Meta Ads allow you to reach a broad and diverse audience at a competitive price. However, that second part — the competitive price — is only possible if you run your campaign efficiently.
Audits help you:
- Improve ad performance
- Identify inefficiencies and ad waste
- Spot trends and opportunities
Here are the five big mistakes to look out for when you run your audit. Address these issues, and you can turn your performance around and drive more sales and leads.
1. You’re sending traffic to the wrong place
One of the biggest mistakes people make with their Meta Ads is directing traffic to the wrong place. You can build compelling ads, optimize your creatives, get your ad bidding strategy humming like a well-oiled machine, and still mess up if you’re not directing users to an appropriate landing page.
Too many marketing teams link to their homepage and not to a relevant landing page. When someone clicks on your ad, they are in a highly-interested state. If you present them with a confusing page that’s not laser-focused on your offer, you’ll destroy your conversion rates.
Plan a clear path for what happens when users see your ads, from the initial impression to the CTA and the landing pages they see when they click.
The only exception is when you want to use ads to drive brand awareness. Then, linking to your general home page is all good.
2. You’re not targeting the right audience
Efficient digital sales and marketing start with having a keen understanding of your audience. Meta gives you many options for targeting, but without the correct settings, you can go too narrow or too broad.
Meta’s Audience Builder tool was designed to solve this problem. However, the default settings only involve age, gender, and location.
By accounting for interests and behavior, you can drill down and target an audience that is more likely to convert. So experiment with fine-tuning your settings.
The power of using Meta is the data they harvest on each user. The platform has a vast amount of information on what people like and dislike. So make those details part of defining who gets shown your ads. Too many brands waste money chasing people who don’t fit their product or service.
3. Your attribution is all wrong
Meta has changed how attribution works since the iOS14 update. Facebook Conversion Windows and Attribution Windows are out; Facebook Attribution Settings are in. This more recent feature helps you understand how your ads impact conversions across different channels, devices, publishers, etc.
Meta Ads offer 7-day click or 1-day view options. Understanding which ads contribute to sales and conversions is crucial. Without this data, you don’t have the feedback required to optimize your ads or the data-driven insights you need to inform your decisions.
4. You’re not A/B testing your creatives
The funny thing about ads is that predicting what will resonate with your audience is challenging. Some of your most promising campaigns will go out without a whimper, while ads you aren’t sure about will be winners. While digital marketing has been increasingly quantified in recent years, advertising itself is just as much an art as it is a science.
A/B or split testing lets you take the gut feel out of your campaigns and replace it with hard data. By experimenting with various headlines, images, copy, and CTAs, you can precisely determine which combinations of different creatives get results.
Best practice dictates that you run ad variations against each other and see which wins before you commit a good chunk of your ad budget.
5. You’re not optimizing your ads
Meta Ad campaigns need constant work and attention. They’re not something you can just set and forget. Sadly, some marketing teams don’t consider this, so they can’t keep up with the evolving needs of the market and their audience.
In many ways, you should think about your Meta ad campaigns in the same ways as you would your SEO or content marketing strategy. You need to test and analyze each campaign frequently and fine-tune your content based on these results. Establish and monitor KPIs and metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversions, and ROAS so you can make adjustments when needed.
There are several ways to optimize your Facebook ads. At a minimum, you need to turn off campaigns that aren’t generating an ROI. While you can return to these campaigns and make some adjustments, only do this when you have developed a thesis about why it failed and how you can change that.
Similarly, you need to play around with your target audience, keywords, and bid strategy. Understanding the relationship between your ads and your bids is crucial if you want to understand a fair price. Sometimes a premium can pay off.
BONUS TIP: Always start with a clear objective
Before you even get around to auditing a campaign, you should define a clear objective for your ads. It could be about raising awareness, driving web traffic, generating leads, or making sales. Ensure you know what each ad or campaign is meant to do before you start.
Similarly, define what success looks like before you invest any money. If your objectives are awareness, pick KPIs like website visits or social mentions to track.
Final thoughts
Meta Ads audits are necessary. However, they take a lot of time and work. The hard part for marketing teams is that investing time in monitoring and optimizing their campaigns isn’t a guarantee of success.
Amanda AI offers a way to take the load off. Our advertising robot can create your ads, optimize your bidding strategy, and ensure your campaigns are placed in the best Meta properties to connect with your audience.
Our impact-based AI algorithms reliably outperform humans, allowing you to focus on your core tasks while we do the rest. Amanda AI helps you get the absolute most from your ad budget, which means you can outmuscle your rivals, even when they have bigger budgets.
