5 Things You Should Avoid Doing When Running Facebook Ads

When running Facebook ads, it’s important to know what you should and shouldn’t do. A tiny tweak to a good performing adset and you can start citing the Lord’s prayers because your adset is probably gone to Hell!

In this article, we cover the most common mistakes newbie and advanced advertisers do and what are the reasons you should avoid them. Make sure to follow this article’s tips so you don’t miss your next winning product.

1. Do Not Edit A Working Adset:

One of the first things I learned is to NEVER touch a working adset, especially if it brings results.

What happens is that if you touch an adset and edit something small like budget or targeting, the adset goes back to the “learning phase”. It’s as if the adset resets itself and starts working from scratch. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t get the same or better results than you did before editing it. It’s just that in most cases, the adset performance after editing it was worse.

This is based on years of experience running Facebook ads and after spending millions of dollars on ads. This and the feedback we receive from Ecomhunt’s dropshipping community. Even Facebook’s support team approves that it’s better to duplicate than touch a working adset.

Instead, if you’re looking to scale or change something, it’s always better to simply duplicate the adset and change whatever you want. From daily budget to targeting, this is the safest way that won’t ruin the performance of a good adset.

2. Do Not Use Automatic Placements For Your Campaigns:

The complete opposite of recommended!

Choosing this option won’t “maximize” your budget and it will probably show it to the same amount of people as if you chose to only show it on Facebook’s Feed. They’re explaining this move by telling you that it will allocate your adset’s budget across multiple placements and stick to where it performs best.

This is a simple A/B testing performed automatically by Facebook. The only way it can actually work is when you play with high budgets or already in the scaling stage. So by giving Facebook the option to place your ads across multiple placements, you can scale your ads even more.

But the best results come from placing your ads in Facebook and Instagram Feeds – This is a straight-up fact. And when you launch your ads, you don’t want to spend a single dime on testing if your ad will bring results from messenger or in-article placements.

This is exactly why we prefer to use only feed placements at first and later if we sell and look to scale, we can let facebook test other placements. But even when we get to that stage, we prefer doing it manually and not give Facebook free will.

3. Do Not Target Worldwide:

Facebook is constantly evolving and it’s learning power is incredible. When choosing worldwide targeting, Facebook will do it’s best to deliver it to the right people who are most likely to complete the desired action we were looking for.

We launch our campaign and we start seeing some resutls. So far so good right? But here’s the problem…

I don’t know about you, but HATE throwing money into the air. I prefer that every single cent I spend has a purpose. This is why I don’t want Facebook to spend my money on countries that I definitely know won’t bring any sales.

There’s absolutely no chance that someone from Kongo, Uganda or Yemen will buy from my store. This isn’t only because these countries are poor. It’s also because people in many countries don’t have access to credit cards or PayPal so there’s no way they can complete their order.

And even if by some chance my ad is shown to someone from Uganda and he actually buys it – Then how will I ship it to him? It’s no secret that the postal services in these countries are bad so the chances of a package arriving safely from China or USA are extremely low.

So instead of just targeting “Worldwide”, make a list of “good” countries where the citizens have no problem purchasing online and target them.

4. Do Not Wait Too Much Before Launching Retargeting Ads:

This is one of the biggest mistakes newbie and even advanced dropshippers do.

Facebook allows us, the advertisers, to create custom audiences. It’s a really powerful tool with a lot of options to choose from. The simplest one being an audience created from people who visited a specific page on our site. It is easily done and we only need our Facebook pixel to be installed on our store.

The minimum amount of people that has to visit our page before we can start using that audience is 50. Now, you would expect advertisers to launch retargeting ads the moment the audience is ready to use. Right? Well, unfortunately that’s not the case…

For some reason, the majority don’t do that and prefer waiting for the audience to get much bigger. As if starting retargeting ads when you have 200 people who visited your page will bring better results than 50+.

You should always launch retargeting ads the moment the custom audience is ready. Because the people who visited your site, even if it ain’t much, were interested in the shown product.

You have to strike while the iron is hot – Don’t wait for the audience to fill up and just launch your retargeting ads!

5. Do Not Use Only One Type Of Ad Creatives:

Not so long ago, when everyone was doing print-on-demand, photo ads were the most popular ad creatives on Facebook. Almost every ad you saw was some kind of photo ad and video ads weren’t as popular as they are now. But since then, Facebook started promoting to us the advertisers the use of video ads and it is now the most popular ad type. From Facebook & Instagram feeds to stories and in-article ads, Videos are everywhere.

Video ads are an excellent way to promote a complicated or even a simple product. They work great, bring great results and it’s one of the best ways to showcase all of your product’s features in a short time. But with every new trend, people tend to quickly forget about the previous one.

Other type of ads still exist! They didn’t go anywhere and by not at least trying one of them, you’re leaving money on the table. Sometimes, and this is from my personal experience, you won’t be able to cash in on a definite winning product only because you didn’t try a different ad type. Instead, someone else who decided to try a photo ad over a video ad will get that winning product run and sell.

The way we test is to create at least 2 type of ad creatives and in most cases we go with video and photo ads together. We usually keep one ad creative per adset which means that for each targeting option, 2 adsets with 2 different creatives are created. This option can be a bit costly for beginning dropshippers with a low budget.

if you’re low on budget, you can always test a couple of ad creatives in 1 adset. This way, Facebook will optimise and deliver your budget to the best performing creatives and you can later shut down the least performing ad creatives.

To Sum It Up:

Efficiency and Experience are the keys to running successful Facebook ads which will bring the results you seek for minimum costs. In this article, we covered the most common mistakes newbie and even advanced advertisers do. In the best-case scenario, the results they get are a bit more pricey. And in worst-case scenario, a winning product slips through their fingers and someone else banks in on that.

Struggling with finding good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

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Daniel Aloni

Daniel Aloni is one of the leading mentors in the Ecomhunt family. Daniel is a highly experienced Print On Demand seller with multiple 6 figures successful launches.

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