11 Exasperatingly Common Mistakes in Meta Ad Campaigns

Meta (Facebook) ad campaigns, done right, can be a great fit for brands looking to find customers at every point in the purchase journey. They’re also competitive, with increasingly expensive CPCs and CPMs pushing advertisers to talk more and more about “performance” and “efficiency.”

Despite this focus on getting more from every dollar, we still see certain mistakes made over and over when we audit campaigns of potential new clients.

Whether or not you’ve ever thought of becoming a Blackbird client, do yourself a favor and make sure you’re not guilty of doing these in your Meta campaigns. Correct any mistakes you’re making on this list, and you’ll actually be taking steps toward more efficient campaigns.

Without further ado, the Meta advertising mistakes we see all too frequently are:

1. Oversegmenting . This is a particularly sticky issue for early-stage companies who don’t have the data volume to support tons of ad groups but want to test a wide variety of target/ad combinations. The number of ad groups for separate targeting is 100 percent correlated with the number of conversions: the more ad groups, the thinner the conversion density is spread, and the longer Meta’s algorithm spends in the inefficient learning phase.  (This is the same reason you don’t want to make too many budget changes that reset learning.) 

Don’t simply take what Apple is giving you for conversion data in the Facebook/Instagram apps; use OCT (offline conversion transfer) and Facebook’s CAPI to link Facebook click IDs to eventual conversions. This will increase your Facebook conversion volume and give you more data to use for segmentation and testing.  

2. Not enough diversity of creative and messaging. We see a lot of Meta programs set up in a structure that aims for clean A/B testing but won’t produce a clean result. The idea that one ad is the best for one targeting group is compelling but is too much of an ideal. You want to have a diversity of creatives being tracked through shared qualities. 

In this assortment of ads, curiosity about CBD is the shared quality, but each ad appeals to a different question: what CBD is in general, the role it can play in mental health, and how it works to affect sleep.

3. Ignoring Meta as a B2B option. We work with a substantial number of enterprise B2B companies, specifically in tech. Years ago, Meta produced very shaky B2B lead quality, and we still hear B2B advertisers dismiss Meta because it doesn’t match LinkedIn’s target criteria and query intent – which is a mistake. Importing email lists is an easy way to find cheaper impressions with your target audience, but true prospecting also works. 

That said, any B2B Meta campaigns must integrate first-party conversion data from your back end – think at least MQL level but ideally even later-stage – to train the algorithm on what works.

4. Under-optimizing mobile LPs and creatives. Even in 2023, this issue persists. Generally, marketers work from desktops and laptops, which creates a fundamental bias toward desktop and laptop ad optimization. That means that from a mobile perspective, there’s still an epidemic of garbage and non-mobile-friendly creative. Here’s a simple litmus test: are you using Reels in your campaigns? If not, you’re guilty of this.

5. Under-investing in video. Is it slightly easier to build a single-image creative than a gif? Yes. Does that merit single images getting the lion’s share of variety, quantity, and testing? Emphatically: no. You’ll earn almost across-the-board performance gains by adding gifs and videos to your campaigns.

6. Including view-through optimization without site visitors excluded. This is an oldie but a goodie. Impressions and views can be an important component in the halo effect, but not in this instance. People already familiar with your site are heavily biased to be non-incremental conversions. View-through conversions increase that bias even more! Simply: if you don’t exclude site visitors from VTC, you’re giving VTC too much credit.  Retargeting can be incremental, and VTC can be incremental, but together they almost never are.  

7. Overcounting long cookie windows for attribution. We see a massive decline in incremental conversions as the cookie window lengthens. Meta seems to agree; they’ve specifically shortened default cookie windows to discourage advertisers from overcounting longer windows. This is actually a pretty intuitive concept, but it runs into real-world resistance because most marketing programs have massive incentives to over-represent their impact on the bottom line. (If the CFO were running marketing campaigns, this would be corrected very quickly.) Generally, 1-day or 7-day click windows should be the default – stay away from 28-day reporting.  

8. Never running an on/off test. Meta has made it somewhat easy for marketers to measure the true impact of their campaigns; you can run any of a range of native lift studies (shown below) to gauge incrementality with pretty good accuracy. You can also limit the ripple effects on campaign volume by structuring the tests to target isolated geos. It’s well worth losing a few sales to understand the actual impact of your ads, but most Meta advertisers don’t run these tests.

9. Exclusive (or non-existent) use of Advantage Plus campaigns. Meta originally marketed Advantage Plus as an alternative to classic campaigns, but they’ve since softened their approach: they’re a whole other type of campaign, powered by AI, that targets different audiences using different signals. Don’t replace your old Meta campaigns with Advantage Plus, and don’t ignore them; run the campaigns in tandem for minimum audience overlap. 

10.  Misusing retargeting campaigns. Many retargeting campaigns like to employ super-high frequencies. This is a poor experience for users, especially those who have just purchased. If you’re going to run retargeting campaigns, make sure you’re always excluding converters, monitoring frequencies, and calculating both marginal return and average return to keep an eye on true campaign efficiency.  

11. Not watching demographics. Here’s a fun quirk: if your campaigns do not have enough conversion signals for the algo to optimize, you will be automatically over-indexed in the age 65+ women bracket. Often, we see a product aimed at men aged 35 to 45 get 90 percent of its impressions coming from women over 65. 

Whether you’re running your own campaigns or working with an agency, committing any of these mistakes regularly is a sign you might benefit from an outside audit (or even new campaign management). It’s hard enough out there without making unforced errors, so stay up to date on best practices and make sure you’re not throwing away precious budget where it won’t benefit your bottom line.