I know:

• You needed to attract more people to your store,
• Drive new product awareness,
• Build up a brand and boost sales.

With over 890 million daily active users, highest engagement in Ecommerce and an average 152% ROI, Facebook ads seemed like the best platform to achieve it.

But it didn’t work.

Yeah.

You did everything by the book – included copy that prequalifies leads, offered incentives, used trigger words to attract buyers and featured shiny images grabbing their attention.

And yet hardly anyone clicked on your ads, why?

Perhaps Facebook ads suck. That’s it.

But before you discount the platform though, check out these common mistakes online retailers make when advertising on Facebook.

It could be that one of them plagued your campaigns too.

Mistake #1: Poor Audience Targeting

It’s a fact:

“Targeted advertisements are, on average, almost twice as effective as non-targeted ads” (source).

They work because they eliminate the so-called “wasted” advertising – promoting to customers who would never buy your product.

As Ganes Iyer from Berkeley University writes:

“Targeting leads to lower advertising expenditures by reducing the wastage created by sending advertising to consumers who are unlikely to buy.”

But that’s providing that you advertise to the right people.

What happens however, if you display your ads based on wrong audience characteristics?

Just take a look at ads that popped up in Massimo’s feed the other day:

The bottom one by Cloudyn seems highly targeted (after all, Massimo is the CEO of AdEspresso, a cloud based app).

But the other one from Siemens? As Massimo says himself, he doesn’t have a clue what the product is.

Poor audience targeting leads to nothing else but low CTR, lack of relevancy and confusing users.

With the right targeting however you could:

• Find the right customers,
• Deliver targeted messages,
• Reach only to people who could become customers.

Facebook offers powerful targeting tools allowing advertisers to define people they want to connect with by their:

Location

This criterion helps you reach out to people within a specific geographic area. For instance, if apart from selling online you also run a brick and mortar store, you could advertise to people who live relatively close to your premises.

Or alternatively, exclude people from location you don’t ship to.

Demographics

You could also target people based on their demographics:

• Gender,
• Age,
• Relationship status,
• Education,
• Workplace and many more.

(Image courtesy of Facebook)

Interests

One of the greatest strengths of Facebook advertising is that it helps to reach people who, in one way or another, signaled to potentially be interested in your products.

This could mean having a specific hobby, activities, interests but also education, job or even other Facebook Pages they liked.

Behavior

Lastly, you could also reach people based on their purchasing behavior, device usage and other activities.

On top of those 4, Facebook also allows to:

Create Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences let you can create a list of target prospects based on a list of emails, website visitors (via our plugin Pixel Caffeine), Facebook IDs or phone numbers.

Lookalike Audiences

Facebook also allows creating lookalike audiences – lists of people similar to your current customers. Simply create a custom audience and then let the tool to find people who are similar to them.

Therefore, to increase your Facebook Ads ROI, precisely define who you want to display your ads to.

Mistake #2: Promoting Products That Are Too Expensive

A 2011 research published in Personality and Individual Differences journal found that two primary motivations for logging to Facebook are

1. The need to belong and
2. The need for self-presentation.

But not the need to buy.

This of course doesn’t mean that advertising on Facebook doesn’t work.

It however means that not every product will attract audience and sales.

And this statement is especially true in relation to high price ticket items.

Advertising too expensive products is a common mistake of online retailers who have already used Google’s Product Listing Ads. The search engine’s platform is useful to selling any products, regardless of price.

Last year SEMrush researched a price range of products promoted with PLAs. They discovered that 29% of products advertised are within a $100 – $999 prices range.

6% however are priced from $1000 – $9999 (source).

(Image courtesy of SEMrush)

On Facebook however you target audience based on demographics instead of a buying intent (i.e. a particular keyword they used in search). And therefore, chances of attracting sales to high priced items are significantly lower.

When advertising on Facebook, try to hook customers with a cheaper product first. Only then upsell a more expensive one. Or use a lead magnet, email list or other lead generation strategy to convert them into higher sales later.

Mistake #3: Not Using Multiproduct Ads

It’s hard to call this one a mistake really – multiproduct ads are still relatively new.

But not using them is missing out on some great opportunities to promote your products:

• Giving customers more options to choose from.
• Showing different benefits of the same product or,
• Showcasing related products (i.e. the whole clothing range).

What are multiproduct ads?

They are a new dynamic product ad type that allows to display multiple products in a single ad.

Because of the ability to show more than one product, they can REALLY increase the effectiveness of your marketing:

• Drive more visitors to your store. Since you’re presenting more than one product, you’re giving the audience more reasons to click the ad.
• Improve conversion rates. The more products customers see, the greater the chance of them buying one.

But do they work?

According to Wolfgang Digital, an Irish digital marketing agency, their ecommerce customers experienced:

A 6% CTR with multiproduct ads, a 66% increase over click-through rate achieved through other ad types (source).

Adobe also discovered that for their customers’ multiproduct ads:

• Increased CTR by 50 to 300% and,
• Reduced cost per click up to 35%.

Mistake #4: Wrong Ad Placement

Did you know that there are 5 possible ad placements on Facebook:

1. Two in the right column on desktop,
2. Two placements on mobile – in the mobile newsfeed and mobile apps and,
3. One in the desktop’s News Feed.

And each placement delivers different CTR and other results.

In one of their tests, for instance, AdEspresso discovered that:

Right column placement was really effective for campaigns with big reach. However, on campaign targeting smaller audience (targeting either Custom Audience or Interest Intersection), the placement performed quite poorly and didn’t even reach the allocated budget spend.

Quick Tip: Something to remember when using the right column placement is that the image is quite small. If you use the same graphic as in the Newsfeed, it might become illegible, reducing the ads performance.

Mobile newsfeed however delivered constant results across all tests.

And as Massimo points in research’s conclusion:

“…social ads on mobiles performs really well and constantly deliver Likes and engagement at a very cheap price”.

When optimizing your campaigns it’s important to split test Facebook ads to establish which placement delivers better results and then focus your efforts and budget on that.

Mistake #5: Not Using Facebook Ads to Retarget Customers

It’s a shocking statistic when you hear it for the first time:

Approximately 71% of your customers will leave a checkout without completing a purchase.

It means that not even a third will actually buy from you.

But it’s even more shocking that 26% of abandoners will return to buy….

…. when remarketed!

Without retargeting however, only 8% of them will ever come back to complete the purchase.
Facebook Website Custom Audiences lets you target people who have visited your site, added product to a cart but never completed a purchase.
And does it work?

According to Wishpond, yes:

• Visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% times more likely to convert.
• The average click-through rate for retargeted ads is 10 times higher than normal display ads.
• Retargeting can lead to a 147% higher conversion rate.

To increase your Facebook ads effectiveness, don’t run them to new visitors only. Use Website

Custom Audiences to retarget to people who are familiar with your brand and store. And with the 100% free plug-in, Pixel Caffeine, you can create all sorts of custom audiences from your website visitors with a few simple clicks.

And so…

Did you make any of these common mistakes? Are any of those a reason of your campaign’s poor performance? Let us know in the comments.