When it comes to life, there are 3 guarantees; death, taxes, and Facebook changing their algorithm.
“This stuff is supposed to work, or so they tell me,” you’ve thought to yourself. You’ve even finally let go of good old days when your Facebook posts actually reached more than 2% of your fans.
You’ve invested your time. Your money. Your energy. And most importantly, your trust, into Facebook.
And your ads are STILL not working.
What gives?
Before writing off Facebook ads, here are 11 reasons your ads might not be giving you the results you want:
1. Your Ad Creative Doesn’t Cut Above The Noise
Ad creative is (almost) everything. Your ads have to be compelling, digestible, shareable, easy to scan and have a strong call to action. One way to see if your ads are resonating with your audience is to check the relevance score. If your relevance score is below a 7, and you’re not getting great results, it’s time to re-think your ad creative.
2. Your Budget Doesn’t Match Your Goals
$50 here, $100 there, and you’re still not rich yet? Your Facebook budget needs to be appropriate to the price of your product. You cannot expect to sell 100s of $100 product with just $100. An easy way to figure out an appropriate budget is to 5-6x your average cost per aquisition to start.
3. You Lack The Expertise, Time or Both
Boosting posts? Using only interest targeting? Using the brand awareness objective when you really want sales? Optimizing for the wrong conversion goal? These are a few common mistakes that those less experience make when it comes to running a successful long term strategy. Plus, managing Facebook ads are all-consuming, and if you don’t checkin several times a day on your ad campaigns, you might miss out on important optimization strategies.
4. You Have No Funnel Strategy
If you’re running eCommerce ads you need a way to bring new people to your website, as well as retarget those who have shown interest. Your ads should be set up in a way that funnels people closer to purchase with different messaging and creative depending on where they are during their buyer journey.. If you don’t have a clear visual of how a prospect moves from just hearing about your product to purchasing your product through ads, it’s time to take a step back and think that through.
5. Your Landing Pages Aren’t Optimized For Conversion
It’s possible you’re doing everything right with your Facebook ads, but then when someone gets your website, the checkout process is clunky, there are hidden fees, your load time is slow, your value proposition isn’t clear, your images are too small or there’s no social proof that your product is legitimate, etc. etc. It’s important to think about the ads, your brand, your website and your checkout process as all pieces of the social advertising pie that need to fit together in order to make a full circle.
6. Your Targeting Is Way Off
With so many options for targeting, this is one thing most people go wrong. Do I target everyone in the world who is interested in my product? What about custom audiences? Do I put the custom audiences with the interest audiences? Yup. It can be confusing. When it comes to audiences, you should caste a wide net, 1-2 million on the top funnel of your ads, and then filter down from there based on actions and interest.
7. Facebook Is Your Only Strategy
Your customers are channel agnostic. Besides Facebook and Instagram, they’re also using Google, talking to their friends, opening their emails, listening to podcasts and browsing the internet. 86% of shoppers are regularly channel-hopping across at least two channels. While Facebook might do a lot of the heavy lifting for eCommerce stores, you should take an omni-channel approach to your marketing.
8. You Make Too Many Changes Too Quickly
Small budget and lots of changes lead towards ads without statistical significance. It’s normal to want to change things when you think they’re not working but when you make too many changes too quickly without a legitimate test budget, you’re not giving Facebook a big enough change to get you results. Give your ads a chance to prove themselves before jumping to any conclusions.
9. Your Optimizing For The Wrong Conversion Goals
When it comes to the conversion objective, Facebook needs 50 conversions/ week to optimize your ad. This does not mean you need 50 purchases/ week, unless that is, if you are optimizing your ads for the purchase pixel. If you aren’t getting the results you want consider changing the pixel you’re optimizing for one step higher in the funnel to get Facebook’s recommended 50 conversions and give Facebook a chance to optimize your ads.
10. You’re Not Building A Brand; You’re Only Placing Ads
Facebook is not only looking at your ads to understand how people resonate with them, they’re also looking at your brand as a whole; your organic posts, your website, your followers, how consistently you post etc. . With so much competition and equal opportunity, brand is going to be the only thing that matters over the next 5-10 years.
11. Your Customer Doesn’t Have A Current Need
Maybe you’re advertising swimwear in the dead of winter. Or maybe you’re selling tires to someone who just purchased a new car. Either way your timing could be off, which doesn’t mean your social ads aren’t working, it just means (hopefully) you’re building an audience that will convert later in time.
Which one of these reasons resonates the most with you?
Leave me a comment below.