How Not to Run Your Facebook Ad

With the tagline “Over 1 billion people. We’ll help you reach the right ones” Facebook has certainly identified itself as a leader when it comes to social media advertising.

Advertising on Facebook gives businesses the opportunity to create custom content and share that content to a specific, targeted audience. This type of targeted advertising is not only cost-effective (Facebook ads are fairly budget friendly) but provides valuable insight about current and potential customers.

While Facebook ads have the potential to transform a company’s social reach, there are factors to be aware of that will affect the performance of your ad.  If your ad is not receiving the desired number of impressions there may be some technical issues at play such as account status, budget, or ad relevance.

Trouble shooting these issues can be fairly straightforward. First off, check your ad status. Ensure that your ad is active, if not then it’s a simple fix, just turn the ad on. Next, confirm that your ad has been approved for posting. Facebook actually reviews each ad that is created before running it to ensure that it adheres to the advertising policies. If policies are not met then the ad is not approved.

Along the same vein, if edits (in particular frequent ones) are made to your ad, a period of 24 hours is required for the Facebook ad delivery system to adjust the performance level of the ad. To the opposite point, if an ad continues to appear without any changes, 3 or more times they tend to decline in performance. It is therefore important to regularly rotate Facebook ads in order to avoid ad fatigue (when people see the same ad too many times they get bored and stop clicking).

Another technical glitch could be timing, has the ad been scheduled to run at a future date and time? This too can be easily amended by checking the scheduling for your ad.

Facebook allows you to choose how much you wish to spend and set an ad budget. Reaching or exceeding your spending limit will disable your Facebook account which means you will have activate the account (and in turn the ad) once again. An ad budget that is set too low for the size of the audience being targeted can significantly impact your reach and can give your competitor the advantage if they’ve spent more advertising dollars.

Ad relevance is also very important when it comes to running a Facebook ad. Once an ad reaches over 500 impressions it is given a relevance score that is based on positive and negative feedback. A low relevance score can mean that the ad is performing poorly with the audience or that the audience is clicking and indicating that they do not wish to see the ad. Facebook will prioritize ads with high relevance scores.

Working with a social media marketing agency can assist with running effective social media marketing sponsored ads on Facebook by knowing exactly what not to do.

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