a good thing that Facebook advertising doesn’t end with a wrong move. It might cost you more advertising dollars, but there’s always a way to fix a poorly performing campaign.
We’ve already covered Facebook ad examples and Facebook ad tips in previous blog post–so this article will tackle 29 popular Facebook ads mistakes and will offer the cures to get you closer to your dream campaign results.
Here they come: the 29 serious mistakes haunting even the best Facebook ad campaigns.
1) Making a Targeting Mistake
No matter how good your Facebook ad copy, design or ad placement, if it’s seen by an indifferent audience, there won’t be many results.
When analyzing the 2016 Q3 Facebook ads statistics, AdEspresso found that there could be over a 1000% difference in the ads’ cost-per-click, depending on the audience you’re targeting.
For example, the cost-per-click for some age groups is higher than others.
AdEspresso explored the differences in Facebook ad costs – image source
It could be a smart move to start your Facebook ad campaigns with customer research to make sure you are targeting the right audience.
Moz — a leading SEO company — was able to make $1 million thanks to the process of interviewing their customers and improving their product accordingly.
How to avoid targeting a wrong Facebook audience:
1) Do customer research on demographics – Go over your customer base and find out the prevalent audience demographics: age, gender, location, job seniority, purchase behaviors, lifestyle, education, etc. Then, target these demographic groups on Facebook.
We’ve seen again and again that geographic specificity in ads and on landing pages contribute to better campaign performance. For instance, Engine Ready showed us higher conversion rates happen when local numbers are used instead of toll-free 800 numbers.
Location-specific ads return better results – image source
2) Analyze interests – Use Facebook Audience Insights to grasp who your target audience is. This tool by Facebook surfaces aggregated information people have already expressed on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners.
Once you’ve learned about your potential audience’s interests, it will also be easier to create relevant ad messages and create a winning ad design.
3) Target niche interests – Instead of targeting broad interests that describe hundreds of thousands of people, narrow down your target audiences. You can add several layers of interests, so that the audience members must match at least one interest on each targeting level.
Facebook recommends niche audience targeting for advertisers aiming to reach a very specific audience, e.g. people in a certain location or with specialized interests.
Narrow down your Facebook audiences
2) Low Audience and Offer Match
When creating ad messages, you should consider the fact that not everyone seeing your ad knows about your brand.
While some audience members are already familiar with your product and its benefits, there’s a good chance that many ad viewers haven’t heard of you before. Which might leave them wondering, “Why am I seeing this ad?”
In most PPC campaigns, the target audience can be categorized into three different groups:
Ice cubes – people who have never heard of you and haven’t visited your site or landing page before. In the Facebook advertising land, ice cubes are usually the people you’re targeting with a Saved Audience.
Lukewarm audience – people who know who you are, but can’t tell for sure what it is that you do.
Volcano lava traffic – people who have bought something from you before or are way down the conversion funnel, on the path to becoming a customer.
Each of these PPC channel temperature levels needs a dedicated Facebook ad campaign.
There’s a right offer for every PPC channel temperature
If your Facebook ad jumps straight to the “Click here and buy now!” trail, people might consider it irrelevant or even threatening.
For example, this ad by Celebrity Cruises promotes a discount offer without explaining why anyone should want it.
This kind of ad would make sense if the ad viewer had purchased from the company before and knew the benefits. However, when seen by a cold audience, this ad would make a lot less sense.
Celebrity Cruises’ Facebook ad has a fairly cryptic offer
A simple way to evaluate your audience match is to check your Facebook ad’s Relevance Score.
Relevance Score is a calculated metric that helps to understand how your audience is reacting to a particular ad.
When analyzing 104,256 Facebook ads, AdEspresso discovered that Facebook campaigns’ Relevance Score helps to predict both the cost-per-click and click-through rate.
Relevance Score affects the CPC – image source
The higher your ad relevancy, the less you’ll pay for clicks and conversions.
