More than 95% of social media marketers believe that Facebook is the most effective advertising platform. However, have you ever felt that you belong to the 5% whose Facebook ads aren’t working? If you’re struggling to get positive results from your Facebook ad campaigns, it’s time to make some changes.
Aside from having 2.41 billion active monthly users, Facebook has a way of narrowly targeting your audience. According to FinancesOnline, Facebook users click on an average of 11 ads per month. 11 ads is enough opportunity to secure your target audience’s attention at least once.
Pause Your Facebook Ad Campaign
Many marketers pause their Facebook ads that aren’t working or when performance gets low. If you want to dive deep and find out what’s causing poor results from your Facebook ads, you may want to do the same. After you restrategize, it may be helpful to perform some A/B testing to find what works for you. About 60% of businesses believe this helps improve conversions.
This is especially helpful when you want to avoid the high costs of running an ad that doesn’t produce the results you aimed for. Follow this link if you plan on pausing your Facebook ad campaigns before fixing the issues. Let’s then move on to the nitty-gritty.
Telltale Signs that Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Working
With so many businesses acknowledging how efficient Facebook is for ad campaigns, why aren’t you seeing the same results? Below is a list of the telltale signs that your Facebook ads aren’t working and the solutions that you can put in place:
No Results for the Past 3 Days
The good thing about Facebook is its capabilities to show you data about your ads. If you don’t know yet, you can go to Facebook Ads Manager to find out. There, you will find the number of people who saw your ad, clicked on them, and how much money you spent on them.
These details will show you if your ads have worked for the past three days. It’s normal to have a day without any activity, but it’s a telltale sign if it reaches three days. Take note of the following scenarios:
- If your reach is low – your target audience is small. This will also translate to low ad spending, meaning, you aren’t making good use of ad placement opportunities. Tweak your target audience to widen your targeting criteria.
- If both reach and ad spend are fine – examine audience behavior. You can use Google Analytics to do this, where you’ll find the following metrics:
- Bounce rate
- Time spent on page
- Exit rate
- If they visited other pages on your site or not
- Check for clicks and click-through rates – this is to see if your ad campaign is performing as expected.
- Check if the link is working – technicalities matter. Check to see if your link is working and that your Facebook ad matches your landing page. Also, you may want to check Facebook’s event tracking feature to see if it is registering results.
Less Than a Thousand People Saw Your Ad the Previous Day
Facebook ad campaigns rely heavily on numbers. A low number of views is a telltale sign that your ad is not working. If less than a thousand people have seen your ad the day before, below are the possibilities:
- Your ad spending may be too small. If a certain amount of placements is all you can afford, it still won’t correspond to an unsuccessful Facebook ad campaign. You can try to experiment with the time you place your ads, fine-tune your target audience, create look-alike audiences, and many other strategies.
- Your graphic design assets may not be of good quality. According to FinancesOnline, 94% of consumers leave a website with poor design. It’s safe to assume that this is the same with Facebook ads. You may want to ramp up your design game by hiring professional graphic designers or getting the help of Penji. Watch our demo video here to learn about what we do.
- This may also have something to do with your spending cap. For this, you need to check up on your ad bidding. Learn about the best practices on Facebook Ad Bidding here.
Facebook Ad Cost Per Result Increased
Expect to see Facebook Ad costs fluctuate. As you may already know, they run on a bidding system. When changes in the market happen, the costs of ads can increase or decrease. When you see an abrupt increase, you need to make some immediate changes in your ad campaigns.
Do a check over the past seven days so you can assess what made the expenses go high. What you can do is lower the budget for each of your ad campaigns that have a high customer acquisition cost or CAC. Afterwhich, you need to identify the causes of the cost increase and adjust accordingly.
The Same Ads Show Too Often
The frequency of a single ad can be the culprit. When people see one of your ads often enough, this may result in ad fatigue. Frequency should never go above three for one ad, otherwise, the chances of it converting can become low.
Even if you increase the frequency of your best ad, it can still come out as ineffective. Check the frequency of each of your ads, expand your audience, or create more creative and captivating ads. Do all these to help alleviate boredom from your ads.
You’re Underspending
While overspending on Facebook ads isn’t a good thing, so is underspending. In Facebook ads, you can set a daily budget that will be used throughout your campaign. If this budget isn’t used, your ads’ potential for optimum performance won’t also be reached.
If you notice that almost 70% of your daily budget isn’t being used, you should immediately take action. This can cause your ad to get low engagement and conversion scores. If this happens, Facebook may put them in the least priority because of their low rankings.
To counter this, review your ads and identify which campaigns get the short end of your budget. Optimize what needs to be optimized to boost rankings. You might want to check on the following:
- Make sure that there are no new payment methods that can hinder you from getting billed correctly
- Check if your billing threshold doesn’t get too low
- See if you have reached the account spending limit
- Ensure that your ad relevance diagnostics metrics is average
- See if your bid level isn’t low
- Make sure that your optimization goals are achieved
- Ensure that you have engaging and eye-catching visual assets
Your CTRs Decreased
As mentioned earlier, it’s a case of the numbers game with Facebook ads. A higher click-through rate means your ad is performing well. When it goes significantly down, you have some troubleshooting to do.
First off, you need to change your graphic design assets. Facebook has Quality Ranking and Engagement Rate Ranking metrics that can help you discover the quality and relevance of your visuals. To solve this, it would be easier just to widen your audience.
But if you’re looking for long-term solutions, a great graphic design partner is the way to go. This will allow you to get high-quality visuals that reel in the viewers and, ultimately, the buyers.
Now, if you’re confident that your creatives are top quality, you then need to change your audience completely. You can do this by using Facebook’s Detailed Targeting Expansion feature. Try adding more locations or deleting some demographic values such as age and interests.
For good measure, you can try Facebook Retargeting. This will help you get to previous visitors of your Facebook ads or website. If all else fails, evaluate your target audience and make some changes.
Ad Reach Goes Down
A dip in your ad reach is normal, but if it goes down by 50%, you may have done some miscalculations. Here are a few tips to solve this:
- Change your creatives – make sure they’re relevant, attention-grabbing, and fresh
- Increase your budget – if allowable, try to increase your budget to reach a wider audience
- Don’t set your bid too low – low budget means lower reach
- Check your account limits – double-check if necessary
You Receive Negative Feedback from Your Audience
Advertising on Facebook is a double-edged sword. While people can say good things about you in the comment section, they can also spew negativity. Use this to your advantage by answering their comments, improving your ad campaigns, and changing the frequency of your ad placements.
Furthermore, ensure that you’re showing your ads to the right audience, as this is one of the top reasons people get mad and leave unfavorable feedback. Review your analytics again and see if you have found the cause. Repeat the process until you find out what’s causing your audience’s frustration.
Final Thoughts
A considerable majority of marketers and entrepreneurs believe that Facebook is an excellent platform to advertise. And they’re right. Creating campaigns on it may not be easy, but it does get good results. Hopefully, the list above will help you identify what’s keeping you down and how you can work around them.
And if you notice, graphic design plays a crucial role in optimizing your Facebook ads. Isn’t it high time to try out what Penji can do for your business? Not only are our designs accessible, but they’re also affordable. Sign up today to get us unique and unforgettable visual assets for your Facebook ad campaigns.
