Common pitfalls. There are some common pitfalls of meta-advertising that can be avoided.
The learning phase – Firstly, each ad, when published, will enter the learning phase. This means the ad is being used tentatively as the algorithm begins to understand how best to place and display your ad. The way out of the learning phase and to get your ad running on all cylinders is to generate enough interest and data for the ad to work efficiently. Ideally, this learning phase will be as short as possible; but it can drag on if the budget is too small to generate the learnings it needs in a short space of time. The common mistake here is falling back into the learning phase.
Currently, if you change any element of your campaign by more than 20%, the ad will re-enter the learning phase, essentially restarting its learning from scratch. We see this most often with budget changes. If an ad is going well, you might think about doubling your budget, but then your ad will be straight back into the learning phase. Similarly, an ad may not be doing so well. So you want to have the budget. But then you’re back into the learning phase as well, where your ad will only perform worse. The solution is to incrementally change your ads as your campaigns roll out. A 20% change over each seven-day period will ensure your ads do not find a home in the learning phase.
Being conversion oriented – While it’s great to see sales spike when you roll out a successful ad campaign, it’s important to remember that the buyers’ funnel needs to be tended to at all sections. If you simply focus on conversion ads over and over again, you’re going to tire out your audience, and soon enough, you’re going to run out of interest. This is why holistic campaigns, which see ads focused on awareness and consideration, as well as conversion, will do better long term.
Broken Links – This one seems like an easy catch. But trust me; I’ve been there. Meta allows us the option to check the links that we’re sending our users for each ad; take advantage of this. If you use a broken link, sending your user to a 404 page on your website means you could have lost a potential conversion. It only takes a few seconds to check an ad for the destination URL. And I would recommend double-checking, especially on those first few campaigns.