You can see your ads’ relevance score when breaking down your Facebook reports by Performance.
See your ads’ Relevance Score
3) Targeting Audiences That Are Too Broad
We’ve seen Facebook ad campaigns targeting over 20 million people in the U.S. alone. However, unless you’re a household brand, your offer and ad copy might not be relevant to such a broad set of people.
The main threat of targeting too broad of an audience is that your offer might not reach the people with highest purchasing potential due to a limited ad budget.
Here’s an example of a Facebook campaign that reached 234,000 people. However, the total potential audience size for all ad groups was over 1.1 million people. This means that more than 850,000 people didn’t see the ad due to budget limits.
Avoid targeting too broad audiences
How to tell when your ad audience is too broad?
First, take a look at cold hard numbers – If your audience size reaches millions of people, ask this: “Are there truly millions of people potentially interested in buying my product?” If the answer is “No”, narrow down your audience with demographic or interest-based targeting.
Facebook’s projected ad reach – Another way to tell whether your audience is too broad is to compare Facebook’s projected ad reach and the total audience size.
For example, if Facebook’s campaign setup interface shows that for the budget of $2,000 you can reach 250,000 people out of 2 million, you might want to consider downsizing your audience a bit.
This campaign will reach 10% of the audience daily
If you notice your audience is too broad, you can restrict it by excluding people by interests, behaviors and demographics or selecting between custom age ranges and genders.
Exclude people based on their interests, demographics & behaviors
4) Not Leveraging Custom Audiences
Creating Custom Audiences is one of the best ways to win at Facebook advertising.
Remember when we talked about PPC channel temperature and lava-hot audiences? By using Facebook Custom Audiences, you’ll be able to reach the audience on the warmer side of the scale.
SaaS company Scoro ran a Facebook remarketing campaign using Facebook Custom Audiences that resulted in six times more conversions at the same ad budget.
If you’re not using Facebook Custom Audiences yet, there’s a huge Facebook advertising potential waiting to be untapped.
You can create Custom, Lookalike, and Saved audiences
How to leverage Facebook Custom Audiences:
Create a remarketing campaign for collecting leads – Target past blog readers and offer them an eBook in exchange for their email address. By asking only for a small commitment of people familiar with your brand, they might be more willing to share their contact details with you. For this purpose, create a Facebook Lead ads campaign to collect contact information in exchange for an eBook or other high-value content.
Marketo’s ad is a Facebook Lead Ad
Remarket to landing page visitors – People who have visited your landing pages, are interested in a particular product you offer, meaning that you can create landing-page-specific Facebook ads that match your audience’s interests.
Scoro’s Facebook ad retargets landing page visitors
According to eMarketer, nearly three out of five U.S. online buyers say they notice ads for products they’ve previously looked up on other sites.
Remarket to past purchasers – Set up a Custom Audience of people who have visited your thank-you or checkout pages and use this audience for a retargeting campaign for upselling.
Amazon’s Facebook ad would make a good upselling campaign
To get a complete overview of all Custom Audience types and smart Facebook remarketing tactics, see our Custom Audiences guide.
5) Not Excluding Past Converters
When starting out with Facebook advertising, people often make the mistake of forgetting to exclude people who have already clicked on the ad and converted.
Leaving past converters included in your audience may be a bad idea for several reasons:
You’re wasting your ad budget on people who have already converted.
Your ads are no longer relevant to those already converted.
If the person keeps seeing your ads even after making a purchase, they might get annoyed.
Forgetting to exclude people can also contribute to higher ad frequency, which means that the same people see your ads over and over again. As a result, you may eventually suffer from ad fatigue and audience decay.
Facebook Ad Fatigue – Since the same people see the same ad over multiple days, their engagement with that ad is likely to drop, leading to higher costs for the advertiser.
Facebook Audience Decay – When you’re targeting the same people over time, their interest in your message usually decreases.
Look out for high ad frequency!
To exclude past converters from your Facebook audience, create new Custom Audiences of people who have visited specific web pages (e.g. your thank you page).
