By Jahniah Dryden on Jun 22, 2021
More than 6 million businesses are using Facebook ads to reach their target audience, which means they are aware of their incredible potential. You can establish brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales, promote events, and build customer trust through a series of paid campaigns on the platform.
However, some advertisers struggle to get excellent results with Facebook and Instagram Ads. They fail to generate conversion or clicks, or when they do, the results simply don’t make for a good ROI.
If you’re worried your ads are not performing well, the solutions almost certainly exist.
In this post, we’ll discuss common Facebook ad issues and how you can fix them. So, let’s begin.
Facebook has stringent guidelines around its ad system, including who you can advertise to, what types of images and copy you can use, what you can and can’t advertise, and even how they’re used in the live ads themselves.
For instance, it will give the broadest reach to ads containing video or images thumbnails with text covering 20% or less of the media and may not approve ads that possess negative traits to the viewer.
If you’ve placed ads that fail to meet Facebook’s quality standards, they are more likely to fall short in reach or might get rejected. Always check your emails for the notification; you can easily miss them.
Such issues can heavily impact your ad spend and the effectiveness of your ad campaign, so they need to be adhered to as closely as possible.
One way to solve this issue is to set automated rules on Facebook. When you create these in Ads Manager, you can adjust, pause, or stop campaigns based on any number of actions.
If you want your ad to be shown to the same person no more than five times, for example, you can set a rule that all campaigns with ad frequencies of six or higher are to be paused automatically.
These rules can be helpful, but they aren’t foolproof. Trying to set them for every campaign can waste your valuable time and prone to errors that end up hurting your campaigns instead of helping them.
There can be multiple issues with your ads. Some can be difficult to troubleshoot, but some can be easily identified and quick to fix with the right Facebook Ads optimization tools.
Here, we will take a look at each one and how you can address those issues.
Your Ad hasn’t had any results for the past few days
Your ad often stops performing as expected, which can be an easy thing to miss. If your ad spends or reach are low, you may be targeting an audience that is too small and denying yourself ad placements. In such a case, try to increase this number by fine-tuning or to expand your audience.
If your ad spends and reach are fine, check your audience behaviour through Google Analytics, and look at metrics like time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, and whether or not they’re visiting other pages on your site. These metrics will show you whether or not you’re targeting the most appropriate audience.
Cost per result increased
Some fluctuation in Facebook ad costs is expected. Because they run on the auction-based system, so market changes can cause costs to increase or decrease.
But costs that increase within a short time can indicate that you need to make immediate changes to your ad campaigns.
In such cases, the first thing you need to do is reduce each ad campaign’s daily budget that has a high customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Once this is done, try to identify why the costs went up. Were there changes in the audience or the ad campaign itself? Did you pause any other ads? Was your frequency too high, or were customers hiding your ad?
People the same ad too often
Your frequency shows you how often an average single audience is seeing the exact same ad. The suggested frequency for the Facebook campaign is three, and it should never exceed that because it can further reduce the likelihood of conversion.
When repetition affects conversion, the ad spend and metrics of the otherwise strong campaign can suffer in your Facebook ad performance report.
CTR decreased over the past few days
If you want a better campaign, you should have a higher ad click-through rate (CTR). Optimizing your ads to improve CTR will get you more traffic. Moreover, it is a good relevance indicator showing how much your audience is interested in the offer. A drop in CTR is a signal to fix your ads.
The first thing you need to do is try changing your creatives and using visuals to engage users. It will also be useful to check the engagement rate ranking and quality rate ranking metrics. Facebook will help you to determine the relevance and quality of your creativity.
Sometimes your creatives are fine, but you show them to the wrong people. If you want better results, opt for a Facebook advertising agency for better ad creation, design and copy.
Ad reach decreased
If your ad reach has decreased by more than 50%, your advertising campaign is most likely failing.
Once again, try to change your creatives and find more relevant offers, viral videos, or eye-catching pictures.
A low budget means you will miss out on the opportunity to show your ads to a larger audience. Increasing your budget means your ads will reach a wider audience in both qualitative terms and quantitative terms. For instance, some valuable users we would like to target simply don’t click on ads, or so many brands are already competing for their attention. Such users will most likely “cost” more.
