7 Budget-Wasting Facebook Ad Mistakes Law Firms Make (+ How to Avoid Them)

Facebook ads is a constantly evolving platform, and because of that best practices are likewise ever changing. On such a complex platform, it’s not always easy to know if you’re doing the right things. That’s why many law firms end up using their budget ineffectively on Facebook advertising. Here are 7 Facebook ad mistakes that can eat up your advertising budget, and what to do about them.

1. Using stale ad creative

It can be annoying to see the same ads offering the same things over and over. If you just use the same creative all the time, you’re not only encouraging users to simply keep scrolling, you’re creating a negative connotation with your brand. Making new creative is time-consuming, but critical. Look around for inspiration (Facebook even offers a place to do so). Remember that not all creative needs to be completely unique and custom. Of course, that would be ideal, but realistically no one has time for that – so don’t be afraid of stock imagery. It’s also a good idea to get smarter on design tools. Options like Canva make creating easier with pre-designed templates. 

2. Optimizing for incorrect objectives

Facebook has a lot of ways to optimize for goals, and that can end up being confusing. Remember that at the highest level, each campaign objective has their own actions they will optimize for. Ensuring you choose the correct campaign objective is an important step in beginning your campaign. You may also want to spend more time on the Optimizations and Delivery adjustments that can be made at the ad set level for almost all campaigns. Spend time thinking about the actions you really want to drive, and choose options appropriately. Don’t be afraid to test and tweak until you are driving more of the desired activity. 

3. Not understanding the complexity of budget controls

Facebook offers some of the most robust budget management of all digital platforms. That’s great for seasoned advertisers, but for people newer to the platform it can get fairly confusing. For example, daily budgets help balance out spend each day. While your campaigns will still try to get as many conversions as possible, they will also spend your daily budget each day regardless of performance. Lifetime budgets optimize for goals within days but don’t always reach the target spend for each day, which can make pacing difficult. And that’s on top of scheduling and other tools you need to manage.

4. Over-segmenting your audiences

A thorough understanding of your audience is critical for effective ad performance and avoiding any Facebook ad mistakes. On occasion though, being too sophisticated with your audience segmentation can cost you. That’s because Facebook needs data in order to optimize campaigns. If you are segmenting your audiences too far and putting them into different ad sets, it will be hard to get out of Facebook’s algorithmic learning phase. Then you might miss valuable KPIs which can help your strategy. Also, smaller audiences make it more expensive to gain impressions. To avoid this problem, keep your audience mappings logical, but not too narrow. Many experts recommend anywhere between 2 and 40 million users in a target audience. 

5. Not accounting for audience overlaps

Over-segmentation is one issue with Facebook audiences. On the other end of the spectrum is having users fall into multiple groups – so you’re essentially creating lots of audience groups to reach the same people. This matters because it makes it harder to see what’s working with your campaigns, and it can also cause ad fatigue for people you’re advertising to. Make sure to use Facebook’s Audience Overlap Tool which allows you to compare the audience make-ups of saved, lookalike, and custom audiences within your Facebook audience manager. 

6. Controlling placements rather than customizing

When users get to the Placements portion of the ad set controls, they are often tempted to pick and choose which to have their ad show up in. That’s not very effective, though, because the audience you target will always be the same regardless of which placement you’re serving your ads from. And, removing placements gives Facebook less data to work with to get the results you’re looking for. We suggest showing up in all placements first, and customizing from there. 

7. Failing to nurture audiences throughout the funnel

Even the best campaigns can’t out-perform a lack of follow-through. Your goal should be to create a full buyer journey. This is especially important if you’re using Reach, Engagement, or Video Views campaigns to generate brand awareness. Ideally you can create remarketing lists of users that engaged with your campaigns to target them with more mid-to-bottom of the funnel ads. Make sure that as you get to the bottom of the funnel, you’re using CTAs to generate action. 

Related: How your Law Firm Can Create a Lead Nurturing Strategy in 5 Steps

Takeaway: 

At the end of the day, advertising on Facebook can be incredibly profitable for law firms. That being said, things sometimes go wrong simply because it’s such a complex platform. If you’re not seeing the results you want, start by reviewing these 7 Facebook ad mistakes and addressing them. 

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