You read every guide or blog post you could find about Facebook ads. You researched your target audience. You wrote some excellent ad copy. You set up an intelligent campaign structure. You hit launch. You waited for the money to roll in. But well, it didn’t.That’s because, most probably, your campaign has a couple of Facebook advertising problems.
Don’t worry. You’re not alone. Many people struggle to get performance out of their Facebook ads, but that doesn’t mean Facebook can’t work for you.
There are a lot of reasons behind the low performance. We just need to find the root cause and make a correction. The trouble is that one problem can have many causes.
This article covers three scenarios (No impressions, Low CTR or Engagement Rate, No conversions) where performance might not be optimal, 18 reasons why this may be the case, and where to fix them.
Ready to fix your Facebook advertising problems?
Facebook Advertising Problems: No Impressions
You’ve launched a campaign, but your ads aren’t getting any impressions, or your campaign has been running for a while, but it’s not getting impressions anymore.
Here are eight things to look at:
1. Low Ad Quality
If Facebook deems your ad low quality and irrelevant to your audience, it will quickly struggle to get impressions.
This is easy to identify — Facebook lets you see the Relevance Score it assigns to your ads. Just add it to your Ads Manager columns using the Column Customization options.
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After your ad has received 500 impressions, you’ll get a score from 1 to 10, ranking the relevance of your ad to the audience. The higher the score, the better. If your relevance scores are low, try rewriting ad copy and adding new creatives or formats.
2. Too Much Text On Image
Facebook used to have a strict rule that no more than 20 percent of an image could be covered by text. They even had a tool to help you measure it. It’s not so hard and fast anymore, making it a little trickier.
But if your ad has a substantial amount of text, the number of impressions it receives will likely be throttled by Facebook, or you’ll end up paying a higher price to get continuous delivery.
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The easiest way to determine this is by checking any messages you receive in the Delivery column of your Ads Manager dashboard. If your ads have too much text, you’ll see a message saying “Too Much Text In Image” at the campaign, ad set, and ad level.
There’s an easy solution: remove some text from your image!
3. Breach Ad Copy Rules
Facebook has a lot of rules around what you can and can’t say in your advert copy. If you breach their rules, your ads won’t run.
Once again, the Delivery column here is your friend. Check if you have a message accompanied by a red dot that says “Not Approved” at the ad level.
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If you think your ad does not violate Facebook policies, you can appeal the ruling when you edit your ad.
But look at why you violate Facebook’s advertising policies first and, if you are, change your ad copy or creative as needed.
4. Bid Too Low
If you are using manual bidding (also known as setting a bid cap), you must ensure your bid is high enough. You’re competing against many other companies to win that ad slot, and you’ve got to beat them in the auction — a low bid will see you miss out too often to generate results and impressions.
Try significantly increasing your bid cap until you generate impressions. If this doesn’t work, switch to using Facebook’s automatic bidding option for a while. This will generate impressions and allow you to see the price you should be paying to win the auction.
5. Budget Too Low
You may struggle to generate impressions if your ad set budgets are too low — particularly when paired with a manual bidding strategy.
If using manual bidding, you’ll likely need to set higher daily budgets than you expect to spend, as you’ll rarely spend your whole daily budget.
If you have a daily budget in mind that you absolutely cannot surpass, don’t create so many ad sets that each has a very small daily budget. Reduce your ad set splits and go for fewer ad sets with higher budgets.
6. Campaign Spend Limit Reached
An easy one to forget — double-check you haven’t reached your campaign spending limit (if you have set one). This is set at the campaign level, and when you reach your limit, you’ll see a message saying “Campaign Spending Limit Reached” in the Delivery column at the campaign level.
A nice easy solution to this one — increase your campaign spending limit!
7. Ad Account Spend Limit Reached
Another easy one to forget — double-check you haven’t reached your ad account spending limit (if you have set one). This is set in the Payment Settings area of your Billing Information. You’ll see a message saying “Account Spending Limit Reached” in the Delivery column at the campaign level.
A nice easy solution to this one, too — increase your ad account spending limit!
8. Audience Overlap
If you have created multiple ad sets, depending on how you have selected your audience targeting, there could be significant overlap in your ad set audiences.
In this case, you are competing against yourself, and some of your ad sets will suffer in terms of their ability to gain impressions.
Check if your audience selection has significant overlap by using the Audience Overlap Tool found in the Audience Manager section of your Business Manager.
If you are using custom or lookalike audiences, you’ll be able to directly compare this by selecting them and then clicking “Show Audience Overlap,” as above.
If you use audiences targeting interests or behaviours, you’ll need to recreate these as Saved Audiences in the Audience Manager to compare them. Once you’ve done this, Facebook will visualize how your audiences overlap.
If your audiences have significant overlap, this needs to be addressed through better audience exclusions or the creation of ad sets targeting new audiences.
Facebook Advertising Problems: Low CTR or Engagement Rate
Your campaign gets impressions, but the click-through or other engagement rates are low.