Next, use the EXCLUDE feature when setting up your ad campaign to stop targeting past purchasers or people who have already been to a specific landing page.
Exclude past converters
6) Using the Wrong Ad Type
Facebook allows advertisers to experiment with many different ad types.
While Newsfeed Ads are one of the easiest ad types to create, you shouldn’t overlook all the other options such as Video Ads and Lead Ads.
Coca-Cola experiments with Facebook video posts
Just to give you a quick overview of the possibilities, here’s a list of Facebook ad types:
Newsfeed Ad
Newsfeed ads are usually the first choice of Facebook ad beginners — they’re simple to create and set up.
Right Column Ad
This is one of the most basic and first types of Facebook ads with a headline, description, and single image. You can see these ads on your Desktop newsfeed.
Lead Ads
Facebook Lead Ads give people a quick way to opt into things like eBooks, newsletters, quotes, and offers straight from their mobile devices. You can usually recognize a lead ad by the “Download” call-to-action button.
LinkedIn collects lead with Facebook Lead Ads
Carousel ads
Also known as Multi-Product Ads, this ad type allows to showcase up to ten images and links in a single ad.
Dynamic Product Ads / DPA
These remarketing ads target users based on their past actions on your site.
Page Like Ads
This Facebook ad type’s goal is to get more likes to your brand’s Facebook Page.
Canvas Ads
Mobile-optimized and animated ads that help to tell your brand’s story.
Facebook Canvas ads are animated
Event Ads
Event ads help to promote specific events and get more people informed and attending.
Mobile App Install Ads
This ad type helps to promote your app and have people install it on mobile.
GIF Ads
A few weeks ago, Facebook announced that advertisers can now add GIFs to video ads. Why not give it a try.
Test GIFs like Buffer
7) Ads That Fail to Draw Attention
Even if you’re targeting a niche Custom Audience and have a brilliant ad message that’s relevant to this audience, there’s a chance that they won’t read your ad copy.
Advertising legend David Ogilvy commissioned research into the use of images and discovered that first, people look at the image. Then, they scan the headline.
If your ad image and headline fail to catch attention in the Facebook newsfeed, many people will skip over your ad.
Ad images that fail to draw attention might be guilty of one of these mistakes:
Ad photo resembles amateur photography shared in the newsfeed
Ad doesn’t use bright colors, which might reduce its viewability
Ad image contains confusing elements and doesn’t match the offer
If you compare these two ads by 17hats and GetResponse, which one gets your attention first?
Which one of these ads caught your attention first?
Research has found that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interactions with either people or products. About 62‐90% of their assessment is based on colors alone.
Creating more colorful ad images might help to get more people notice your ad, read it, and take your preferred action.
If you’re still doubting the importance of your Facebook ad image, read this:
Consumer Acquisition found that images are incredibly important — they’re responsible for 75%-90% of ad performance.
Using custom images like Soylent is a good idea
Tip: Make sure that your Facebook ad design is at least 1200 x 628 pixels wide (it’s the standard), and that the colors look good on every screen.
For more Facebook ad design inspiration see our lineup of 32 awe-inspiring Facebook ad examples.
8) Too Much Text on the Ad Image
Do you remember the 20% Rule of Facebook ads that implied that only 20% of the ad image may contain text? Otherwise, Facebook could refuse to distribute your ad.
Now, the times have changed and Facebook isn’t as strict about their text rules anymore.
Instead of getting a “Yes” or “No” from Facebook, your ad’s text density will fit into one of the four classifications:
Ok
Low
Medium
High
You can test your ad’s classification by using Facebook’s Text Overlay Tool.
We ran a test with this ad by Unbounce.
This ad by Unbounce seems to be quite text-heavy
Facebook told us that the ad’s image concentration is high, explaining:
You may not reach your audience, because there’s too much text in the ad image. Facebook prefers ad images with little or no text. Unless you qualify for an exception, change your image before placing your order.
