Facebook ads have become one of the best growth tools for small business owners on the social media platform. Although it sometimes requires trial and error, the end result usually favors the business. Since almost 33% of consumers start a shopping journey on social media, Facebook ads can be one of the best tools in your arsenal.
When your ad performance isn’t where you want it to be and you feel as though your Facebook ads are not delivering, it can be challenging to figure out your next step. There are many reasons your ad is underperforming, such as poor audience targeting or uninteresting copy. In this blog, we are going to break down the five most common reasons your approved Facebook ad performance is inadequate, how to fix those issues, and a few tips to improve your overall social media ad campaigns.
Is Facebook Ads Worth it?
Before we continue, we first want to explain a little more about Facebook ads and how they can be useful to any sized business, but especially small businesses.
Facebook is the third most visited website in the world with over 25 billion visitors each month. Although business accounts have noticed a decrease in organic reach on social media, Mark Zuckerberg has admitted SMB owners still have a chance to become successful on his platform.
Because of where your content can be placed using Facebook ads, you have a great chance of increasing your leads and re-targeting your current customers. Here are all the choices you have when it comes to Facebook Ads placement:
Feed: These ads appear as people scroll through their Facebook feeds and inboxes on both mobile and desktop.
Stories ads: Ads appear as full-screen vertical ads in between people’s stories.
In-Stream ads: These appear while users watch video content on Facebook.
Search ads: These ads are shown alongside search results on Facebook and its marketplace.
Message ads: These show as sponsored messages in Facebook Messenger.
In-article ads: These appear in Instant Articles within Facebook’s mobile app.
Apps ads: These ads appear as native or video ads across apps on the Audience Network.
Since we know a third of shoppers use social media to begin a shopping journey, the chances of them seeing your ad at the right time are high. Because of the opportunities Facebook ads give, we believe it’s one of the most useful tools for a small business owner.
5 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Are Not Delivering + How to Fix
There are a lot of reasons why your Facebook ads are underperforming or not giving you the results you had hoped for. Assuming your ad has been approved and has no legal, liability, or backend issues, here are the five most common reasons our customers see underperforming ads and how we fix them:
Your Budget/Bid It Too Low
The amount of money you are aiming to spend on advertisement is the investment you are making to build up your business. Regardless of the channel you choose to advertise from, often times the more money you spend, the more results you can expect.
Typically, a marketing budget for any business is 5%-10% of your revenue. We recommend newer companies spend closer to 10% if they want to see aggressive growth during their first year. But don’t worry, all that money is worth it!
According to Facebook, businesses that use the cost-per-click goal bid strategy should budget at least 5 times the amount of your cost-per-click goal. For example, if you set a cost-per-click goal of $2.75 your daily budget should be at least $13.75. This equals an average monthly of less than $500!
Vertex Marketing has an excellent resource on how your budget is broken down and used for anyone needing more resources.
Your Audience is Too Broad
No, you shouldn’t target everyone on Facebook. Whether we want to admit it or not, not everyone in the world can buy our product or service.
Because your ad spend is directly related to how well your audience engages with your ad, we never recommend using broad or wide audience targeting. When it’s harder to reach the exact type of person interested in your ad, Facebook often will continue to spend money trying to figure out who wants to see your ad.
Luckily Facebook shows you your audience size and if your chosen viewer list is considered too narrow or too broad. To experience a strong return on your ad investment, you need to consider the following:
The quality of your audience: Is this audience ready to make a purchase? Have they been warmed up to your brand? Is this ad for leads or purchasers?
Size of your audience: Who exactly is your ideal buyer? When are they online? What days are best?
The price you’re paying to reach out: What can you spend to make a purchase worth it? Does your ad budget outweigh your revenue?
Your Ad Isn’t Relevant to Your User
It’s not only important to get your ad seen by a significant number of people, but it’s also vital that the ad is relevant to them. As we mentioned previously, the quality of your audience is one factor to consider when determining who you are going to target.
Luckily Facebook gives you the information you’re looking for on their platform. The “Audience tab” in Meta Business Suite Insights offers a ton of valuable data about your followers that can help you when it comes to targeting the right user.
