Your Facebook page created for your brand is getting some traction, but it isn’t enough. So you run a Facebook ad campaign and are doing everything by the book. The ad copy is on point, the visual elements look stunning, you have the right target audience… but the ad is not getting any reach.
What gives?
After checking on several devices that the social media platform is indeed working, it’s time to consider these reasons for why your ads may not be delivering.
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Reasons Why Ads Are Not Working
1. Your Ad Was Rejected
Facebook will usually send a notification and an email when an ad is approved and when it’s rejected, but if you’re the kind of person who gets tens of notifications on the app every few hours and doesn’t check their inbox, it’s possible to miss this warning.
Thankfully, you can re-check the status of your ads in your Ad Account, and see if the ad was rejected. If you click on the ad, Facebook will also explain why your ad isn’t running, in which case you can fix any issues and re-submit it for approval.
Facebook ads can get rejected for breaking Facebook’s advertising policy, such as promoting alcohol to an underage audience or targeting people based on personal characteristics like their weight.
Additionally, if your ad includes a link to a landing page, which it most likely does, the system will also check to see if that page is functional. If there are any major issues, such as a broken link, a slow-loading page, or the content has nothing to do with the ad, then your campaign might not run. So it’s worth checking the landing page quality too.
2. You Broke the 20% Rule
An image with some text on it can grab the viewer’s attention and draw their eyes to your ad. However, Facebook has a 20% rule when it comes to this type of content, which specifically says the text cannot be more than 20% of the image.
The problem is, if you break this rule, your ad may still get approved, so if you do not check on it you could be under the impression that the Facebook ad campaign is going about its business. But photos with too much text may not get to reach their full audience, as Facebook won’t deliver them as efficiently. They know their users prefer clean images with fewer texts, and though they’re happy you advertise with them, the social media platform still wants to give it’s users a good experience.
3. Your Bid is Too Low
Just like on PPC services like Google Adwords, Facebook ads work on a bidding process, where you tell Facebook how much you’re willing to pay for each desired action, such as a link click or the number of impressions.
You are bidding against other companies who are perhaps focusing on a similar target audience, so if your bid is too low, competitors may take the lead on this one. Or, you may use the automatic bidding process, which lets Facebook decide how much each action should cost, but your competitors are just better at figuring out a more convenient bid.
Either way, you can fix this issue by selecting the manual bidding option where you can tell Facebook exactly how much you’re willing to pay for each action. Then, Facebook will use that to spend your allocated budget.
4. Your Target Audiences Are Overlapping
If you run multiple ads but have rather similar target audiences, this creates a problem with ad delivery. Facebook will try to prevent these ads from competing against each other and spare you the situation where you’d have to outbid yourself to get one ad forward.
So instead, they will stop delivering one ad in favor of the other, usually based on which one is performing better in terms of relevancy. If by now you’ve addressed any other issue on this list and your ads still aren’t running, it may be worth looking into your target audience.
Facebook created the Audience Overlap Tool to help you with this problem, which you can find in the Audience Page of your Ad account. You can select up to 5 different target audiences and run the tool to see if they overlap, and you’ll get a percentage of how much they overlap. The bigger the percentage, the more alike the audiences are. Not to worry, you can change a few characteristics such as choosing a narrow location or changing the interests and fix this issue.
And if you want an extra tip, instead of running multiple ads with similar audiences, you should take a dive into Facebook’s Custom audiences. Here, you can create a target audience with the people who’ve already converted from your ads and target them with fresh content. That can increase your conversions even more.
5. Your Ad Is Just Bad
It’s worth pointing out a rather painful possibility. Your Facebook ad campaigns could be optimised to perfection, and still not get any results. Why? Because the ad is just bad.
“Bad” is a vague term, granted, but it refers to the overall quality of the ad, in terms of:
How convincing it is
How well it gets users’ attention
How relevant it is to your target audience
Running a campaign with low-quality images could let your ads start, but users won’t respond to something that doesn’t meet their expectations. And on social media, expectations run pretty high.
Improve Your Facebook Ads Now
Are you ready to start seeing results with your Facebook ad campaigns? The experts at Sydney’s #1 Facebook Advertising Agency, Australian Internet Advertising, are here to help you meet your business goals, whether it’s getting more sales through Facebook, or increasing your notoriety. Contact us now!