This Facebook ad had a high text/image rate
High text density on your ad images doesn’t mean that Facebook won’t deliver it, but it will deliver it to fewer audience members.
The good thing is that Facebook notifies advertisers by email, guiding their attention to text-heavy ads.
Facebook will notify you of text-heavy ad images
If you want to be 100% sure that your ad image’s text won’t mess with your ad results, keep the text density low or use no text on the ad image.
9) Headlines Without the Right Hook
According to a study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59% of people actually never read more than the headline of a Facebook post before sharing or liking it.
If you take into account that, on average, we’re surrounded by 5,000 ads/branded messages per day, it’s no big surprise we’re grown immune to ads.
If your Facebook ad headline fails to catch attention, people might not continue to read the ad copy.
This ad example by PPI Check Me has the headline “Ac. Claim: £2,750 (BBC)” that may not be very informative (rather confusing) for the reader.
PPI Check Me’s ad headline seems a little confusing
Here’s another example by Scoro with a clear and actionable headline explaining the benefit of the product.
Scoro’s ad headline presents a clear benefit
How to write better headlines for your Facebook ads?
Emphasize the benefits – Use your ad headline to communicate your product’s benefits. By explaining to your audience what’s in it for them, they may be more interested in learning about your offer.
Keep your ad headlines short and clear – Jeff Bullaz measured the engagement rate of Facebook posts, and discovered that the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86% higher engagement than others.
Use numbers in headlines – A study by Conductor showed that by starting your headline with a number, you’re 36% more likely to have people click on your ads.
10) Careless Copywriting
When creating a Facebook campaign, you can write custom copy for every part of your ads.
That’s a huge responsibility as one wrong line of text could potentially distinguish the spark of interest in a reader.
You can customize every text box of a Facebook ad
One of the rookie Facebook ad mistakes is not taking the time needed to craft high-quality ad copy. To analyze whether your campaigns underperform due poorly-written texts or some other missing ad elements, you can set up a split test and experiment with multiple ad copies.
For example, DaPulse has experimented with different ad copies while maintaining the initial ad design:
DaPulse tests different Facebook ad copies
How to write good Facebook ad copy:
Facebook ad copywriting starts by defining your goal.
As Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers explained in her article:
“One of the most important principles to keep in mind when writing your Facebook ad body copy is this: give your body copy a single goal, and stick to it.”
Think about the goal of your ad campaign: is it to get people buy something from you, to collect new leads or create more brand awareness? Each sentence of your ad copy should support the goal, nudging the reader towards the right action.
Facebook recommends to follow three copywriting best practices:
Find the right tone of voice
Stick to what’s important
Write with the customer in mind
You could also try including testimonials from clients — an article by Econsultancy pointed out that when a website has customer reviews, 63% of visitors are more likely to buy something.
When writing Facebook ad copy, avoid sounding vague and cryptic as people might not understand your point. Focus on clear, trustworthy, and informative texts.
11) Missing a Clear Value Offer
Value offer is like your ad’s goal translated into the language of customers.
If your ad’s goal represents the key action you’d like a person to make, the value offer explains why they should take it.
UVP / Unique Value Proposition is a clear statement that describes your product’s benefit to the customer while differentiating you from your competition.
To give you an example of a Facebook ad with a value offer that could be improved, here’s one by Freshdesk.
While this ad copy is okay (not bad, not perfect), it fails to differentiate the product from competition and explain the final benefit of using the product: How would accessing the helpdesk from my phone help my company in the long term?
Freshdesk’s Facebook ad is missing a clear UVP
As Peep Laja from ConversionXL put it:
“Value proposition is something real humans are supposed to understand. It’s for people to read.“
Among other things, Peep suggests that:
Your value proposition needs to be in the language of the customer — and you cannot guess what that language is.
UVPs should be clear and easy to understand.
UVP should show it’s different or better than the competitor’s offer.
It should avoid hype (like ‘never seen before amazing miracle product’).
