Common Facebook Advertising Advice We Don't Agree With

You’ve Got to Spend Money to Be Successful

This advice hurts me personally. No one should push your business to spend more money than you can allocate toward advertising. We’ve helped plenty of small businesses ramp up their Facebook advertising within their budget and achieve a positive return on their ad spend. Sure, you need to spend enough to get learnings, but the initial testing budget can be as low as $3,500 / month. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that you have to spend five figures on ads during the first month. (Also keep out for contracts with advertising agencies that are spend based, as sometimes incentives aren’t aligned with the client’s best interests.) 

Do What Your Competitors Are Doing

Is this real advice? We had to double check that other agencies are even suggesting this in order to believe it. One of the biggest advantages of social media advertising is that social platforms are the place to show a company’s personality and culture. It’s a venue to stand out and show your and your company’s unique self. Copying what your competitors are doing whether it is mirroring their creative, their ad placements, or their offering, will only get you so far. Spread your wings instead, do you.

X,Y, and Z Works the Best

The number of anecdotal tips and helpful suggestions flying around can make anyone’s head spin:

“videos work the best” 

“don’t bother with X ad placement” 

“I’ve tested that before and it doesn’t work”

Following advice like this can feel like you’re getting a head start but it could also backfire and limit your advertising potential. It’s true, there are general trends within Facebook on what is working, but they don’t last forever and you’ll never know the age of the advice you’re getting. The point is, you’ll never know what is going to work best for your company until you test it. You never know, you might discover the newest trend that other companies are missing out on.

Ugh, $*%# Vanity Metrics 

Please, take vanity metrics with a grain of salt. Of course it’s seductive to know how many people liked your post, but keep in mind that real meat should always be results: leads, conversions, revenue, ROAS.

You Can “Beat the Algorithm”

To this advice, we’d typically say, “Nope. Let Facebook do its thing.” It has been true for years. Facebook observes and knows behaviors, interests, demographics and can do an excellent job targeting and optimizing your ads to the right audience for success. 

Things have changed recently with large stakeholders in the space creating tighter privacy policies, i.e. the Apple iOS 14 release and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As more people opt out of tracking, Facebook and other advertising platforms are receiving less engagement and conversion data on an individual basis. This is making it more difficult to observe interest and behavior data and therefore micro-target to your prospective customer base. Because of this, strategies have had to adapt as we all adjust to limited targeting and reporting. We discuss this in more depth and the after effects of Apple’s iOS 14 release if you want to learn more about this topic.

Without getting too far into the weeds on this topic we can say, if you’re struggling to get your advertising off the ground - let us help. We’d love to help you get started with their online advertising and provide a personalized strategy for your business. If that interests you, contact us here.