3 minutes

10 biggest pitfalls of Paid Social in Ecommerce

There’s stacks to be said for Paid Social as a key results driver in your marketing strategy, but if you’re pumping budget into this channel and not seeing results it’s likely something’s gone wrong somewhere along the line…

We caught up with our Senior Paid Social Manager, Danielle, recently to pick her brain on the most common pitfalls retailers make with their paid social campaigns.


1. Wishwashy goals

Not understanding your overall marketing objective or lacking clearly defined goals is an immediate set up for failure. If your objective is to gather leads but you're sending people to a basic uninspiring landing page with a CTA that doesn't align, you're probably not going to get any leads. Have a clear objective - what do you want your customer to know? What do you want them to do? You wouldn’t get into a taxi without telling the driver your destination. Ensure you know where you’re wanting to head with your campaigns.

2. Not enough testing

Not testing enough is a biggie if you want to move forward and not fall stagnant. This is especially important for new businesses to understand what does and doesn’t work for you, and what best captures your audience. It’s wise to consider that some of your budget must be allocated for test campaigns. Once you’ve established what’s working you’re able to scale, and that’s where the fun begins!

3. Audience uncertainty

If you’re not clear on your audience, how do you know who to target? To start gathering the most reliable data possible you need to have a good understanding of who your audience is and what content is resonating most with what audience? Once you start driving more traffic to your website and have stacks more data you can then create custom audiences (targeting website traffic, creating lookalikes etc - but tracking must be set up to take advantage of custom audiences)!

4. Lack of diversity

Don’t play it too safe. If you’re spending no time at all thinking about the best way to target your audience and have a bit of a slap dash approach to your campaigns don’t expect much on the results side. Throwing one ad up with a single flat image and bland samey copy isn't good enough and there’s buckets of formats and ad types to get stuck into. Have some diversity, test multiple ad types with varying creatives and spruce up your copy!

5. Poor foundations

We all know the story about the fella that built his house on sand, right? Didn’t end so well. The same applies here (although no sand!). If you’re not set up properly from the get go you can wave bon voyage to being able to effectively measure results and prove the effectiveness of your campaigns. Correctly set up tracking is crucial for accurate results. Take Facebook for example, with the iOs 14 update, there are new things in place to create more accurate tracking through domain verification and the conversions API - spend the time looking into this.

6. Looking in the wrong places

Looking at vanity metrics for success, and not conversions isn’t the smartest move and not how a marketer should think. Likes are all very lovely but are they resulting in sales? Probably not. Don’t lose sight of the bottom line - engagement is undoubtedly great for exposure but conversions are what matter when it comes to reporting and justifying your paid social budget.

7. Shutting out new learnings

It’s easy to turn a blind eye to new developments in social, shut out new learnings and just churn out the same old thinking you know best. This restricted approach so social platforms (that are ever evolving!) gets you nowhere, and clears the path for your competitors to ride on by with brand new and engaging ads that scoop up your potential customers. Be willing to learn everyday and be open to new concepts and features that may benefit your strategies!

8. Putting all your ads in one basket

It might be nearly Easter but we don’t want to be throwing all our eggs (ads) in one basket assuming Facebook is the No.1 place to be. It's not. Not always, anyway. Depending on your audience and who you’re drilling down on targeting, the likes of Tiktok, Pinterest and even Linkedin can offer countless opportunities to catch an unaware customer. Have a look into where your audience is engaging the most/ what platforms they spend the most time on before throwing that budget into the wrong avenues purely based on assumption.

9. Assuming budget is everything

Ah this one comes up a LOT. Don’t be naive to think that just because you are throwing some pretty hefty dollar behind a campaign, that it’s nailed on for success. Repeat after me, ‘Content is king’. Is the content you have created high quality? Is it eye-catching and engaging? Budget might facilitate a campaign going live but it doesn’t necessarily drive those results solo - look at your creative, is it doing enough to pull the right people to take the action you’re after? If the answer is no, back to the drawing board you go.

10. No inclusion of video

Getting great content needn’t break the bank, but investing in video to mix up your creatives is a wise move. Video content is proven to drive more clicks, sales and engagement, and on average sees 48% more views than standard imagery ads. Having a few graphics or product images just isn't good enough to capture the modern day consumer in a sea of other ads on their feed so don’t ignore the importance of video!


Our team our experts at driving results from Paid Social - learn more about our offering here!