Have you been running ads but you don’t understand how you can make it work for you or you wonder if the demographic is right?

It’s possible that you feel like you aren’t getting ROI on your ads spend and that you’re not making sales from your ads.

Maybe your ads don’t seem to be reaching many people.

If Facebook™ asks you if you got what you needed from the ads and you say no! then this blog post can help you!

#1 Too many interests

In regards to your ideal customer, they might have like Oprah Winfrey’s Facebook™ page. So if you type Oprah Winfrey in the interests section you can target your ad to people who like the Oprah page and her posts.

What I see a lot of people do when they are creating ads is to choose a LOT of interests to cover a lot of bases. To make sure that they cover a lot of the things that they think their audience is interested in and to reach as many people as possible.

It looks a bit like this:

Nooooo!!! Don’t do it!

Why not?

Because if your ad succeeds you won’t know which interest made it successful and similarly if it flops you won’t ever know why and you won’t be able to succeed again.

What to do instead:

Instead of bundling all of the interests into one ad, its best to create campaigns with multiple ad sets within them, each ad set with its own single interest.

The easiest way to do this is to make one ad with one interest and once the ad is approved, you can go into the ad set and click “Duplicate”. Once you’ve duplicated it, you can edit the interests with another, different interest. After a few days, you’ll be able to see which one is performing better and then send your budget into that ad. Essentially it’s a kind of split testing that gives you much better feedback and information about your audience to create future ads with.

#2 Advertising to multiple countries in one ad set

In a way very similar to too many interests, I see a lot of people trying to run a single ad to multiple countries inside one ad set. 

The problem with this is the same as too many interests: if you ad flops or succeeds you’ll never really know why.

Another very good reason NOT to bundle countries is that certain countries are much more expensive to advertise to that others. Your ads could be costing you more than they need to. 

What to do instead:

Have complete clarity about where your ad is going to be displayed.

If you are truly a global brand and you need to advertise to many countries at once I’m sure you have a budget to run different ads to different countries. PLUS each country has it’s own cultural nuances that require different images and wording so get real about whether your ad is really going to cut it in an international market or if your $10 is better spent starting off with a small local audience and building up to a global empire.

Then, it’s just like the actions in #1 – go ahead and create duplicate ad sets and edit the location details. Here’s what that part of the Facebook™ ads manager looks like in regards to location:

#3 Running ads with a start and stop date

When you are setting up your Ads Set, another option you have is to do with the Budget and Schedule. Many people want to run a short ad to reduce their ad spend and that is fine.

The only trouble with an ad with a start and end date is that the robots don’t seem to give you as good results as if you run an ongoing ad and then turn it off once you reach your budget.

Some people don’t want to run an ongoing ad in case they go over their budget. My experience is that if I’m spending money with Facebook™ ads, it’s on my mind. There is very little chance I will forget that I’m running an ad.

If you are really worried about forgetting you could always set an alarm on your phone or calendar.

If you’re not convinced that this is true, you could run your own experiment and run 2 ads – one that is ongoing and one that has a start and finish date and see for yourself. I’d be interested to hear your result! Let me know if you do this.

An ongoing ad

What to do instead:

You have options: you can either take my word for it and run ongoing ads which you turn on and off as you need OR You can run your own test as described above and see what the reality is for your business.

Ultimately, I would always recommend extensive testing around Facebook™ ads because everyone’s audience is so different and everyone’s business is so different. It’s smart and savvy to be invested in your ads process and your audience and your business so be patient with yourself and use it as a learning challenge.

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