Feel like you’re making some costly social media ad mistakes?
I feel like there are two types of people when it comes to social media advertising: those who love it and are excited to learn more and improve how they use them, and those who are intimidated by them and would rather go organise their fridge than learn more about them.
There’s been a LOT going on in social media ad land lately. The platforms have been rolling out a lot of changes and updates over the last few months, and things have been changing in a pretty significant way.
What worked with social ads a year ago, even 6 months ago, probably won’t work like that anymore.
Does that mean we should all throw up our hands and give up on the platform in disgust?
Nah I don’t think so. Love em or hate em, there’s an ENORMOUS potential to get in front of your customers with social media advertising, so the business case for sticking with it is definitely there in my opinion.
But….
You do NOT want to just boost a post or throw up an ad without a proper strategy. And I DEFINITELY see people make a lot of mistakes that hurt the potential of their ad to convert into profitable results. Which basically costs you money, right?
So in this article, I’m going to explain the top five social media ad mistakes I see eCommerce brands make ALL the time.
None of the mistakes I’m going to talk about are about specific ad types or ad funnels or ad creatives. For sure, it’s easy enough to make mistakes with how you actually set up your ads in the ads manager.
But I believe that stuff is easily fixable. Whereas there are some bigger social media ad mistakes people make and just don’t realise it’s actually really important to the success of your ads.
That’s what I talk about in this article.
Plus I give you step–by–step, tangible strategies for avoiding them, or course correcting if you might be making these mistakes.
Mistake #1: Not setting goals
So the first mistake I see happens before you even get into the ads manager. And this is something I see happen a LOT, with start-ups as well as businesses that are already scaling up.
And that’s: not defining what success means for their marketing.
So what is your sales goal? What does that look like for the next month, 90 days, and 12 months?
What marketing strategies will you execute to achieve that sales goal?
And then, what’s your budget for ads, and how much are you going to make from that ad spend?
A lot of times people start ads too late – when they’re already desperate for a fast hit of traffic and sales – and then pull out too fast, and it’s because they’ve gone into it without any specific goal or definition of success.
Like, “I think I’ll spend $1,000 dollars and see what happens.”
And what I encourage and really want people to do to do to get the most out of your ad spend is say, “Over the next, let’s say, 90 days, I want to make this many sales, which equals this many dollars”.
And then you work backwards from there to figure out what your investment in ads should be.
Because if you go into ads and you’re kind of just picking a number and then seeing what happens, what will happen is you’ll start running ads and you’ll say things like, “I have no idea if this is working or not, and I have no idea where to put my time and energy to get it to work.”
Or, I see people who will boost a post thinking it’ll be a magic button that will drive a tonne of traffic and sales, and get super disheartened when it doesn’t work like that.
And so then you end up probably just turning your ads off and waiting a few months and trying – I’ve seen that scenario play out so many times.
At this point, you may be thinking, ‘OK Catherine. I know how much money I want to make each month in my online store. But I don’t know yet how much I should budget for ads.”
Is that a familiar struggle for you?
Let’s break it down a bit more:
As an example, let’s say you want to make $10,000 in a month from your ads.
Your average order value is $100, which means you need 100 orders.
An average cost per purchase with your ads will be about a quarter of that, so $25, times by 100 orders, equals $2,500. So your budget for ads would be $2,500.
Now, before you start to freak out and think you can’t possibly make money in business if it costs you that much…
Bear in mind that you should only be getting around 20-30% of your traffic and sales from your paid social ads.
And those ads will help you to grow your email list and to increase your organic search traffic and your referrals.
So the $10,000 revenue from your ads might cost you $2,500 in ad spend. But your total revenue from all sources should end up being more like $35,000. Which is a pretty damn good result in my books and I would definitely want to scale that business!
So, moral of the story is, before you even start ads, whether, like I said, you’re a beginner, you’re intermediate, you’re advanced, you need to go into it knowing your sales target and your budget for ads, so that when you start running ads, you’re able to assess whether you achieved success or not.
Mistake #2: Relying only on one channel
I totally get why brands make this particular mistake with their social media ads – because this is the path of least resistance. Just getting your head around marketing on one platform is definitely going to feel easier than using multiple platforms.
But it’s risky – especially when it’s a platform where you don’t own your own audience and you’re at the whims of whatever changes to that platform are being rolled out.
And it’s also just not going to be as effective either.
There’s been plenty of research over the decades that proves customers need to see your brand and interact with you multiple times before they’re gonna buy.
And if they do that in various ways and on various platforms, all the better.
So you will always have much bigger, better results from your paid social media ads if this is only one piece of your marketing puzzle.
Once you’ve worked out all your marketing messaging and you know who your customers are, you want to be communicating with them with that consistent messaging via multiple channels.
Website, emails, Google, Facebook, Instagram and wherever else your ideal customers hang out.
I especially advocate for you to be always building your email list.
100% of our clients who are automatically building their email list and using automated email marketing as part of the mix, achieve much bigger and more profitable results from their paid Facebook ads, compared to the ones who do not use email.
Building other marketing strategies into the mix like email and search engine marketing, can literally double the profitability of your ads.
Mistake #3: Not testing enough
This is one of the biggest social media ad mistakes brands make all the time: they don’t do enough testing, especially of your ad creatives (your ad copy, your images or video).
