Most marketers won’t tell you this: it’s really easy to lose money with “normal” Facebook and Instagram ads. Unless you’re dropping major bucks, Meta doesn’t care (and sure won’t lift a pinky to help). If you’re running ads yourself, here are three ways to avoid setting your money on fire:
(From here on, we’ll use “Meta” to refer to Facebook and Instagram—they use the same Meta Ads Manager platform.)
1) Quit Messing with Your Budget. Tweaking your budget too often can frustrate Meta’s ad algorithm—and believe me, they’ll penalize you for it. Obviously, sometimes you need to scale campaigns up and down, but you don't need to be fiddling with it all day. Let the algorithm breathe; give it a few days at a time to work with your campaign. Chasing sales by tweaking ads nonstop is like your dog chasing its tail: equally frustrating and equally unlikely to spell success.
2) Boosted Posts are easy but rarely hit the mark. Meta makes it deceptively simple to boost a post and feel like you’re driving results. Usually, you’re just driving profits for Mark Zuckerberg. You can’t use any of the (crucial) advanced targeting or optimization features with boosted posts. It’s like shouting into the wind, but worse: instead of wasting your breath, you’re wasting your marketing budget. Skip the boost and opt for Ads Manager to get real results.
3) Auto Placements are awful for awareness and traffic. I’ll be fair; auto-placed ads can work wonders for the right sales campaigns. But for awareness or traffic, all they do is invite Meta to send you the bottom of the barrel: low-quality clicks and cheap traffic. Meta’s point of view here seems to be that if you don’t care enough about traffic quality to set some basic parameters, why should Meta bother pulling your chestnuts out of the fire? If you don’t specify traffic quality, Meta sure won’t.
BONUS - Don’t Overdo Ad Frequency. Overexposure spells ad fatigue. And if there’s one thing people hate, it’s stale ads getting in their faces again. Shoot for a frequency under 3 to keep your audience engaged. (You can see this data in your Ads Manager interface.)
P.S. I was reading somewhere that online platforms tend to follow the same three stages. First, they woo users by providing value. Then, they disregard their users in favor of their advertisers. Finally, they deprioritize their advertisers to ultimately serve… themselves.
I’ll leave it to you to decide where Meta stands on that spectrum today.
P.P.S. If you think Meta’s a handful, don’t miss my guide on how not to get screwed by our other favorite ad machine, Google.