Facebook ads are currently one of the most popular online advertising platforms and you may just be one of the million advertisers who’s jumped on the bandwagon. And though you’ve heard loud praise for the platform, for some reason it just doesn’t seem to be working for you.
Sure enough, you’re getting impressions and clicks, but are actual conversions scarce?
If this sounds too familiar to you, then read on.
We’re going to review 5 likely reasons why your Facebook ads are failing and go through important tips to get your campaigns back on track!
#1: Poor Targeting:
Targeting is that brilliant feature of Facebook Ads that enticed the largest global brands as well as smaller entrepreneurs to try Facebook advertising. I mean, the ability to target people based on their income, location, age, gender; even their interests and behavior is simply amazing!
But THIS is where most marketers fail.
The greatest advantage that Facebook advertising gives you, is reaching the most relevant customers and this is what you should place your primary focus on.
If you’re messing up the ads targeting, then your ads are just being shown to people who may not care for them, leading to poor conversion rates.
So how do you get your targeting right?
You should start by taking a close look at who your ideal customer is and build an audience profile. To create a basic customer avatar, you should take note of the following information.
- What age group does your customer fall under?
- Where do they live?
- What languages do they speak?
- What do they read/watch/listen to?
- Who influences them?
Answering all these questions will give you a closer insight into what your ideal customers really look like. Based on these answers, improve your targeting and this should make your campaigns a lot more effective.
#2. Your audience is too small
If you’ve been targeting your ads well at the right audience and your ads are still not working, then you should review your campaigns to check if you’ve niched down your targeting too much.
While it is great to run targeted ads, you may be reaching an audience that’s too small in size, which can seriously impact the cost and performance of your ads.
So here’s how to make sure you audience isn’t too narrow or small.
- Small Audience: This tends to happen when you’ve selected a custom audience from a file, people who’ve liked your page or engaged with you in some other manner. So, you’ve put in too much of a budget to reach too few people and the same people keep viewing your ads. In this case, you will notice a higher frequency rate or negative feedback. That’s when you know that you need to be targeting a broader audience.
- Narrow Audience: This tends to happen when you’re a smaller business or a local business. Of course, you’d only want to select people belonging to your location but limiting your audience further or narrowing it down beyond the usual age and gender may make your audience too narrow. This also tends to happen when you’ve used multiple narrowing factors such as inclusions, exclusions plus further narrowing options.
You may then have to limit your targeting to a certain extent.
#3. You picked the wrong optimisation objective
What have you optimized your ads for? Also, what’s the objective of your Facebook ad campaign?
So, the first step while creating a campaign is to choose your ad’s objective. Facebook allows you to choose between generating Awareness, getting Consideration and bringing in Conversions.
Now base on your chosen objective, you can optimize your ads delivery based on the kind of action you want people to take. Facebook will then optimize your delivery to reach people most likely to take the action you desire.
So you need to be absolutely sure that your ads are being optimized to reach the right audience to get the best results.
#4. You haven’t tried retargeting
Have you tried retargeting your customers?
It’s basically reaching out to people who’ve expressed an interest in your business but haven’t taken any action yet?
Reaching out to these people can be incredibly powerful as some customers just need that little push from you.
The beauty of Facebook targeting is that you can target these exact people! Giving you a much higher chance of converting!
Having a tracking pixel on your website or installing the Facebook pixel itself on your website is your best bet. You can then specifically reach out to all those people who’ve shown interest in you and display the best offers to them for better conversions.
#5. Relevance Score and Feedback
If your ads aren’t working, your ads relevance score is that major factor that you should keep a track on!
Your ads relevance score basically observes your audience targeting and simply determines how relevant your ad is to the audience you’re trying to reach. The higher the relevance score, better the delivery and performance of your ad.
Your relevance score is directly related to the cost of your ad. For instance, an ad with a 2 or 3 relevance score would cost a LOT more than an ad with relevance score of 8 or 9.
An important parameter to observe is your Feedback; your ad’s Positive and Negative Feedback.
Remember, if your positive feedback is high, but your negative feedback is also high, your ad’s delivery will be affected.
So ensure that your ad always has a higher positive feedback.
So if you haven’t really been getting the best results from your Facebook ads, it may just be these common mistakes that that can be easily rectified.
Now, it is a complete possibility that you maybe getting all these right but are still not getting your desired response. There’s a high possibility that your ad’s creative and copy are just not enticing enough for the customer to make an actual purchase.