5 Most Common Beginner Mistakes With Meta Ads

by Wesley Remy

When water stagnates, it can attract mosquitos who can lay eggs and ultimately ruin your day *scratches at bites*. When your business stagnates it can be as just as annoying. A very real sense of uncertainty looms over you like a spectre of impending doom. So you come to the conclusion that paid advertisent is the way, I mean how can reaching your target market immediately be a bad thing? Maybe that annoying dude in your email was on to something. Before you reach for that infernal boost button, take a second to absorb these words of advice. The last thing you want to do is throw away money because it can be very easy to do. Enough banter, lets break down the five common mistakes made with regards to Meta ads.

1) Campaigns Type Not Sales Focused

Choosing your campaign type is an important and fundamental step in the whole Meta ad setup process thing. If you're looking to get money, be it service or product, the blatanly obvious choice would be a sales campaign type. The Meta algorithmn is very clever (like raptor-level), meaning that if you tell it to get awareness, well… all the buttons go off except the sales one. The leads that you do manage to scrape will be poor quality. This is because the campaign wasn't optimized for that outcome, thus they weren't ready to buy. General rule of thumb, brand awareness should be the byproduct of a good sales campaign.

2) Using Inferior Advertisments

Unfortunately, most ads fall short of the glory of the Marketing gods. Meaning they just don't do what they were intended to do which is attract people who want to give you their money. Let me be the one to tell you that you are perfectly capable of creating an ad that completes your desired outcome. Here is the anatomy of successful ad:

• Headline - Often the first thing that is seen in an ad. Needs to capture the attention in a relevant way.

• Ad Creative - Any images or video that are used in your ad. Should be relevant to the what is being sold or otherwise.

• Body Copy - Usually the bulk text of your ad or sales page, etc. Explains and provides support to close the sale.

• Offer - A.K.A. Call to action, engages the reader to interact with your business, usually by providing an incentive for prospective buyers. Also needs to direct the person to the next step in the sales process. "First time orders get 30% off when you click the link and fill out the intake form."

3) Meta Pixel Out Of Commission

Let me tell you the story of a very naughty piece of code. It's name was Meta Pixel and if you're halfway familiar with it then you must know how frustrating it can be to install, with or without a partner integration. That being said it's still extremely important in your ads journey. Pixel detects how people interact with your ad which gives you access to all the juicy analytics of your results. I suggest using Google Chrome with the Meta Pixel Helper extension to help diagnose and treat your pixel problems.

4) Not Accounting For Ad Fatigue

You ever like a song or tv show so much that you replay it over and over again? Eventually you (and maybe anybody around you) got sick of it and wished you didn't burn yourself out so quick. Your ads can have a similar effect on those who view it. While it's true that if it aint broke don't fix it however, just because someone hasn't bought from you doesn't mean they never will. If your ad pisses them off before they have the chance then that is money that is off the table. Changing up small details in your ads every once in a while can keep things from getting too repetitive before your next ad.

5) Neutering Yourself Right Out Of The Gate

Yes, I'm going to talk about the boost button. For those unfamiliar with this feature within Meta Ads, Boost is a way to get money from you while simultaneously giving you the absolute bare minimum as far as control, creativity, and results are concerned. Not to mention the targeting is broad and not customizable for every product or service. There is NO such thing as a perfect ad but, with a little more time spent in the learning phase, you could get much better results. At the end of the day there is a reason it's referred to as the "take my money" button.

So to conclude, because Meta Ads Manager is a complicated program with lots of features, there are a wealth of problems and mistakes that can impact your final result. This list could be much longer but, I wanted to share some of the most common and arguably, the most important for beginners. Focus on sales type campaign for better quality leads Utilize the structure and anatomy of a working ad. Always monitor your pixel. Switch up ads or elements of the ad to avoid ad fatigue. Lastly, a little bit of research and some technique will carry you farther than just shortcutting with the boost button. Much luck to you who reads this.

P.S. If during the length of this article you've developed a headache from the thought of doing all of this by yourself, feel free to get in touch to see what we could do for you.