Here are three things to look at:
9. Bad Audience to Message Match
If your campaign is getting impressions, but your ads aren’t getting link clicks, your ad message might not be well matched to your audience.
Try creating multiple ad sets, each targeting different audiences to see if you can find an audience that matches your message.
10. Not an Enticing Offer
If your campaign is getting impressions, but your ads aren’t getting clicks (and you’re convinced you’re targeting the right audience), your offer may not be that enticing to them.
Try creating different ad copy, using new images, and trying new ad formats. Experiment and test how these different versions perform against one another to determine what messaging resonates with your audience.
11. Ad Fatigue
If your ad’s click-through rates have dwindled over time, your audience may suffer from ad fatigue.
What does this mean?
They’ve seen your ads too many times. Facebook lets you know the Frequency of each of your ads. Just add the option to your Ads Manager columns using the Column Customization options.
If you have a high ad frequency, it’s time to create new ads.
Facebook Advertising Problems: No Conversions
Your campaign’s getting impressions and clicks, but people aren’t completing the final conversion. This could be completing a purchase on your website or downloading an app from the app store.
If you have a good CTR but are not getting conversions, here are six things to look at:
12. Wrong Campaign Objective
Different Facebook campaign objectives give you different actions to optimize your ads for and ways to bid. Make sure you are optimizing your ads for your desired action.
For example, optimize for landing page views instead of impressions if you want traffic to your website. If you want conversions, optimize for that conversion instead of for link clicks.
13. Not Enough Data
Before your ad performance stabilizes, Facebook needs to learn which users will most likely perform the desired action you are optimizing for.
For this to work, Facebook needs a certain amount of data for each ad set. If you’re optimizing for link clicks, it requires 50 per ad set before knowing who to target. If you’re optimizing for website conversion, it needs 15 to 25 per ad set before knowing who to target.
If you haven’t yet got those 15 conversions for your ad set, your campaign won’t be optimized as well as it could be.
So don’t make too many hasty decisions until you’ve got enough data. And if your campaign will naturally not get a lot of conversions, don’t split your targeting across too many ad sets, as it will take longer to get those 15 conversions for each ad set.
14. Pixel Not Installed Correctly
If you’re optimizing for website conversion, one of the first things to check with a low conversion rate is whether your Facebook Pixel is installed correctly.
To do this, you can install the Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Chrome. Go through your checkout and conversion process and see whether the correct events are firing on each process page.
You can also see if any errors are registering in the Pixels area of your Ads Manager. However, this won’t tell you if you’ve forgotten to install it altogether at certain stages of your checkout process.
15. Long Sales Funnel
If you have a long sales funnel — as often happens with high-value products — then it’s possible that you’re not catching conversions. Try different attribution windows within the Ads Manager to see if this affects how many conversions you see.
Also, try using Facebook Analytics to create your sales funnel and identify drop-off points in the process where your messaging may need improvement.
16. Bad Ad to Landing Page Match
When someone clicks on your ad, they expect a similar experience on the destination they’re sent to, whether it’s a website, mobile app, or Messenger.
If it isn’t similar, or you make them work to make the connection, they’ll likely leave. Make sure the experience here is consistent. Start by checking your bounce rate on your web analytics and see if people are going without investigating your offer further.
Test different landing page layouts and copy if you send them to a website. You can also create personalized landing pages for different audience segments to create messages that resonate further.
Remember, as an advertiser, your job doesn’t finish when someone clicks the ad; landing page optimization is as essential as ad optimization.
17. Slow Loading Page
The majority of Facebook ad traffic is mobile. If your website doesn’t load quickly on mobile, you’ll lose a lot of your visitors — up to 53% if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Check your site speed using Google tools to discover how you match up alongside other websites in your industry.
You can also add the landing page view metric next to the link click metric on your Ads Manager dashboard. This will allow you to see how many people click your link and then wait for your website to load.
The lesson here is simple — be mobile-first. Be fast. Keep visitors on your website as long as possible. The better you do this, the more likely you will get conversions.
18. All-Round Bad Campaign
If you’re getting impressions but have a bad CTR and the people getting through to your website are not converting, there’s one final possibility — your campaign sucks.
Yep, it’s not nice to admit, but it happens to everybody sometimes, whether it’s unrealistic KPIs, bad ads that can’t be changed or ill-advised targeting.
Sometimes, you need to go back to the drawing board.
Conclusion
Facebook ads provide a large number of ways to generate results. More often than not, you can rectify poor performance.
You must ensure you’ve identified the right problem before addressing it. Once you’ve done this, there are many ways you can test, iterate, optimize and ultimately improve your campaign performance.
So before throwing in the towel in front of Facebook advertising problems, ensure you’ve exhausted all your optimization options!
Relevant case studies of Todays.Agency
- How we increased sales and decreased CPA from 21,52 £ per purchase to 4.12 £ in Facebook Ads
- We reached CPAs under 1 Eur in Google and Facebook campaigns
- Reviving the Romanian Market for Used Smart Gears through Lead Generation
