6 Common Meta Ads Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

Running Meta ads can be a powerful way to grow your business, but only if they’re done right.

Whether you’re new to the advertising world or if you’ve been in it for years, there’s a lot to look out for and think about when crafting the perfect campaign to reach your potential customers.

When we audit Paid Social accounts, we often see that advertisers are wasting budget or missing out on results due to a few common (and avoidable) mistakes.

In this guide, we’ll break down the most frequent Meta ads missteps, and if it turns out that you’re making these mistakes, not to worry! We’ll also show you how to fix them for a better performance.

1) You’re Over-Relying on Boosted Posts

Sometimes, when we’re asked to audit ad accounts, we come to find that posts have only been boosted, or they’re heavily relied on for the ad strategy. This is great for a quick visibility boost, but it’s not by any means an effective way to run ads.

It’s very easy to use, but boosting posts lack advanced targeting, bidding and optimisation capabilities that Meta’s full Ads Manager has. If you’re looking to drive sales and leads, you’re essentially wasting your money by boosting posts.

Even if you’re desperate to use an existing organic post for your ads, this can be done on Ads Manager with a full host of targeting capabilities.

In short, if you’re looking to seriously advertise across Meta, scrap the boosted posts!

2) No Clear Campaign Objective

One of the most common Meta Ads mistakes is selecting the wrong campaign objective, or not really understanding what the objective is designed to do.

Meta offers different campaign objectives based on your goals: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. We’ve discussed each objective in a previous blog, which goes into great detail about what each should be used for, so check that out for a more in-depth guide to the objectives!

But in a nutshell, make sure that your campaign objectives match your business goals. An example we often see is advertisers using the Traffic objective to drive more website visitors in the hope that this will increase sales and leads. Incorrect! While we understand the logic, Meta’s algorithm does not.

We’d recommend working backwards with your business goals to work out your campaign objectives: 

• Goal number 1: Sales. Create a campaign with the sales objective
• Goal number 2: Boost brand visibility to find new potential customers. Create a secondary campaign with the traffic objective to run alongside your sales funnel

3) Missing Your Target Audience

You’ve set up your campaign with the right objective, you have a killer offering and brilliant ad copy… but no one’s clicking through to your website.

It might be time to take a step back and look at who you’re showing your ads to, and whether they really care about what you’re showing them.

We regularly see advertisers miss the mark when trying to target their audiences, casting the net too wide or repeatedly targeting the same narrow group. Common targeting issues include:

• Overly broad audiences: Broad targeting can work for large budgets and when your account has a strong conversion action with a lot of data, this is where using Advantage+ campaign types would be great. However, if you’re relatively new to advertising, or you haven’t received many conversions, a broad audience can often lead to irrelevant impressions.
• Extremely narrow audiences: On the other end, if you’re targeting a small segment of users in a small location, you can limit your reach very quickly, which can lead to ad fatigue. We understand that if you’re a niche business, there might not be much you can do here. However, keep in mind that repeatedly showing the same ad to the same small group for months on end may have the opposite effect on your brand than intended.
• Not using lookalike and custom audiences: These audience types are arguably higher intent than using saved audiences, so not utilising these could result in you missing out on those most likely to interact with your brand.

We’d recommend to use layered targeting when creating a saved audience – combining demographics, interests and behaviours as a smarter way to reach your target audience. Using the ‘narrow audience’ feature where applicable if your initial audience is too broad.

In some instances, we’d recommend refreshing your audiences semi-regularly, especially the more niche businesses with a smaller audience.

4) Poor Ad Creative

On the flip side, what if you have your target audience nailed down, but you’re still not seeing clicks? Have a look at your ads, because no matter how smart your targeting may be or how optimised your structure is, your ad is your audience’s first impression. The hook is often the deciding factor between a click or a scroll.

Your creative needs to grab the audience’s attention. You’re competing with posts and trending content, so if your ad creative doesn’t stop a user from scrolling, then it’s lost to Meta’s ether.

For a good ad creative, you need eye-catching visuals and clear, captivating messaging. When we audit accounts, we see far too often one or the other, rather than both.

If you’re running ads on Meta, be prepared to invest in your visuals. Using basic product images and videos will only take you so far and using stock images with no text and/or hook for lead gen won’t get you anywhere.

For your messaging, you need to get into the audience’s frame of mind and try to showcase to them why they need your product or service.

Remember, other advertisers in your industry may be doing the same thing, so you need to show them what puts you above the rest in your ad copy. Headlines focusing on their needs and how you can help them might stop them in their tracks and compel them to read on.

If your campaign is less sales and leads-oriented, a good creative is still needed to tell your brand story. Building trust and recognition will come from sleek photography and video, relatable testimonial videos or emotional storytelling. Show your audience who you are and why they should care.

5) Poor Use of Campaign Budget Strategy

Also known as an Advantage+ campaign budget strategy, this allows you to give Meta a daily or lifetime budget, and it will spend it across your ad sets to give you the best results based on Meta’s algorithm and your campaign data.

This is a good budget strategy to use if you have a sizeable budget and a few ad sets that all have equally amounts of data going through them. 

However, a mistake we sometimes see is an over-reliance on using this strategy. If you have a low budget, or one ad set with much more conversion data than the other, you can sometimes find that the campaign with the most data is favoured in terms of the direction of ad spend. 

If you have a really high-performing ad set then sure, you want Meta to push more budget to this, but where does that leave new ad sets you want to give an opportunity?

Utilising budgets at an ad set level gives you much greater control over what you’re spending per day across each area.

This is ideal for advertisers who have highly specific audiences for different services or product ranges, and they want to give them each equal attention, or at least control how much they want to spend across each audience.

6) Your Budget Is Too Low

If you’re new to advertising, you might consider casting the net out wide to cover as many people as possible via your ad sets.

This, in theory, is fine, however, if you have a lot of audiences you want to test or if you want to push numerous products via separate ad sets, then you may be at risk of spreading your budget too thin.

If you have a constrained budget, then creating lots of ad sets and spreading your money across them all is the best way to get limited results.

When your campaigns and ad sets start to run, they enter a learning phase, and in order to exit the learning phase, you require a good amount of data to pass through them.

With a low budget, you may find your campaigns and ad sets not getting the data they need to pass this learning phase.

As a result, your campaigns may not mature enough to actually get the best results possible. If you have a smaller budget at hand, we’d recommend combining similar ad sets and consolidating your budget.

If there are lots of areas you want to test, we’d recommend start with fewer campaigns and ad sets in order to give what you have running as much budget as possible.

A Quick Recap

To get the most out of your Meta ads, focus on the things that really matter to avoid these common mistakes.

• Stop relying on boosted posts and see what Meta Ads manager has to offer
• Use your wider business objectives to tailor your Meta campaign set up and strategy
• Put high-quality creative at the forefront of your campaigns
• Ensure all campaigns have enough budget to get the most out of your performance
• Even with great creative and a strong strategy, your ads will only perform if you’re capturing the right people who care about your product

How We Can Help

As this blog has highlighted, Meta is a complex platform and while avoiding these common mistakes can help you drive better results and optimise your ad spend, there are a lot of areas to consider and navigate when it comes to Meta Ads.

At The SEO Works, we don’t just run Meta ads – we make them work smarter. Our Paid Social experts have experience working on a variety of Meta Ad accounts, covering lead generation and ecommerce businesses. Why not check out our Paid Social Services to see how we can help you navigate through the world of Meta advertising?