Your Audience Doesn’t Understand What They Should Be Doing
Your ad has to be more than a few pretty pictures or videos of why someone should do business with you. Advertisements now have to work harder than ever to convince a user to continue with their buyer’s journey. With over 35% of internet users saying they use social media when they’re bored, there’s a good chance your audience members are included in that.
Facebook understands the importance of a CTA (call-to-action) button, which is why they require businesses to choose one before launch. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't have some secondary calls to action in other parts of your ad!
When you include a first CTA in your ad copy, with the second being Facebook’s required button, you give yourself two chances to catch your audience’s attention enough to take action.
You Never Had a Testing Phase
Everyone ad campaign needs to leave time for an appropriate testing phase; at least 30 days. During this testing phase, your business is changing and editing your ad to figure out what type of ad will perform the best. These tests often include A/B variables, changing images, increasing your spending, or other changes.
If you never had a testing phase or didn’t test your ad for long enough, chances are it’s going to underperform when the time is right.
The first step is to understand your social media ad goals and metrics. Using these key metrics to track your ad performance can not only help you save money acquiring leads but can also assist your company in creating a solid ad from the very beginning.
Once those metrics have been defined, it’s time to start running your ad and seeing the types of results you achieve with your original ad. From there, you can test colors, copy, placements, CTAs, and more. When your testing phase is complete, you will have an ad that consistently brings in quality leads and sales without much effort on your part.
Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads Performance
We understand the importance Facebook ads can have on a company. Especially when starting out, ads can be one of the best and most effective ways to gain leads and grow your brand awareness.
To ensure your efforts are optimized from the beginning, here are four tips to improve your overall ads performance.
Pay Special Attention to Your Ad Copy
Copy is one of the stronger elements of your Facebook ad. Good copy keeps your audience engaged, but great copy gets them to act! Here are a few tips to elevate your ad copy:
Use “You” words: Using personal words like you and your makes insinuate a quality relationship has already been established. This type of copy change can result in improved conversions.
Avoid nomenclature: Speak to your audience in words and ways they will understand. Remember, almost 1/3rd of all social media users are using the platform when they’re bored!
Keep it short: Too much text can be intimidating, so focus on the essentials and get rid of the rest.
Don’t Overload Your Images With Text
After being in the marketing industry for over 10 years we know one thing is for certain - users don’t really like to read.
Don’t worry though, Facebook knows this. To ensure your ad has the best chance possible of performing well, it limits the amount of text in your ad to 20%.
Since you only have a few lines to grab your audience's attention, here is how you do it: When adding text to your Facebook ad, be sure to select copy that will 1) Catch your target audience’s attention and 2) Tease the value of your offer.
Experiment with Lookalike Audiences
If you're trying to locate your best customers on Facebook, Lookalike Audiences might do the trick!
Lookalike Audiences are Facebook users who share similar characteristics to your target audience or current followers. These factors often include Facebook-type information available, such as content they like or share, other ads they have interacted with, and other brands they may follow.
Here are the most common reasons we recommend Lookalike Audiences:
You want to engage a new audience
Your existing ad audience isn’t engaging as it used to and you need to run some tests.
You want to compare two different audiences against each other.
Tip: Utilizing Lookalike Audiences in your testing phase for a re-targeting campaign can often save you time and money!
Keep Track of Your Relevant Score
As we mentioned above, the relevancy of your ad is incredibly important to Facebook and its ad algorithm. To ensure ads are always relevant to their audience, Facebook introduced “Relevance Score”. This numerical score is Facebook’s way of measuring the quality and engagement level of your ads.
Your Relevance Score is important because it determines both your CPC (cost-per-click) on Facebook and how frequently Facebook shows your ad. After your ad has been shown to over 500 people, Facebook will show you a score based on how it predicts will be your ad’s engagement will be based on the campaign objective and audience details.
Key Takeaways
Running a successful ad campaign is the ultimate goal for many businesses. With organic reach and organic traffic becoming increasingly difficult to obtain in the short term, turning to ads is sometimes the only option.
If you’re searching for how to improve your Facebook ads performance, we hope this blog helped! Our ads experts have been running ads for hundreds of businesses, so we know what it takes to create a compelling ad your audience can’t help but act on.
Click the link below to speak to a professional today, and let’s see what an ad strategy can do for your business.