There’s a learning curve when it comes to learning proper marketing strategies on the Facebook platform. Sure many people can throw together a quick campaign and you’ll probably see some clicks and impressions.
However, a common occurrence is Facebook ads not delivering. There are a number of reasons why this could be happening.
Your Audience Is Too Small
When advertising on Facebook you’ll be required to target an audience that is a minimum size. This is done to ensure ads are not too specific to users. This sounds ridiculous, but we are all aware of the privacy concerns Facebook has had in the past.
Ads won’t run if your audience is under 1,000 users. Facebook should warn advertisers that the audience is too small, however, things always fall through the cracks.
What can you do to fix this problem? This may come across as obvious, but the first step is to broaden your audience. Now if you have your audience fine-tuned and don’t want to target additional users Facebook may not be the route to go. However, if you can broaden your audience through additional age groups, interested, and locations you can increase the number of people reached.
Ads Are Not Relevant
A major part of the delivery equation is the relevance score. This 1-10 rank helps tell advertisers how engaging ads are to users. When a user engages positively, such as sharing or commenting on the ad, it will increase the relevance score. On the other hand, if a user engages negatively, such as hiding the ad, then the score will decrease.
There’s no ideal relevance score, however, there are steps to increase the score.
- Review your audience – There’s a possibility that your audience is too large. Is your ad showing to users who may not be interested in what you’re offering? This can cause your users to hide the ads more often. Try creating new audiences that are highly targeted, this can help increase ad engagement.
- Create new ads – Often advertisers will create ads once or twice and let them run. This creates ad fatigue and users quickly become burnt out on what they are seeing. You’ll want to be always creating new, relevant, engaging ads.
- Get new creative – A part of creating new ads is creating new creative to accompany your ads. Maybe when you launched the ads you only had a handful of images to work with. Try adding new images, and make a push to get some videos added as well. Throwing the same image over and over at someone will end up irritating users.
Disapproved (or Limited) Ads
If ads are disapproved you should see notifications letting you know they are not active. However, if they are limited you could miss this notification. Ads are often limited if there’s more than 20% text within an image. Facebook does this to ensure advertisers create quality, engaging ads, rather than stuffing it with text.
Another reason why ads may be disapproved or limited is that they are within special categories. Types of categories include politics, housing, dating, etc.
In some cases, Facebook will flag ads even if they are not in breach. This is done to ensure advertisers are doing their due diligence to set up a proper campaign. If your ads are disapproved and you see no reason why this could be it. To fix this issue you’ll need to get on Facebook support, which is a dreaded process. However, it’s sometimes the only way to get them approved.
Budgets Are Too Restrictive
There’s a bit more to this than just throwing more money at the campaign. Facebook will show ads to users who they feel are most likely to convert. Whether a conversion is ad engagement, a form fill, event RSVP, or visiting a website. Facebook gathers this information through algorithms, tests, and raw data. To gather this information you’ll need to spend some money. Limiting how often your ad is shown won’t allow Facebook to get the data they need. For instance, if you have a large audience and a small budget (say $1) a day, then it will take Facebook longer to get accurate results.
Bids Are Too Low (or Restrictive)
Similarly, if you have strict bid caps your ad won’t show as often. For some business owners they may not want to spend over $2 on a click, however, if it’s a competitive industry ads may never show with this type of bid. You’ll need to adjust daily spends and bids to ensure your ads are showing. This is vital in the first 30-60 days as this is when Facebook really gathers important information.
Implementing automatic bidding from the start can help get an understanding of what bids are going to look like. After a month or so you can switch to manual bidding which you can restrict a bit more.
These are just a few reasons why ads may not be showing. You’ll need to do some research to locate the source of the issue. In most cases Facebook Support can help guide advertisers through the issues, however, it’s not always 100%. If you’re having issues with Facebook ads and want some expert advice contact Denver PPC.
