I’ve been coaching businesses on how to increase their sales with Facebook ads for the past two years and I’ve noticed that businesses who start with Facebook ads, exhibit a lot of the same mistakes at first.  This became really clear to me after our Office Hours session last Wednesday. I figured it would be helpful for the Soldsie community to get a brief recap the learnings from the latest office hours and also a highlight of the best practices I shared.

Also, we are hosting office hours, this Thursday, October 8th, 2015 at 1PM PST.  Sign up now!

1. Don’t Be Cheap! You Have to Spend Money to Make Money.

I often hear people telling stories of how spending less than $50 on a Facebook ad gets them many comments on their post and ultimately drives sales.  If it was really that easy and true, everyone would be boosting posts on Facebook for $5, $10, $15 and be rich.  The truth is, spending $50 on an ad, just to spend $50 is a bad approach.  Be willing to spend $100 or more on an ad.  You should spend as much as you need to figure out if it’s a good product to promote or not.  Once you’ve done that, you want to keep spending money on an ad as long as it’s generating sales to give you positive ROI.  I want to remind everyone that it may seem like a lot of money, but from my experience Facebook advertising is much better ROI in Cost Per Click (or Engagement) than other social networks such as Twitter and Linkedin.

We recently highlighted one of our sellers and their recent exponential growth on Facebook with ads. Take my advice. Be willing to spend the money on running proper ads for your business.  Spending $5 on an ad is not going to get you 617% sales growth through the platform.  

  1. Facebook Ads are Not Rotisserie Chickens.  You Can’t Just Set It and Forget It.

On the flip side, I see lots of people who are inspired by stories of businesses who make a huge ROI after spending lots of money on Facebook ads.  The mistake they make is that they run ads with a huge budget and forget about them. They expect to come back days later to a huge increase in sales, but in reality, they don’t see any increase in sales or return on their ad spend.   What they don’t realize is that they need to watch the ads and manage them while they’re running.   

Here’s my analogy for this: You hire a new employee who has great potential, but if you don’t train and manage them at the beginning, there’s a good chance they’re not going to bring your business the value they could if you had provided them the training and management at the beginning.  The same goes for ads, you have to manage them when you run them to make sure you get the desired results for your business.  

What metrics should you be watching and after what point?  Start looking at the metrics before and after it reaches 1500 people to get a fair assessment of how the ad is performing.  The metrics you want to watch are: Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and Comments (for comment selling posts).  Make sure your Cost Per Engagement is low (under $0.20).  If it’s high then your ad creative/copy is not resonating with the audience you’re targeting, and you should stop the add and adjust something.  For a comment selling post, I recommend watching how many comments your ad is getting as low CPE can be misleading.  The post could get a lot of likes from the ad which drives the CPE down.  Make sure your ad is getting comments which can directly translate into sales. Lastly, monitor your actual sales and make sure this is translating into direct revenue.  If an ad is not performing, you should shut it off and analyze why it did not perform and make changes for your next ad.   

Read about our 8 Best Practices For Facebook Ads and don’t make these two mistakes.  If you’ve made them before, don’t feel silly because you’re not the only one who’s done it.  Just make sure to learn from this and don’t do it again.  

Have more questions about Facebook Ads?  Email  or tweet me @alansoldsie.

Written by Alan

@Soldsie