Are you having trouble getting conversions from your Facebook Ads? If so, you’re not alone.
Many businesses struggle to get the most out of their ad campaigns, and it can be difficult to know where to start.
Here’s some of the common reasons why your Facebook Ads might not be converting, and how you can fix them.
Poor targeting
One of the main reasons marketers fail with Facebook Ads is because they fail to target their ads properly. Facebook allows you to create a custom audience but many people don’t realize this.
More than 1.09 billion people use Facebook everyday – it’s pretty hard to say that your ads aren’t working because your target market isn’t hanging out on the site.
The main advantage of Facebook Ads is that they provide you with the ability to target your ads so that they’re shown to a very precise audience who will be curious about your offer and click ideally to a specific landing page.
However, the flipside of that is that if your ads are poorly targeted, your ads will be shown across social media to people who don’t care for them at all leading to horrible site conversion.
You picked a very narrow audience
Narrowing down the kinds of people that should see your ads can help you get better results. However, restricting your ads to a very small audience might cause Facebook to stop delivering your ads.
The best way to fix this is to expand your target audience. Here are some ways to do that:
- Add more behaviors and/or interests
- Edit your geographical restrictions
- Add more users to your customer list
- Allow Facebook Pixel to collect more data before you launch retargeting campaigns
- Use Lookalike Audiences to help Facebook use a source audience (email list, site visitors, etc.) to find similar prospects based on demographic and interests.
Failure to write compelling ads
Have you ever come across a Facebook ad and thought that it sucked?
Maybe you thought that ad was awful because it had a terrible, salesy copy. You felt like it was just after your money.
People appreciate conversational copy. Write your ads as if you’re having a cozy chat with your audience – like two friends enjoying coffee!
Avoid using jargon words to promote understanding. Use more words that evoke the senses – sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell.
One great technique to use when writing Facebook ads is storytelling. Storytelling sparks your audience’s imagination so that they’re able to better connect with your message.
Too much text
This unwritten rule is often referred to as Facebook’s 20% Rule and could be another reason your Facebook ads are not delivering.
Facebook’s research found that images with less than 20% text tend to cost less and reach more people than ads with more than 20% image text. That’s why ads with higher amounts of image text are considered low-quality and may not be delivered, or may be penalized in auctions (lower reach for the same budget).
There are some exceptions to the 20% rule:
- Book & album covers
- Product images
- Games
- Event posters
- Charts & graphs
- Magazine & newspaper covers
- Movie & TV show posters
Low ad relevance
If a specific ad isn’t meeting your advertising objectives, Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics can determine if it was relevant to the audience it reached. And if not, what adjustments to your ad creative, post-click landing page, or target audience could improve performance.
The following relevance diagnostics assess each ad’s past performance in the ad auction over the date range you’ve selected:
- Quality Ranking — how your ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same audience
- Engagement Rate Ranking — how your ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience
- Conversion Rate Ranking — how your ad’s expected conversion rate compared to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience
You Are Not Testing Different Ad Sets
If you are only sticking to one Ad set at a time, you may not get the desired results. How will you know if your audience is liking your content or not, if you are only circulating one Facebook Ad at a given time?
If you are not leveraging the split testing feature for your Facebook Ads, you will not be able to know which elements of your Ads are working and which ones aren’t.
Bid is too low
When setting up your bidding strategy, you choose what actions you pay for (link clicks, etc.), and how much you want to pay for them based on lowest cost or lowest cost with bid cap:
Choosing “Lowest cost” allows Facebook to select the best amount for your selected action and bid competitively (ideal for most advertisers since it ensures bid price will never be set too low and under deliver).
You have high auction overlap
When you run an ad campaign on Facebook, your ads compete against other advertisers to reach a specific target audience.
However, when you have multiple ads targeting the same audience, you may start competing against yourself — which can harm your ads’ delivery.
When several of your ad sets have similar targeting, Facebook tries to prevent your ads from competing against each other during the auction process.
You can fix this with Facebook’s Audience Overlap tool.
Wrong Optimization Goal
When you pick an optimization goal, you’re telling Facebook the exact action you want your target audience to take. This helps Facebook target your audience better.
Say, you choose to optimize your ad for product sign-ups. What you’re telling Facebook is that you want to target people who are likely to sign up for your products based on how they’ve engaged with similar ads.
Facebook analyzes user value signals to determine the best audience for your optimization goal.