It should be easily read and understood in about 5 seconds.
If you get these five things right, you’re likely to have nailed a stellar value offer.
Place your UVP in the headline or on the image of your ad, where it’s most visible to viewers. That’s a good way to deliver your most important ad message at first sight of your ad.
For example, LinkedIn’s ad headline reads: “Reach 433m+ professionals with LinkedIn Sponsored Content.”
It states the benefit, explains how the product works, and differentiates LinkedIn from other PPC channels by mentioning the 433m+ professionals using the platform.
LinkedIn’s ad has an awesome value offer
12) Stuffing Ads with Too Much Text
When it comes to Facebook ads, less is often more.
When explaining how to improve landing page UX, Peep from ConversionXL explained:
“The more visual inputs and action options your visitors has to process, the less likely they are to make a conversion decision.”
Most of the time, the same rule applies to Facebook ads as well. Having fewer distractions in your ad copy might help get more people to convert.
When analyzing the perfect length of Facebook posts, Track Social discovered that brief Facebook posts saw the highest engagement.
Facebook post length vs. engagement – image source
Another study by BlitzLocal analyzed 11,000 Facebook pages and found that engagement increased as posts got shorter.
On average, page posts are 157.7 characters, while user posts are 121.5 characters and mobile posts are 104.9 characters. Posts between 140 and 159 characters long are, on average, 13.3% less engaging than posts between 120 and 139 characters.
Shorter posts get higher engagement – image source
Why do shorter Facebook posts work better? One of the reasons might be that they’re more concise and deliver the key message more quickly.
This Facebook ad example by Target is minimalistic regarding both the ad image and copywriting. People could potentially like this ad more as it doesn’t require a big effort to read.
Target’s Facebook ad is clear as day
However, if you’re creating a blog article promotion campaign, having a longer introductory ad copy might make more sense.
Here’s an example by Clanbeat, sharing one of their blog articles. The longer ad text helps to catch the reader’s attention and spark curiosity, so that they might be more interested in reading more.
Clanbeat’s Facebook ad promotes a blog article
13) Forgetting to Caption Video Ads
When creating your first Facebook Video Ads campaign, you might forget this single important fac t: all the videos in the newsfeed are soundless by default.
According to Facebook, captioned video ads increase video view time by an average of 12%. In another study of Facebook video ads, 41% of videos were basically meaningless without sound.
Moreover, Facebook’s research shows that:
“In mobile-feed environments, people prefer having the choice to opt in to sound. When feed-based mobile video ads play loudly when people aren’t expecting it, 80% react negatively, both toward the platform and the advertiser.”
AdEspresso has captioned their video ad
As you forget to caption your video ads, chances are that people won’t click on the “Play” button and watch the entire thing. That’s because they won’t be able to see what your ad is about, only a video without sound or text.
You might also want to avoid these video ad mistakes that — according Social Media Examiner — result in low video engagement:
Including an intro
Using logos or credits at the beginning of video
Trying to tell too much in a single video
Having a person talking to the camera without sufficient context
As making a video can take multiple hours (or days), it’s a smart idea to think it through before getting to work.
14) Bad Choice of Ad Placement
In a Facebook experiment, marketers at Scoro discovered that Desktop ads had a 534% higher cost-per-click than ads placed on Mobile + Audience Network.
However, they also discovered that Desktop ads performed a lot better in terms of conversions.
Desktop ads outperformed Mobile ads – image source
The choice of ad placement plays an important role in your Facebook ad results.
Facebook’s ad placements include:
Facebook feeds (mobile and desktop)
Facebook right-hand column
Instagram
Audience Network
Instant Articles
In-stream Video
One of the main reasons why you might make a mistake when choosing your ad placements is the offer and placement mismatch.
For example, if you’d like people to create a free trial for your business software, Instagram ads might not be the best option as people aren’t in the mood of dealing with business when browsing images by their friends.
