Facebook and Instagram ads not performing as you expected? Not to worry, because we’re sharing our Facebook team’s top tips for troubleshooting and fixing poor ad performance.
If you want your ads performance to improve or you’ve noticed that your ads performance has changed drastically, these are the things you want to check:
- Are you using the right type of campaign for your goals?
- Is your targeting correct?
- Is there a problem with your budget?
- Has Facebook flagged any of your campaigns?
- Is your frequency too high?
- What’s your relevancy score?
- Has the competition ramped up?
#1 Are you using the right type of campaign for your goals?
If your ads aren’t doing well, the very first thing you need to look at is whether or not you’re using the right campaign. Does your objective match your goals?
Facebook has three different marketing objectives that each of their campaign types fall into: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
Awareness includes brand awareness and reach campaigns.
This is the marketing objective you would choose if you were trying to get your company out in front of as many people as possible or in front of people that are best suited to what you’re offering.
Think: spreading the word.
Consideration includes traffic, engagement, video views, and any type of campaign that is designed to get the viewer to think about purchasing from you.
Conversion covers any type of campaign that’s designed to get those who see your ads to purchase from your brand, sign up for a webinar, or take whatever action it is that you consider your “end goal.”
Why does it matter if your campaign objective matches your goals?
Let’s say you want to drive store visits with your ads, but you’re using a traffic campaign. Well, you won’t see the end results you’re looking for.
Here’s why: A traffic campaign drives more traffic to your website, not your store.
In this case, you’d be better off with a conversion campaign that features ads with offers or incentives for visiting your store.
Make sense?
#2 Is your targeting correct?
The second thing you’d want to look at is your targeting.
When we talk about targeting with ads, we mean your audience. Who is in the audience you’re targeting with your ads? Is your audience large enough?
Facebook will show warnings like, “Your audience is too small,” or “Your audience is too broad,” and those things do affect performance.
So if you’re running the right type of campaign but you’re still not seeing the results you’d like to see, take a look at your audience and make sure you’re targeting the right people.
#3 Is there a problem with your budget?
The next thing to check is: is your budget feeding out?
While it’s not the only option, most people will be using a daily spend for their ads (for example: $5/day).
Now, let’s say you’re spending $20 a day and you’re thinking, “Wow, my campaigns are just not working.” If it’s budget-related you’re either:
- Not spending enough.
- Miscalculating your reach.
Let’s address spend first.
Let’s say your cost per result for a lead gen campaign is $25 and you’re spending a daily budget of $20…
Well, Facebook cannot get you a lead in one day with that budget. It needs two days worth of budget to get you a lead with that lead cost and that daily spend.
To see if this is the problem with your ads performance, you need to look at what your cost per result is and what you’re spending daily.
You might want to only spend $5/day, but if a lead in your industry costs more than that and you’re not willing to spend it, you’re wasting your money.
Facebook has to match industry standards and they can’t give you a lead for $5/day just because that’s what you want.
So if the average plumbing lead costs about $80, you need to be willing to spend at least $80/day or accept that you’re only going to get one lead every several days.
Now, let’s talk about your reach.
You may think that your reach is really wide and your budget will go a long way — but you could be wrong.
For example, you may think it’ll be $0.50 to $1.50 per lead, but Facebook may be saying something different, depending on the day.
So you need to look at the estimated daily reach. If that’s not lining up with what you’re getting in your results, then it’s time to switch campaigns, adjust your budget, and switch up some copy and headlines.
If it is matching, then Facebook is doing the best it can with what you’re giving it.
#4 Has Facebook flagged any of your campaigns?
Still not sure what’s affecting your ads performance? Then it’s time to look for any red flags (pun absolutely intended).
When you look at your dashboard, do you see any yellow or red triangles next to your ad sets, your ads, or your campaigns?
If you have a red triangle, you either need to fix that ad/ad set/campaign, or delete it.
Why delete? Even though that ad might be turned off, Facebook Ads Manager sees in there and can hold that against you in the long-run. So if you can’t fix it, get rid of it!
If you have a yellow triangle, read it and take action!
The nice thing about Facebook Ads Manager is that it tells you why it’s flagging something, so you can fix it.
And if you don’t understand what it’s saying, you can always go in and submit a request that says, “Hey, I don’t really know what this means,” or “Hey, I don’t agree with this.”
Flags can get overturned, but you can’t just ignore them.
#5 Is your frequency too high?
Let’s say your ads were running just fine for a couple of weeks or a month or two, and then all of the sudden, performance plummeted.
Chances are, your frequency is too high. Frequency means how many times a person has seen that specific ad in the time that it’s been running.
Why is too high of a frequency bad? It means people aren’t engaging with your ad anymore because they’ve seen it so many times.
What’s a good rule of thumb for frequency?
If your frequency is at or over four and your ads have started to decrease in results or increase in costs, it’s time to switch those ads out or update them.
You can keep the same campaign, you can even keep the same ad set, but you need to keep fresh ads coming in there.
#6 What’s your relevancy score?
If frequency is down and cost doesn’t seem too ridiculously high, but you’re just not seeing the results you hoped for, look at your relevancy scores.
Relevancy scores are broken down into three parts:
- Quality ranking — This is determined by the feedback on your ad in comparison to other ads going to the same audience. Are people liking it?
- Engagement ranking — This is determined by looking at how people are engaging with your ads. Are they getting a lot of likes, comments, clicks, shares, etc.?
- Conversion ranking — This is determined by looking at whether or not your ads are achieving the goals you’ve set for them. For example, if you’re running a traffic campaign, is this ad bringing more people to your site? If you’re running a conversion campaign, is the ad getting conversions and purchases?
If quality, engagement, and conversion rankings are low, and Facebook is saying your ads are in the bottom 25% of ads, chances are your ads just aren’t being shown, and people aren’t liking or engaging with the message you’re putting out there.
If this is the case, you need to completely overhaul your headlines, your copy, your videos, and your images, and get something out there that people really care about and want to engage with.
#7 Has the competition ramped up?
If you’re freaking out because your Facebook or Instagram ad costs just skyrocketed and you don’t know why, look at CPM. CPM = cost per thousand impressions.
If this number is high, it typically means that your competition has increased on Facebook or Instagram, and indicates that more people are targeting the same audience you’re targeting.
A good average CPM is between $5 and $15.
That said, during the holidays, you can expect a normal CPM to be $25+ because more people are typically vying for your audience’s attention during the holidays.
If it’s not holiday season and you have a really high CPM, that means you have a super competitive audience and it’s time to go back into your audience and see if you can adjust your targeting.
See if you can target people who are a good fit for your business in a different way, so that you can get those costs lower.
For example, you may use a lookalike audience instead of interest targeting, or you may focus on retargeting instead of cold audiences.
You’re still getting to the same people, you’re just going about it in a different, more cost-effective way.
Hope this post helps!