Why Your Facebook Ads Are Not Delivering

We bet we can guess how your Facebook ad campaign is performing. You have a great strategy in place, and the content and copy are great too. The audience is all targeted to the T. But, in spite of your efforts, you’re ads aren’t delivering and you can’t seem to see any boost in impressions or conversions.

No, nobody hacked into your accounts. It’s just a more common issue than you’d think. At Australian Internet Advertising, a lot of our clients tell us about their lackluster experiences with Facebook ads. So lackluster, that they begin to distrust the entire tool.

Not so fast. It’s not about how much you’re willing to spend or how technically good the ad is. The devil lies in the details. Here are some things to look out for.

Reasons Why Facebook Ads Are Not Generating Traffic

1. You’ve Exceeded the Account Spending Limit

Facebook stops delivering your ads if the ad account exceeded its spending limit. These limits are generally imposed when there are multiple accounts with access to the same business account to avoid going over the total budget because of an error.

However, the individual budget that established the ad or campaign may have run out, and when it happens Facebook won’t automatically take the funds out of the other accounts.

The quickest way to fix this problem is to go to the Ads Manager Menu and see the Billing and Payment Method tab and change or remove the account spending limit. Once you do that, the ads will automatically run again.

2. You Ignored the 20% Text Rule

Facebook doesn’t allow their ads to contain more than 20% text place right on the ad. The text description doesn’t count here. That is just one of the many different rules the platform has in place to optimise its services.

That means the logos, slogans, watermarks, or other text you have on your image cannot exceed the 20% ratio. If they do, then it may mean that you might not generate any impressions.

But, there’s more to this rule than just that. If your text is more than 20%, the ad won’t get rejected. It will run, but Facebook will reduce its reach without any warning. We know what you’re thinking at this point, and the answer is yes, they can do that. It’s part of their guidelines, and if you don’t comply, they are in their right to lower your ad reach. Sorry.

However, Facebook does have some exceptions to this rule:

• Books and album covers;
• Games, because the logos and slogans generally account for most of the ad ratio;
• Product images;
• Event posters;
• Charts, graphs, magazine covers, or other informational material.

So unless your products or services fall under the exceptions, you’ll need to pay close attention to the text ratio. If you’re not entirely sure, the Text Overlay Tool can rate the image and tell you if there’s anything to worry about or if you’re in the clear. If there is, then you’ll need to make some design changes to lower the amount of text.

3. Your Goal Is Hard to Reach

Facebook has a set of optimisation goals you can choose from to let the platform know what action you want the audience to take. That way, Facebook can take your ads and show it to the people most likely to take that action, be it liking a page, signing up for a newsletter, or even purchasing a product.

If, however, you’ve used the wrong optimisation goal for your campaign, then it should be pretty obvious at this point why you’re not getting the results you want. And if you’ve made this mistake with multiple ads, then the entire campaign can suffer.

Not to worry: you can change it easily by going to the ad settings and changing the objective. Think carefully about what you want your target audience to do. For instance, if you want them to buy something from your store, then you don’t just need an objective that gets them to visit your website. You should also add an “add to cart” event so that Facebook can optimise your ad delivery.

4. Your Ads Are Not Connecting with Your Audience

Audience targeting is key to Facebook marketing success. You’ll have to create a profile of the ideal customer if you want to see any significant results. Facebook even has a relevance score to tell how the audience you’ve selected is responding to your ad, and if they are engaging with your content.

There are positive engagements (likes, shares, comments), and negative ones (hide post, report as spam.) You should keep an eye on this score to see how your ads are performing. If the ad score is low, it means you are generating more negative engagements than positive, and you’ll need to change the ads, or the audience.

Either you chose the wrong audience for the ads, or your target just doesn’t like the content you are offering them, you’ll need to test it out to see which one is the culprit. But, in the meantime, it’s best to pause any running ads until you figure it out.

5. Your Audiences Are Overlapping

It’s very likely that your audiences for different ad sets will be somewhat similar, in which case Facebook will try to prevent them from overlapping through an auction process.

Here’s how this process looks: Facebook takes a look at the ads with similar audiences, establishes which one will perform better, and then not run the one it thinks won’t generate results. It’s like survival of the fittest, only in Facebook Marketing; only the stronger ad will reach users’ news feeds.

Select multiple audiences from your account and hit the Show Audience Overlap to see if that is really the issue. If it is, then you’ll have to change one of the target audiences or create a new ad using a different audience.

Anything Familiar?

These are some of the most common issues we’ve faced at Australian Internet Advertising, but there’s certainly not the only possible reasons for why your ads aren’t getting results. Facebook advertising can be tricky sometimes, especially since it seems that one slip-up can make the social media platform stop running the ad entirely. You need to keep a close eye on ad performance and check the setting regularly to see if it’s all going as planned.

And if you need any extra help, or still have questions, we’re happy to help. Contact Australian Internet Advertising now and we’ll make sure your ads get great impressions!