The best way to find out which ad placements result in the highest return on investment, test multiple ad placements and analyze the results.
In the Facebook Ads Manager, you can break down Facebook Ads reports by ad placement and see which ones had the lowest cost-per-click and a high conversion rate.
Break down your ad results by placement
If you’re unsure which ad placements to start with, here’s what Facebook suggests:
Brand awareness: Facebook and Instagram
Engagement: Facebook and Instagram
Video views: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network
App installs: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network
Traffic (for website clicks and app engagement): Facebook and Audience Network
Product catalog sales: Facebook and Audience Network
Conversions: Facebook and Audience Network
15) The 24/7 Ad Delivery
Is your Facebook offer relevant to your target audience 24/7, even at night and on weekends? If so, having your ads run on a regular schedule makes sense.
However, there are several arguments against running your ads on full schedule:
According to AdEspresso, people will get tired of seeing your ad more quickly.
You’re spending parts of the budget on low-traffic hours with fewer conversions.
To avoid Facebook ad fatigue and keep your ad frequency under control, set up a custom schedule and deliver your ads only on specific times of week.
Set up a custom ad schedule
If you’re worried about Facebook delivering your ads to the same person too many times per day, you can use the frequency capping a la Facebook: Daily Unique Reach.
Deliver ads one per day with Daily Unique Reach
16) Amateur Ad Bidding
Facebook operates on an auction-type bidding system, just like Google AdWords.
PPC bidding is like a science that could potentially give your ad campaigns a real bump when applied skillfully.
To customize and view your bidding options in Facebook Ads Manager, go to the “Budget and Schedule” section.
Set up your ad budget and schedule
Facebook ads have four different bidding options:
Conversions – Facebook will do its best to deliver your ads to people who are most likely to convert. This bidding method is a good place to start as Facebook will optimize the ads for you.
Link Clicks – Facebook focuses on getting users to click on your ad to follow the link. If your goal is to get a lot of users to your landing page, or to view an on-Facebook page, this could be a good option.
Impressions – Facebook optimizes your ads with the goal of being seen by as many people as possible. This is a good option for businesses looking to build brand awareness or sharing highly engaging content (e.g. blog articles).
Daily Unique Reach – Facebook optimizes for showing your ads to people up to once a day. This method is great for retargeting, ensuring that people will see your ads only once every day and may not get annoyed as quickly.
According to AdEspresso, there are three factors that contribute to your ad cost: your bid, ad relevancy, and estimated action rates calculated by Facebook’s algorithms.
There is no 100% right or wrong bidding method for any ad type — you can find the best ad bidding methods through trial and error.
To get some insight into Facebook ad costs by ad placement, have a look at this chart by AdEspresso:
Placement has a huge impact on ad cost – image source
17) Slow Campaign Take-Off
Sometimes, Facebook ad campaign timelines look like this:
The face of disappointment – image source
Sorry, my bad. What I actually meant was this:
This campaign failed to take off for ten days – image source
For almost two weeks, this campaign failed to start delivering results.
Every time your Facebook campaign fails to take off, it might be due to one of these five reasons:
You’ve created too many ad groups of A/B test variations with low budgets
You ad images fail to catch people’s attention
Low relevance of ads (might indicate a bad audience targeting)
Using the wrong bidding options
Being impatient and making rapid changes
So, what’s the cure?
Scoro’s digital marketing manager Karola Karlson introduced a secret formula on AdEspresso blog called FTO / Fast Take-Off.
Here’s how the FTO method works: Assign Lifetime budgets that cross your planned budget. When starting a new campaign, you’ll need about 10,000 impressions to evaluate which ads work and which don’t. So, you want Facebook to use more resources at the beginning of the campaign. For example, use a $2,000 budget instead of the planned $400, just to get things rolling.
According to Karola, here’s why it might just work:
“Facebook rarely uses the total daily budget. Unless your ads are super relevant to your target audience, Facebook shows the ads less often than you’d like. To serve your ads to more people at the beginning of the campaign, increase your initial budget and expand the audience size for a week.”
