Last updated Feb 15th, 2021
Your campaign is not even a week old and you’re down $500 with little to nothing to show for it. Your Facebook ads weren’t delivering and you’re racking your brain as to why.
In this post, I’m going to highlight 8 reasons why your ads stopped delivering and how you can easily rectify them. By the end of this article, you’ll know what you need to do to make sure your Facebook Ads stay effective.
1. Your ads are overgeneralized
Your ads aren’t delivering because they don’t target a particular interest. Each ad should be made for its desired audience. This is especially important if you want to successfully retarget and increase your CTR.
How to fix:
Try running ads within each ad set that adhere to different interests. Facebook needs a minimum number of impressions to gain the momentum it needs to show your ads to an audience most likely to engage with it.
Rack up a number of impressions to gain the momentum your Facebook ads need.
If your ad gets zero clicks on your first thousand impressions, Facebook will cut back on showing your ad. This is why you see a reduction on some ads within an ad set and an increase in others.
If you run a retargeting campaign, the communication in your ad should also change. This is not the first time this audience has seen your ad, so it should stand out. Set a different CTA, for example, “sign up” instead of “read more.” Make sure your landing page sets a clear objective and that the link is working.
In Hunch, you can create a link checker so that you can receive notifications regarding broken links connected to your campaign.
Receive notifications of broken links with Hunch link checker.
2. Your bid is too low
Another reason why your ads may not be delivering is that your bid is too low.
Whenever you’ve launched a campaign, your ads enter a competition with thousands of other ads like a digital auction. Facebook takes into account 3 major factors when deciding which ad to show:
- Relevance and quality – how interesting your ad may be to your audience and the quality of them
- Estimate action rates – how likely your audience is to engage your CTA
- Bid price – the price you’re willing to pay for the completed CTA.
Beware of setting bids that are too low.
How to fix:
Maximize all three factors. Choose the lowest cost bidding. In doing so you are allowing Facebook to bid competitively and choose the best price. This is great because your bid price will never be too low whereas by setting a ‘bid cap’ you are risking your bid being too low. Your ads will be shown to little to 0 people at all and have difficulty delivering if your bid is too low.
If you must keep the ‘bid cap’ adjust it to a high price.
3. You haven’t chosen the right optimization goal
Setting the proper optimization goal for your campaign objective could also be the reason why your ads aren’t delivering. Facebook selects audiences based on their history of engaging with similar ads. If you optimize for conversions, you may find that your campaign stops running after a few days. Facebook uses conversions as a means of finding targets for your campaign but it doesn’t know who could be interested because it doesn’t already have conversions to work with.
Set the proper optimization goal for your campaign objective.
How to fix:
Build up your conversion rate and optimize for a conversion that occurs more frequently like add to cart instead of purchase. Facebook recommends a minimum of 50 conversions per week to keep your ads delivering.
4. Create click-worthy ads
One reason your Facebook ads aren’t delivering is you haven’t made click-worthy ads. Using the same copy for each of your ads and not making a clear call to action are sure ways to get your audience to scroll past your ad.
How to fix:
Define your target and create ads for them. You can experiment with ad copy instead of paying a designer to come up with 30 different images for your ads.
Here’s what Topshop did:
They tweaked the copy and kept the same image.
Having a clear call to action will increase CTR and enhance your ads’ deliverability. Believe it or not many advertisers don’t have a clear CTA and their ads are often scrolled past. Implement it in the text and on a call to action button.
See how Garret Leight tells you what it wants you to do in both the copy and has a clear CTA button?
Have a clear call to action and increase CTR.
5. Don’t edit your ads too frequently
It takes Facebook 24 hours to deliver your ad and however tempting it may be to make tweaks- don’t. Editing your Facebook ad within 24 hours of launching hours can inhibit you from getting the real image of your ad’s performance. In fact, your ads can result in poor delivery.
Stop editing your ad every hour.
How to fix:
Hold fire on the editing and wait out the 24 hours to ensure that your ads have started delivering and get usable data before you start making changes.
6. Your ad set budget is too small
One critical mistake you can avoid is setting a tiny budget for running numerous ad sets with multiple ads because they are all sharing the same budget.
You can set CBO in Hunch.
If you’re showing your ad in a market of high valued products, a campaign with a low budget won’t even be seen by its ideal target.
How to fix:
Simply increase your budget. If you must keep your budget low, narrow your audience. Think of it like dropping a dime into a pond.
7. Your Audience is Overlapping
Similar audience targeting can increase costs and also reduce your Facebook ad’s deliverability. This is a common mistake when creating multiple ad sets that target similar audiences.
How to fix:
Exclude audiences that you think might be similar to a previous ad set.
Similar audience targeting can increase costs.
8. Your images are Text-dense
The unwritten Facebook 20% rule stipulates that text shouldn’t take up more than 20% of your ad’s image.
Facebook used to outright reject ads that didn’t abide by this rule. Now it simply reduces your ad’s reach or not run it at all.
Which ad do you think followed the 20% rule?
The text shouldn’t take up more than 20% of your ad’s image.
There are exceptions for images that are “naturally text-dense.”Album covers, book covers, product images. games, event posters, and legal documents are among the exceptions.
How to fix:
You can check whether your ad is within the guidelines by using the Facebook text overlay tool.
You won’t always be alerted to the fact that you’ve exceeded the 20% You’ll just have an inkling when Facebook lowers your ad’s reach.
Conclusion:
Despite popular belief, Facebook ads can work well. With over a billion active users each day, you have a real possibility of creating the right offer at the right time.
By understanding how these unwritten rules work you can prepare yourself for the next time your Facebook ad stops delivering. Your ads are delivering now, but you must continue to maintain a good targeting strategy. Check out our article: 8 Quick Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Ad Targeting Strategy.
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