Top 3 Mistakes Social Advertisers Are Making

Facebook and Instagram advertising are now considered a staple of digital marketing strategy. For this reason, businesses of all backgrounds are flocking to the platforms to accelerate brand presence in-front of their designated audience to drive awareness, sales and leads, amongst other conversion goals.

But are they doing so successfully? Here are the 3 most common mistakes we come across when auditing new paid social advertising accounts.

Unclear & Unmeasurable Objectives

What are you trying to achieve through paid social? Whether you’re trying to build brand awareness, drive more sales, or build your Facebook following, your selected campaign objective must reflect this. A common mistake social advertisers are making is having these objective unclear and undefined.

We suggest that prior to launching any paid social activity, awareness, consideration or conversion are identified as the overall objective of the campaign. Relevant campaign structures can then be selected:

• Awareness: Reach & awareness campaigns
• Consideration: Traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead-gen & message campaigns
• Conversion: Conversions, catalogue sales, & store visit campaigns

Selecting the correct objective will enable the campaign delivery to be more effective. Awareness and consideration campaigns will enable your campaigns to reach relevant users at scale, while conversion campaigns will reach users who have a higher propensity to convert. Getting this right is key to effective and efficient paid social activity.

Too Broad Audience Builds

Many advertisers get excited when they see they can reach millions of people who are ‘relevant’ to their campaigns. But when your estimated audience reach is 14 million, how many of these people are really relevant?

Of course, we can add interest, behavioural and geographical targeting to make the audience build more targeted, but often the overall estimated size will remain in the millions. This means your audience is too broad.

To fix this, advertisers should make use of the narrow audience tool. This enables audiences to comprise of a variety of different interests but be narrowed down to ensure ‘they must also’ fit into a tighter, more specific criteria.

For example, if we were trying to reach users who may be interested in purchasing a new luxury vehicle, we might look to select interest-based targeting containing a variety of premium and luxury goods and services, ensuring a good volume of people to target. We can then narrow this audience down, and make it more focused, by including ‘but must also’: be interested in the brand of the car and be from a higher-income household. This will reduce the overall size of the audience but result in greater granularity and focus.

Overlapping Audience

When running multiple campaigns, it is common to have messages and creative that is suitable to the same audiences. The temptation is to run the same audience across your different campaigns. Is this the right thing to do? No.

If you run the same audience in different campaigns and ad sets you have the potential to push the cost per click up, as you will be bidding against yourself for the media placement.

How do you get around this? Instead of including the same (or similar) audiences across different campaigns and ad sets, you should look at building different messages and focuses into different ad variations. Doing so, you can continue to reach those who are of interest to your business, with varying messages that are relevant whilst ensuring you’re not bidding against yourself. This reduces the possibility of audience overlap and keeps CPCs lower.

Our best advice is to build your paid social presence slowly and strategically, continually testing and evaluating to benchmark performance. Achieving this, activity can then be scaled up to come a key performing channel of your digital strategy.

Are you concerned that your paid social efforts may be making these mistakes? Get in touch with our paid social team and book your paid social audit.