Compared to Search or Display Advertising, Facebook Ads are relatively new. There also a different animal than either of those online advertising standbies, which means that a lot of advertisers tend to fall into the same common pitfalls when creating Facebook pay-per-click ads. Avoid them and you’ll be well ahead of the game. Here are the

Top 3 Facebook Mistakes to Avoid

1. Generic Campaigns: Facebook users read what interests them, and unflinchingly ignore anything that doesn’t. So if you expect them to read your Facebook ad, you’d better make it interesting. And that means simply copying your search campaigns over to Facebook and adding a photo will all-but guarantee failure. — as will any generic, boring ad, such as this one:



To avoid this, create your Facebook Ads with the assumption that your ad will be ingored without some kind of compelling engagement strategy. Many high-performing ads have turned to contests, interesting polls, sponsored stories, sweepstakes, giveaways, and good-old un-ignorable headlines and imagery. generic ad with a photo. But whatever techniques and strategies you use, make sure they result in an interesting, fun and utterly non-generic ad.

2. Creepy Images: When it comes to grabbing attention, creepy images definitely get the job done, and that’s good. Unfortunately, that creepy feeling created by the image usually rubs off onto your brand, and that’s far from good. This dog daycare ad is a great example of that. The image looks an ink-stamp of Cujo — dark and threateningly haunted. After seeing that image, do you want your dog anywhere near that daycare?



Before launching your ad, test your images by asking other people in your office how they would respond to the ad. In this case, another good resource to find opinions about this ad image would be any friends with dog owners.

3. Not-so-catchy Headlines: Unlike display ads, you don’t get to bold your text or call to action. Facebook only bolds your headline, making it the most important text that will attract your audience’s attention. For this particular cleaning ad, the headline says nothing about cleaning and has no real relation to the product.



For ad headlines on Facebook, make sure that they’re catchy and that they can stand alone without the ad copy. Consumers’ attention will mainly be focused on the bolded headline, so if they miss the rest of the ad, the headline should convey what you’re trying to advertise.

For insights on ad copy and image ads in your industry, try using the MixRank search engine for display ads. This will give you some ideas on what kind of ads you might want to run on Facebook. Register for a free account here. Good luck!

About MixRank

MixRank is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 95,000 Google AdSense sites. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.