Facebook Ads: How To Perform Better

It feels exciting to log onto Facebook Ads Manager and see that your ads are accomplishing their goals. But, there are times when you can log into your Ads Manager and see zeros across the board.

This can be frustrating, especially when considering how much time and effort you’ve put into your campaign. If this is your situation, don’t panic or think of leaving your campaign altogether. Instead, focus on finding out why your ads are underperforming and then take the necessary steps to fix the problem.

Here are the top 7 possible reasons why Facebook ads fail to convert and their solutions:

1. You’re Targeting Your Ads to a Cold Audience

Many new advertisers on Facebook tend to focus more on finding new customers for their products/services instead of maximizing the potential of the warm leads they already have. As such, you’ll find them targeting their ads to new customers who match the profile of their ideal persona.

However, this type of targeting tends to yield poor results. Because this group of people has never heard or engaged with your brand, they’re less likely to take action on your ads.

Solution

To solve this, consider targeting your ads to people you’re 100% sure are interested in your business, products, and services. These include:

  • Your current customers.
  • The people who have spent time on your website exploring different pages.
  • People who have watched your videos or clicked on your ads.
  • Those on your mailing list (those you’ve been nurturing with lots of informative content).
  • The people who have responded positively to your lead magnets.

These people know about your business and probably like the products/services you offer. They’re more likely to respond positively to your ads and take the specific action you’d like them to take.

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2. Your Ads Have Been Rejected

If your Facebook ads aren’t showing at all, it could be because they have been rejected. If this is the case, Facebook will give you a reason for the disapproval through your email.

There are several reasons why Facebook might reject an ad. You can review these by checking out their guidelines.

Solutions

  • Change your ads to fit Facebook standards. To increase the chances of your ad being approved, make the changes that Facebook has requested. Once you do so and save your ad, it will be resubmitted automatically for further review and approval.
  • Appeal the rejection. You can submit an appeal if you feel that your ads were wrongfully rejected by the social media platform. Appeals can sometimes take longer to be resolved, but if you succeed in getting your ads approved, your efforts and patience will be worth it.

Facebook will start the ads automatically and notify you via your ad account if your appeal is successful.

3. Your Ads Have Low Relevance Score

Another thing that can affect your ad performance is relevance score. When you run an ad campaign on Facebook, your target audience will either engage with your ad positively (by liking, sharing, and commenting) or negatively (by reporting it as spam or hiding it from their feed).

When more of your audience receives and engages with your ad positively, your relevance score increases. If your ad gets poor reception, your relevance score decreases.

Facebook is keen on ensuring that every ad posted on its platform is relevant to its target audience. It rewards advertisers who keep their relevance score high by charging them less in advertising fees. Facebook also displays relevant ads to more people. This means that if your relevance score is always low, Facebook will serve your ads to a limited audience. This, of course, reduces the number of positive feedback you get and lowers your relevance score.

Solutions

  • Use multiple variations of your ad. People get bored easily when they see the same ads repeatedly, you should consider creating multiple variations of your ads. You can show them to your audience at the same time. Doing this helps prevent ad fatigue and keeps everything fresh and interesting for your audience.
  • Use video ads to promote your offer. Video ads can significantly increase your ad engagement rate, relevance score, and overall performance. So, take time to create high-quality video ads for your campaign, or pay a professional to do it for you.

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4. The Quality of Your Ads is Low

Having low-quality ads can also affect your ad reach and performance. Your ads are considered low-quality by Facebook if they fall into these three categories:

  • Engagement bait. This type of ad requests its target audience to engage with it through likes, tags, comments, shares, etc. Doing this can impact your ad performance because it’s against Facebook policy.
  • Withholding information. As the name suggests, this type of ad withholds vital information from the target audience to force them to click on it. For example: “This Weird Trick Cures Alzheimer’s Disease – Doctors Hate It.” This is also known as clickbait.
  • Sensationalist language. This type of ad uses exaggerated headlines to get people to engage with it. It then fails to deliver what it promises on the landing page.

Facebook has the right to reject or limit the reach of ads that fall into any of the above groups. So, make sure you’re scrutinizing your ads before submitting them for approval to ensure that they’re of high quality.

5. Your Ad Image Breaches the 20% Text Rule

Another thing that can cause your Facebook ads to convert poorly is violating the 20% text rule. This rule recommends that your ad images contain less than 20% text. Going against this rule in the past led to your ad being rejected by Facebook. But nowadays, they can either choose not to run your ad or limit its reach. Both of these actions have a negative impact on your ad performance.

Your ad image will be given an OK rating if it contains the recommended text amount. It will have a low, medium, or high rating if it has more words that need to be reduced.

Solution

Getting a medium or high rating is an indication that your ad image is text-heavy. So, consider replacing it with another image with less text to improve your ad performance.

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6. Your Ads are Stuck in Review

Every Facebook ad must be reviewed before it goes live to ensure that it meets the company’s advertising terms and conditions. The review is done manually by support staff members as well as by the company’s automated review systems.

Most ads are usually reviewed within 24 hours, but there are times when the review process can take longer. So, it’s possible that your ads are still stuck in review, and that’s why you do not see any results.

Solution

To prevent review processes from affecting ad performance, create a gap between the start and end dates of your campaign. This gives Facebook’s manual review team enough time to review your ad before it goes live.

Secondly, don’t make any edits to your ad until it’s approved. This is because edits force the review team to go through the ad again, which makes the review process longer.

7. Your Facebook Ad and Landing Page Don’t Align

Lastly, directing your target audience to a landing page that’s different from the ad they clicked on can cause them to bounce in large numbers. This leads to a loss of conversions.

This is why it’s important to always ensure that your Facebook ads and landing page match. You want to make sure your audience feels like they’re in the right place.

The landing page should also have short and clear headlines, error-free copy, fewer links, and highly-visible call-to-action buttons. You want to encourage people to take the desired action.

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Final Thoughts

These are some of the reasons why your Facebook ad can fail to deliver. Go through each of them to see what’s applicable in your case and implement the suggested measures to improve your ad performance.

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