1) Facebook Pixel not installed on your site, or your events are configured incorrectly.

The Facebook Pixel is a line of code that links your website to your Facebook Ad Account.

Not having a Facebook Pixel installed means you’re not tracking your ads, and you’re not allowing Facebook to optimize correctly. A critical error to say the least!

Check if your pixel is installed properly by using the Facebook Pixel Helper Plug-in for Google Chrome.

2) Your website load speed is abysmal

It?s been said that up to 50% of your website visitors expect your website to load in two seconds or less. Two seconds!

Over 90% of Facebook?s ads are being shown to folks on mobile.

Many of them aren?t connected to wifi. So if you haven?t tested your mobile website load speed, chances are your site loads slowly and potential website visitors are dropping off at an alarming rate.

Inside your Facebook Ads Manager, compare your Outbound Clicks to your Landing Page Views. Are you receiving 400 Outbound Clicks on an ad, but only 20 Landing Page Views? That’s a 95% bounce rate. Bad news!

Check your website load speed now.

3) You’re optimizing for the wrong objective

In recent years, Facebook has become particularly great at finding the most likely buyers for eCommerce businesses.

You must, however, ask Facebook to find them, and that?s what optimizing for purchases at the top of the funnel is all about.

By optimizing for purchases right off the hop, you?re telling Facebook you want it to go find you the folks out there who most closely resemble people who have purchased from you in the past (glad you got that Pixel installed, huh?).

Coupling this objective with a sufficiently large Lookalike Audience of your previous buyers can be a particularly powerful combo.

While not all of them will buy on their first visit, you?re now populating your website with the folks who Facebook has deemed most likely to buy from you when all is said and done (perhaps after seeing your retargeting ads over the following week, for example.)

Always optimize for what you REALLY want to happen at the Top of the Funnel. Want more purchasers (as is true 99% of the time)? Optimize for purchases. Looking for subscribers? You know what to do.

Beware the clickity-clickers that your traffic campaign will drive to your site. All too often, they’re not the buying type.

4) You?re not testing enough creative/copy/hook variations

Far, far too often when my colleagues and I audit an account we see one single ad inside of an ad set. This is a critical error.

Different subsets of your audience respond to different messages in different ways. Part of the incredible magic of Facebook?s AI is its ability to pick up on these nuances and deliver the right message to the right prospect at the right time.

You must be testing each variation adequately in isolation. Facebook recommends 8,000 impressions for an ad?s delivery to stabilize. Once you?ve discovered your top images, top pieces of copy and top hooks, create a set of ads that are unique from each other, and run them all in your ad set. This will help leverage Facebook?s AI to the maximum.

A worthwhile endeavour indeed!

5) Not stacking Social Proof

Social Proof is the concept that if other people are interested in something, perhaps I ought to be interested too. It is an incredibly profound force and, whether we like to admit it or not, we are all susceptible to its pull.

Likes, Comments and Shares (known as ?reactions?) on a Facebook post are immensely valuable to your brand. The more social proof you can build on a post, the more it sticks out on peoples? newsfeeds as something they ought to check out.

A critical error we often see in accounts is folks neglecting to stack social proof.

The concept of stacking social proof refers to the method of using the exact same Facebook post, with the exact same Ad ID in multiple ad sets and even multiple campaigns, as opposed to creating a different version of that same ad in each ad set.

This will allow you to build one big, popular post with all the comments and reactions in one place! You’ll be shocked to see the difference in click-through rates on posts with a lot of social proof vs the exact same post with only a few likes on it.

So there you have it! Those are the top 5 simple yet critical errors that might be occurring in your Facebook Ads Campaigns.

I hope you?ve found some useful info in this article to help patch some leaks and get you back on track to profitability.?

I take on a very select few clients each year. To discover if my team and I can help grow your business with Facebook Ads, schedule a free call with me here.

Until next time,

Milo