18) Leaving Facebook No Time for Optimization
Another freshman Facebook ad mistake is relying too much on instant gratification, expecting a new Facebook campaign to deliver amazing results in the first few hours.
After you’ve waited for 3 hours without any sight of results, it’s easy to write the campaign off as a failure. However, you should give Facebook at least 24 hours to optimize your campaigns, even better if you’re able to wait for 48h before making any changes.
According to Facebook:
“It takes our ad delivery system 24 hours to adjust the performance level for your ad. It can take longer when you edit your ad frequently. To fix it, let your ad run for at least 24 hours before you edit it again. “
Every time you make substantial changes to your campaigns, consider waiting for at least 24-48 hours before drawing any conclusions.
Take a look at a campaign results graph below. The campaign was set live on February 12, and it took Facebook almost 48 hours to gather data and start delivering ads on full steam.
It takes up to 48h for Facebook to optimize your ads
19) Guessing, Not Testing
What do you think, which one of these ads by Shopify works best?
Shopify is testing multiple ad images – image source
While we don’t have access to Shopify’s Ads Manager to uncover the test results, we can guess that Shopify was running an A/B test to discover the best-performing ad image.
Had they settled with a single image, Shopify would’ve never known if it really was the best option.
A study of 37,259 Facebook ads found that “most companies only have 1 ad, but the best had 100’s”.
SaaS startup Scoro went as far as to test over ten different ad images when starting with Facebook advertising.
Scoro tested over ten Facebook ad images
Whenever you’re unsure which target audience, ad copy or ad image to use, experiment with both.
20) Doing the Wrong Kind of A/B Tests
Not all your split testing ideas are gold — and with limited ad budgets, your A/B testing capacity is restricted to a few tests per month.
As Pauline Marol, the site optimization lead product manager at Hotwire put it:
“If you come to me with an idea and it’s not live in two weeks, it’s not because it’s a bad idea—it’s because I have better things to test.”
I’ve written about simple A/B test prioritization methods in a blog post here on KlientBoost’s blog.
As I explained then, it makes sense to start closest to where your money is.
Optimizely put together an absolutely incredible chart to help non-seasoned (and seasoned) A/B testers to prioritize like a pro.
Make your own prioritization rules just like Optimizely – image source
You should also check out the PXL prioritization framework developed by the folks at ConversionXL.
ConversionXL created their own prioritization spreadsheet – image source
AdEspresso studied data from over $3 millions in Facebook Ads experiments and listed A/B test elements that provided the biggest gains:
Countries
Precise interests
Mobile OS
Age ranges
Genders
Ad images
Titles
Relationship status
Landing page
Interested in
As you can see, many of these elements are related to your target audience, reminding once again how super important it is to figure out whom it is you’re targeting.
21) Testing Too Many Things at Once
It’s easy to get carried away with all those amazing A/B testing ideas. However, your Facebook split testing campaign might soon look like this:
5 ad variations might turn into 625 ads – image source
As Mike Murphy from HeroTheory.com commented on ConversionXL:
“Many folks will take their research from step one, gather their interests and then lump them all into one big list on the Facebook Ads Manager in hopes of reaching a large target audience. This is a grave mistake that will cost you far more in ad spend. And while you might get results, you’ll have no idea which interest brought the best results.
Putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t the smartest way to do Facebook A/B testing.
With every experiment you run, you’ll need to ensure that you have enough data for your results to be statistically significant and valid.
Just like with website testing, you should aim to collect at least 500 conversions before making any conclusions. If you’re testing more than two variations, you’ll need even more ad impressions and conversions to determine the winning option.
22) Low Landing Page and Facebook Ad Match
Imagine you clicked on this ad by Fiverr promoting videos, and were lead to a landing page offering custom logos instead.
That would be quite confusing, right?
Fiverr’s Facebook ad promoter explainer videos
Luckily, Fiverr’