Also, if you’re using manual bidding in your ads, you may be setting your bid too low. Like with the budget, a low bid will most probably reach few users.
So, make sure you have not spent all your account limits. It is easy to set a spending limit, and then you can forget about it once a campaign goes on. By availing of Facebook marketing services, you won’t have to spend so much time doing this tedious job. Their experts will set up and deploy your campaign and will also do its ongoing optimization for you.
You spent less than 70% of your daily budget
Setting a daily budget will allow you to use the total ad spend available and reach as many people as possible throughout your campaign.
However, it is easy to notice overspending than underspending, so you might overlook the fact that your ads aren’t reaching their daily limits. You should typically be using at least 70% of your daily budget to benefit from your ads.
Make sure to track your expenses, even if you have your budget set as ‘lifetime.’ You only have to divide your lifetime budget by several days and compare the obtained result to your daily expenses.
There are so many potential reasons for ads underutilizing your budget:
You can also avail Facebook marketing services of a leading digital marketing company. They’ll set up your campaign and deploy it accordingly.
Fewer than 1,000 people saw the ad the day before
Facebook ad optimization management is a numbers games, so identifying issues can be as simple as pinpointing low numbers of views.
For instance, your budget might be so small. If you can only afford to pay for 500 placements per day, that’s all you will get, but there are different ways in which you can increase your budget effectively only if you’re strategic about it.
Another can be that your creativity may not be performing well and may need some modification. This can be down to the levels of text or the quality of imagery.
You can opt for split testing; it will help you find which creative is performing best to adjust accordingly.
It is also important to note that there is also the potential to reach a spending cap, limiting how much you can spend with a particular period.
If you’re using manual bidding, you may have set a very low bid cap, which can prevent you from having bids that are high enough to be competitive and assure placements.
Facebook ads payment failed
A very frustrating and common scenario that happens with some marketers is discovering all of your ads have suddenly stopped running due to a payment method failure. This can happen when you enjoy some success across your ad set and spend more money with Facebook.
The main reason for this is that you are using a credit or bank card to pay for your ads. When Facebook automatically bills your card when a certain threshold is reached, the automated fraud detection of your bank flags up this Facebook charge and stops the payment from going through.
Facebook algorithm sees this as a payment failure and schedules up to two more attempts to charge the card automatically within few hours. If these attempts fail as well, you might find yourself flagged for payment violations with Facebook, and your card will be marked.
There are two ways to stop this problem from happening. The first thing you can do is to call your bank or credit card company before you start running the ads and inform them that a sum might be leaving the account from Facebook and not to stop the charge automatically.
The second thing you can do is to add a second, reliable payment method to your billing info, such as PayPal. So, if your primary method doesn’t go through, Facebook will automatically charge the invoice to your second method.
Facebook ads are stuck in review
An extremely annoying problem is when you have spent hours setting up a load of Facebook ads set only to watch as they sit there stuck in review for days.
This can be due to an algorithmic glitch or because the ads have been sent forward for human review. In this case, wait for 48 hours. If still the ad sets have not been approved and no notification has been given regarding ad error or policy violations, then try to duplicate the ad sets again, switching off the original ad sets.
I can’t access the Facebook ads manager
If you find yourself locked out of the Facebook ads manager, this is most probably due to payment method problems or multiple policy violations. Once you’re banned from Facebook ads manager, there isn’t much hope that you will ever be able to use it from your personal Facebook account again.
But you can mitigate this by having a second trusted person added as an additional business manager admin on your ad accounts. So, if you ever get locked out of the business manager or ad manager for any reason. In that case, you have a route into your ads again to read your notifications, identify any problems, and most importantly, turn off any ad sets that might be running and spending money.
Both Instagram and Facebook ads can be challenging, but you can remove the guesswork from the equation with the right automation tools. Every day of loss means lost sales, so optimize your campaigns today or invest in a Facebook advertising agency. Our experts will handle all facets of the campaign for you, including ad creation, campaign setup and deployment, ongoing campaign optimization, and live view dashboard and monthly reports.
Use our free tool to get your score calculated in under 60 seconds.
