The Mistakes I See in Almost Every Ad Account

This is what I look for in struggling ad accounts.

I’ve seen a whole lot of ad accounts over the years. It’s usually because an account is struggling, and a brand or agency is looking for solutions. While the causes for problems have evolved over the years, there are very common themes now.

There are mistakes that advertisers make so often that I know to look for them.

The first is Audience Segments.

If you haven’t defined your audience segments in Advertiser Settings, you are setting my expectations low for everything else. This isn’t a new feature anymore.

To not have it defined means that you either don’t know about it, don’t know how to define them, or aren’t sure what to do with them. And because you don’t have that information, it impacts the actionable data you have available.

Even if you’ve defined them, advertisers often define them incorrectly or incompletely.

Ultimately, the failure to properly define audience segments is a bad reflection on the agency that is responsible for the account. It’s sloppy, amateur, and possibly even lazy.

The next common mistake is closely related to the first.

The benefit of audience segments is that they allow you to get deeper information into how your ads are delivered. When running Sales campaigns, you can run breakdowns by audience segments to see how your budget and results are distributed.

So even when using algorithmic targeting, you can see how budget is distributed by engaged audience, existing customers, and new audience.

When audience segments are defined fully and accurately and these breakdowns are used, you know that remarketing happens naturally. When you don’t, you assume that remarketing is necessary.

You think that Meta doesn’t value these people the way you do, and targeting needs to be isolated to these groups.

When you lean heavily into remarketing, it shows a misunderstanding of how your budget is distributed naturally. Remarketing is prioritized because Meta knows these people are most likely to convert.

And when you lean heavily into remarketing, you miss opportunities to reach a broader audience.

Remarketing may provide results, but they’re misleading, often inflated, and lack incrementality.

And that leads me to the third mistake I often see.

An agency that is mismanaging an account is obsessed with surface-level conversion results. Whether this is because those results look impressive on the surface and they want to make the client happy, or they simply don’t know better, it’s a bad look.

An experienced advertiser will value getting the most meaningful conversion results, and that starts with understanding the results you’re currently getting.

So they use the breakdown by attribution setting to see how results are distributed between click, view, and engage-through conversions. You should want a heavy concentration on click-through, and even 1-day click.

While you don’t need to completely discard the view-through and engage-through results, you also don’t want them making up a large percentage of conversions. If that happens, it’s usually because you’re remarketing.

You should also use the breakdown by conversion count to get a sense of how many unique customers are performing conversions. You may have 100 conversions, but they may be performed by 80 customers. This can be understood by isolating the First conversions.

And a knowledgeable advertiser will use compare attribution settings to view results beyond how the ad set was optimized. This could mean uncovering 28-day click conversions or viewing how many Meta believes are incremental.

A fourth common mistake I see is restricting by demographic groups and placements.

If you are selling an age-restricted product, that’s one thing. You should restrict by age.

But the mistake I see is that an advertiser will visualize who the ideal customer is by age and gender and they’ll restrict by men aged 25-44. Or they have a negative impression about a placement, like Audience Network, and they’ll universally remove it.

These kinds of restrictions misunderstand how the algorithm works. When you optimize for a purchase, Meta is trying to get you more purchases.

If people outside of a certain gender or age group aren’t converting, Meta will distribute budget accordingly. If Audience Network doesn’t lead to conversions, you’re unlikely to see much, if any, spend there.

The problems can happen when you have information that Meta doesn’t.

Women buy, but they have a lower customer lifetime value. Or people aged 65 and up subscribe, but they’re low-quality leads. Or you get lots of clicks from Audience Network when optimizing for link clicks or landing page views, but they’re low quality.

Resist the urge to restrict in these cases. When you have information that Meta doesn’t, use value rules to adjust bids.

The next problem I see is unnecessarily complicated campaign construction.

This usually comes from a misunderstanding of how targeting works. So they’ll create multiple ad sets for different targeting groups.

But lookalike audiences and detailed targeting are only suggestions when using most performance goals now. Those separate ad sets can reach the same people.

The more campaigns and ad sets you create, the more you slice and dice the limited budget that you have. You duplicate efforts, compete with yourself, and water down your budget.

Prioritize a simplified approach that focuses your budget on your most important goal. Only add complexity when it’s necessary.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

When I hear from an agency that’s struggling to get good results, there are some common things I look for.

Do they define their audience segments? Do they lean heavily into remarketing? Do they have misleading or inflated results? Do they restrict by demographics or placements unnecessarily? And do they create complexity that waters down their budget?

These are just five of the most common mistakes that I see.

Read about all 7 common Meta ads mistakes agencies make at jonloomer.com/mistakes.