10 reasons why Facebook ads don’t work

It’s a fairly typical situation: you set up and run a Facebook ad campaign, check your Facebook ads conversion rate after an hour or two or a day, and the results for impressions are disappointing: there are very few or no impressions at all. There can be many reasons for the lack of activity in campaigns. Let’s discuss how to create Facebook ads more effectively:

You use different audience ad groups in the same campaign that overlap with each other

In other words, one user, according to your Facebook ad preferences, sees ads from different groups, since they belong to two seemingly different audiences.

In this case, your ads may not be displayed, because you are trying to show two of your Facebook offer ads to the same user at the same time, and they are competing with each other.

You can check the intersection of saved audiences by going to the “Audiences” tab, then select audiences for comparison and click the compare button in the “Actions” section.

Solution: disable overlapping ad groups, leaving one of them; run no more than one ad group per audience in the same campaign at the same time.

A narrow audience

Choosing the right target audience to make your ads effective is certainly an important aspect of your Facebook ads strategy ‘s performance, but you should not narrow it down too much, because in this case, impressions can be minimized. It is better to keep the audience size within at least a few thousand or tens of thousands of users.

Low bid

If you choose to manually establish the bid, your price may not be enough to win the auction, and as a result, the number of impressions will suffer.

To solve this problem, an ads manager shall simply switch to automatic bid setting, and after the impressions start, you will be able to set manual control again based on the received statistics.

Example of a manual bid:

Small budget

If you set a budget of a few dollars for an ad group and chose an audience that is expensive in terms of Facebook algorithms, then your budget will simply not be enough for a sufficient number of impressions.

To solve this problem, simply increase the budget in the ad group settings.

A lot of text on the Facebook ad image

Facebook reduces coverage for ads that have banners that exceed the Facebook ad character limit of 20%. You can use a Facebook ad text checker to see whether the amount of text meets the requirements facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay. You can find out how to bypass the ad character limit in our article about bypassing the FB rules for images.

If your ad image does not meet the requirements of the advertising system, you will see an alert when creating an ad: 

If you end up requesting manual moderation, your ads will probably be served, but they will probably get less coverage than they could have.

Users consider your ads irrelevant and try to get rid of ads on Facebook

This situation may occur if you use a very wide audience and Facebook lead generation ads are not relevant for some users. The second option: you have been posting the same ads on FB (banners) for a long time to the audience for which it has lost its relevance.

Users can also get rid of your ads because of frankly low-quality content.

To solve this problem, you should constantly work on the relevance of ads, change them in time, and create a target audience.

A negative consequence of users clicking the ad block button is that it affects not only the ad’s impressions, but also the overall performance of the account.

The reaction of the audience on your ad

You can view the audience’s reaction to your ad in your account by going to the ads tab and selecting the “Reviews” column:

The level of positive and negative feedback will give you an understanding of whether the audience likes the ad, or it is better to replace it:

If your ads have a low quality score, this may lead to a decrease in the number of impressions of this ad and an increase in the cost of impressions and clicks. You can check the quality indicator by adding the Relevance Score column to the report. You can only increase this indicator by generating high-quality content that matches the target audience.

A high frequency of impressions can also cause a decrease in the number of impressions. If the frequency increases and you see a decrease in the effectiveness of the advertising campaign (impressions, clicks, engagement), this indicates the need to replace creative ideas with new ones. Usually, you should think about replacing it when the frequency is 2 or higher.

Enabling conversion optimization when you first launch a Facebook ad campaign is not a good idea. For this type of optimization, Facebook must collect statistics that its algorithms can rely on. If a new campaign is launched, there are no such statistics, and when choosing conversion optimization, Facebook ads conversion rate and the overall effectiveness of the campaign may suffer.

For the first launch of the campaign, it is better to choose the click optimization setting, and after receiving 15-30 conversions for the campaign, you can already try the conversion optimization option.

Often, too frequent and abrupt changes do not help to stabilize the number of impressions. Facebook ad placements don’t always start right away, and it may take up to a day to see the first results. Therefore, if several hours have passed since the launch of the ad campaign and you don’t see the results in the advertising cabinet, don’t panic. If your impressions don’t improve after a day, you should try making adjustments: increase your daily budget, bid, expand your audience, and check your content.