In my opinion, when I see someone saying that their ads aren’t working, 85 to 90 percent of the time it’s because the messaging is not hitting the mark with the customer.
It takes a lot of work to really understand who your ideal customer is, what their buyer journey looks like, how to speak to them and how to stand out in the newsfeed.
Most brands will have multiple segments of ideal customers as well. For example, our client Babiators kids sunglasses have a segment of customers who are buying the superior sun protection and others who are buying the cute fashion aspect. The messaging that appeals to one of those segments won’t appeal to the other, but if you don’t test you won’t figure that out and you’ll ultimately leave an enormous pile of cash on the table!
And especially this year, it’s just gotten even more important to go deeper, to take your ad creatives to the next level with engaging with and appealing to your ideal customers’ pain points and desires.
And so a lot of people, mostly because ads can be a lot of work, but I encourage you to take the extra week, if you need, as you get ready for ads, to have at least three versions of your ad that you’re testing – maybe it’s a long form of copy and a short form of copy, and then you have a video and an image – because I’ll get this question all the time.
People say, “Well, what works better: video or image?” or “What works better: long or short?” And there is no concrete answer, because it’s truly different for every audience. A lot of times I do see video work better, but then in some cases I see a static image with no text work better for somebody.
So the more testing you can do and the more deep you can go with your messaging to stand out, the better your ad results will be.
And like I said, truly 85, 90 percent of time, when your ads aren’t hitting that cost-per-purchase goal or they’re too expensive or they’re not converting, it’s because of your messaging and ad creatives. It takes so much time to really, truly know your customer, but the person who knows them the most and can talk to them the best in the feed will always win.
Mistake #4: Blaming poor results on the ads
This is probably the second biggest social media ad mistakes brands make!
And no, I’m not saying that because I’m biased! For sure, there are plenty of situations where I’ve seen some situations where it actually was the ads causing the crappy results.
One situation quite recently, we audited an ad account for a really awesome creative play product for kids.
It was one of those really cool brands that you see all over Instagram, producing awesome images and videos showing kids how to come up with imaginative play ideas. They had fantastic images and the whole brand personality was bright, vibrant, colourful and FUN!
Yet the ads were sooooooo boring. Like, not even something that would stop you scrolling your newsfeed for long enough to read or look at the ad.
Another scenario we saw recently was for an organic skincare brand that had heaps of amazing social proof with customers giving glowing testimonials and great user generated content on their Instagram feed.
Their ads were performing poorly as well, but it really wasn’t the fault of the ads, it was the website.
The website was poorly designed, confusing navigation, none of the brand personality showing through, and really just did not give website visitors a reason to trust the brand or to purchase.
It would have been an extremely disjointed experience for customers to go from the ad over to the website.
So in the first scenario I described, the ads were the problem, and in the second scenario it was the website.
You really need to use a mix of common sense as well as analytical ability to decipher where the issue is.
That can be hard sometimes – if you’re the brand owner, you’re really close to your brand and familiar with your own website, so it can be really difficult to be objective about reviewing your marketing or your website. But it’s so important to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and look at it from their perspective.
And then, obviously you need to learn how to interpret the actual results the ads are telling you and let that data inform your next steps.
Which leads me to….
Mistake #5: Not paying attention to the numbers
The fifth – and perhaps the most common and the most critical – social media ad mistakes I want to mention today is people don’t pay attention to the numbers in their marketing.
Historically, before the advent of digital marketing which makes it so easy to track results, we used to have to rely on more broadcast style advertising. Like TV, radio, and print advertising in news media and magazines.
Back then, you’d hear the phrase, “I know 50% of my advertising works. I just don’t know which 50%!”
Which was true because it was so broadly targeted.
Nowadays, with digital marketing strategies like social media advertising, it’s a whole lot easier to track your results.
Don’t let that fool you into thinking that you can track results after spending $2 or $10 and assume that’s enough ad spend to extrapolate results out and predict your future success. That’s a scarcity mindset talking.
Like I said earlier, you definitely need to do enough testing to get your messaging and targeting really dialled in and converting.
But beyond that, you need to monitor your performance metrics.
And you need to monitor them across your website and all your marketing channels, not in isolation.
The days are very much gone, where you could expect a customer to purchase after seeing one ad.
Our marketing needs to work as a system, with consistent messaging across multiple channels.
So if you’re reviewing your performance metrics inside your ad manager and you’re seeing a lot of people clicking over to your website but then leaving, go and review your website.
Or if loads of people are adding to cart and then dropping off, don’t just run an abandoned cart ad. Literally go through your website and see if there’s a sticking point at the add to cart point.
We recently had a client experience this scenario and it turned out there was a weird bug in her website that was preventing Android mobile users from adding to cart and either returning to the shop to continue browsing or proceeding forwards and checking out. Major bummer when customers can’t check out of your store huh! Good thing was, we were able to identify and fix that issue and her ads started converting immediately.
Here’s what you can expect when you get your social media ads dialled in:
One of our fashion clients had experienced slowing revenue during the first quarter of 2024. After starting working with us in April, we were able to make improvements to their social media ad strategy, messaging and creatives, website conversion rate and Klaviyo automations.
The screenshot below shows their May results (compared to 2023) – a hearty 292% increase in revenue!
Book a FREE eCommerce Strategy & Planning Session ($1,000 value)
Take advantage of one of our free eCommerce strategy sessions. Click here to book yours today.
Updated 28th May 2024
