Advertising Mistakes: 10 Common Mistakes Sellers Make in Advertising

Estimated reading time:   7 minutes

I believe that many new sellers have fallen into many traps when they first placed advertisements. Some of them did not even make back their capital, and some even lost their houses, cars, wives and children.

Today let’s take a look at the common mistakes sellers make when placing advertisements.

1. Not placing ads according to advertising goals

If your advertising goal is to gain public attention and expand brand awareness, then you can create a homepage post interactive ad (engagement ad).

As shown in the example below, the Deluxe Letter Board brand wanted to get more exposure, so they created an ad with the exposure goal and received 1.2k likes at a price of 2 cents per click.

But when it created a conversion ad, it used the same ad but didn’t generate any sales because the goal of the post was to drive engagement, and the Facebook pixel didn’t collect enough data about which users were likely to buy the product.

So ads whose goal is to be interactive cannot generate any sales , no matter how popular the content is.

Some sellers believe that it is best to keep the Audience Definition indicator of Facebook ads in the middle (as shown in the figure below). This leads some sellers to set the goal of seeing the words "Your audience is defined" on the page every time they create an ad. However, in fact, the ads that perform best have a wider audience. In other words, the indicator is slightly to the right of the green area, and the ad performs best.

If you only have one product in your store, or the page you’re directed to is a landing page, then that’s fine.

For example, Shopify’s Add to Cart button is prominently located on the product page, but on the homepage, shoppers have to scroll down to see it. The longer it takes customers to find the Add to Cart button, the less likely they are to make a purchase.

Therefore, sellers must ensure that consumers can pay seamlessly after clicking on your ads to increase conversion rates.

The biggest problem for sellers who don’t make much profit from advertising is that they don’t learn from previous advertising failures, which is one of the factors that affect the profits brought by advertising. There are many new sellers who have invested thousands of dollars in advertising but have not received a single order.

In addition, it is important to fully consider the advertising costs before pricing your product . Many novice sellers keep bidding when placing ads, but they don’t think about whether the final bid will bring benefits.

Sellers can use the Amazon Affiliate Program to reduce advertising expenses. It can bring traffic and sales to sellers, and only take a certain commission from the sales.

When pricing your product, stay within the market price. If you are a seller of women's tops and you see that your competitor is pricing it at $40, then you can price it that way, too. Don't blindly bid, as this is the easiest way to lose money.

Practice has shown that the product images with the highest conversion rates contain some celebrities or influencers. You can find and privately message some influencers on Instagram who match your niche product ideas and collaborate with them.

It is recommended that sellers upload product pictures like this :

• Demonstrate product performance and advantages

• Detailed description text or picture

• Contains different angles of the product

• Different color scheme from the theme to highlight the product (as shown below)

New sellers often forget to test the payment process before adding the pixel code to track user data. During the self-testing process, sellers sometimes find that the user interface is completely different from the seller interface. If you are a seller selling print-on-demand products, you should check the shipping fee in the user interface payment. This can save many unnecessary abandoned shopping carts.

It is recommended that sellers book a test sample before adding the pixel code to their website so that Facebook will not crawl the website data and build a similar audience based on you, because you yourself are likely not the ideal customer for your product.

After placing a test ad and before creating an ad, add Facebook pixel or pixel code from other advertising platforms to your website to capture user data and build a similar audience. This will increase the conversion rate of your product.

One of the most common mistakes that novices make when using Pinterest to advertise is to mistakenly believe that posting promotions means advertising on Pinterest. This is probably because Pinterest's promotion function is visible after pinning (sharing) to other websites, and sometimes people do enter the store by clicking on the post, so sellers can easily misunderstand it.

In addition, some sellers even use their personal accounts to post. Then the people who see your ads are limited to your fans, and by the time you realize this problem, the advertising budget has been spent.

In fact, Pinterest has its own advertising platform . Pinterest Pins ads require payment to use, and like Facebook ads, you can segment your audience and filter out your ideal customers.

If your advertising goal is to focus on increasing conversion rates, it is recommended that sellers do not use personal accounts for advertising, even if you have a lot of fans on your account. It is best to use a business account.

There is a very important point that almost many sellers overlook, that is, the purpose of creating Facebook ads. The purpose of most sellers is to bring accurate traffic to the store .

Example: A seller of yoga mats saw her store sales double after she wrote an article about yoga. How did she do it? It turned out that her article was about a well-known yoga influencer, sharing some yoga tips, which brought in a lot of relevant traffic. Then she put the Facebook pixel code on her website to capture user data and create retargeting ads.

Then, she contacted the influencer on social media and told him that she was mentioned in the article. Through the influencer's sharing, the seller's store received a lot of relevant traffic and further sales. These sales in turn promoted the effectiveness of the advertisement, forming a virtuous circle.

There are billions of people in the world, with different beliefs, values, personality traits, and personal preferences. As a seller, you need to be aware of this before placing an ad, so as not to offend potential customers unintentionally.

For example , if you sell clothing, you might want to be mindful of how much skin people are allowed to show in countries where clothing is more conservative.

Someone once included a picture of a "punk rock grandma" in an advertisement, which ended up offending many Europeans. (Note: The hand gesture in the picture is an insult)

Therefore, when creating your ads, be sure to segment your audience and take into account the culture and values ​​of the country you are targeting.

Some sellers have opened several online stores, but they didn’t set up retargeting ads early, wasting advertising costs. Retargeting ads usually have a higher return on investment. Most of the top ten performing ads can be seen as retargeting ads.

The beauty of retargeting ads is that they can get a large number of first-time buyers . Not every consumer who visits a store has the intention to buy something.

Creating retargeting ads as soon as possible can save you a lot of advertising budget.

To recover abandoned shopping carts, redirecting the add to carts button is more effective than sending customers an email; redirecting blog traffic, like the seller selling yoga mats in the example above, can increase product sales.

To be successful in advertising, you must first experience failure and setbacks. If your first few ads fail, don't be discouraged. Think of it as paying for lessons. Learn from each failed ad. Then review it and avoid making the same mistakes in the next ad .

Last but not least: Never give up.

Text ✎ Mary/