Facebook ads are one of the most popular methods for growing your business and increasing sales — but if you’re not converting, it doesn’t matter how much you spend. Instead of a potential opportunity for exponential growth, it’s just a waste of money. This article will walk you through 7 common reasons why your Facebook ads aren’t working as well as they should and show you how to fix each one. Take a look at which reason applies to your ad and start implementing changes to improve the performance of your campaign.

1.    Insufficient Audience Data

Most marketers are accustomed to Google Ads, where you create a marketing campaign first and then await a response from potential customers. Facebook Ads, however, require significant knowledge about the target audience beforehand, conducting research on your customers before creating a custom marketing campaign. It is crucial for businesses, especially new businesses and start-ups, to identify all their customer characteristics. They need to identify who the customers are, what they buy from the business, and what impact the product has on the customers. Getting this information beforehand will make it easier for the Facebook advertising algorithm to create targeted ads for your intended customers. As a business owner, you should conduct frequent surveys on your target audience, identifying critical details regarding the relationship between customers and your products.

Alternatively, you can set up a broad awareness campaign at a cheap charge, helping you get multiple impressions, from whom you can collect relevant data. From this initial campaign, you can identify what kinds of people click on your ads and whether any of them get converted into customers. In this case, you will be identifying your specific audience by narrowing down your visitors. You can also take advantage of the comment sections on most of the social media accounts associated with your business. Through these customer comments, you can get valuable information regarding how customers engage with your products and additional input on how you could provide better service. After collecting this data, you can consequently create a customized Ad campaign that will target your audience.

2.    Poor Audience Targeting

On the flip side, poorly optimized audience targeting can limit your marketing campaign. Facebook gives a suitable marketing platform for any business, with its vast daily users providing a pool of potential customers. Additionally, Facebook then offers businesses the ability to target their advertisements to a custom audience, which most newbie businesses do not know. Poor audience targeting can either occur through narrow audience targeting or broad targeting. With narrow targeting, a business gets overconfident with their audience metrics, feeling they sufficiently know and understand their customers. Consequently, the business implements several audience parameters into the ad, limiting the Facebook algorithm’s scope of operation. With a strictly targeted marketing campaign, the business will not reach a greater audience which holds the potential for more leads and conversions. As a consequence, the Ad campaign often suffers, resulting in less conversion and less profitability from the advertisements.

On the other hand, broad audience targeting is detrimental to the business, since the advertisements will reach an audience who may not necessarily have an interest in the product or service. Additionally, having a broader marketing campaign will also require a higher advertisement budget, which is disproportional to the amount of business recouped from successful leads and conversions. Consequently, businesses should strive to achieve the right balance with their audience targeting metrics, ensuring that the Facebook algorithm can adequately cater to the existing customer base while eliciting increased interest from new audiences.

3.    Impressions are Too Low

Impressions refer to the number of times your ad gets displayed on user screens. However, the ad just gets displayed on the pages and does not account for how many people eventually view it. Measuring impressions is necessary since this helps determine whether your ad is getting displayed at all. Low impressions show that there may be issues with your ad’s content or framing. Additionally, since impressions and reach go hand in hand, lower impression rates consequently result in lower reach and thus conversion rates. As a business owner, you can keep track of your impression and reach metrics on your Facebook Ads account. Here, you can determine whether your ads have a healthy impression-reach ratio, and you can consequently make any remedies to improve the impressions.

4.    Not Enough Clicks

Getting a few clicks on your ads can significantly impact the viability of your ad campaign. Generally, the ad campaign is impractical, if it does not translate into added participation by customers. Usually, ad clicks will get affected by the ad’s suitability to the target audience. As earlier stated, a business needs to have a targeted ad campaign, ensuring that they adequately identify their target audience and their characteristics, helping them send customized ads. However, some businesses will create a good ad campaign, but they will market this to an audience that is not interested.

In some cases, the ads will have lots of impressions but little click-through rates and conversions. For many businesses, the ads will gather so-called “curiosity clicks”, where Facebook users stumble upon the ad and click on it, but will not proceed beyond the view. Consequently, this will display added interest in your business as reported on Facebook analytics, but it will not have any impact on your business. Therefore, you must enhance your conversion rates on your Facebook ads, which will improve your business’s performance relative to your marketing campaign. `Seek to create custom ads targeted at your customers, which guarantees added clicks and added business. 

5.    Less Than Optimal Ad Spend

Sometimes businesses will have low conversion rates because of Ad spending. Facebook ads generally work through a bidding system, with higher bids getting priority over lower ones. The prices for these ads also generally change throughout the year, with increases in price during heavy advertising seasons, such as during the Christmas holidays. As such, you may find that your business is having lower conversion rates at a lower bid, one that has typically shown good returns throughout the rest of the year. In other cases, new businesses could simply not understand the bidding system, leaving them without a competitive edge on the Facebook advertisement algorithm. The ad spend also gets determined either by clicks or impressions, which will also change the overall amount charged. If, despite bidding higher, you find that you still have limited clicks, opt to get charged per impression. However, it is critical to understand that the number of clicks achieved not only relies on ad spend but also on the precision of customer targeting.

6.    Weak Call to Action

           A call to action is a prompt to customers, usually urging them to perform a specific action. Usually, a call to action will get posted on a business’s website or their advertisement. The business owner will seek to get the customer to perform a specific action, be it buying the product getting advertised, or accessing additional assistance regarding a specific product or service on their website. A call to action needs to be clear and powerful, successfully eliciting the expected reaction from the audience. Weak calls to action will usually confuse customers, especially those without a well-defined way to access the required product or service. The customers will then usually leave the website without buying the product or service, limiting the business’s ability to convert visitors into customers. A good call to action will consist of hyperlinks, or buttons that help direct the audience to the next course of action along the sales funnel. In some cases, multiple calls to action may be necessary, helping a wide audience each redirect to the next stage of their interaction process. A clear call to action, therefore, will eliminate decision fatigue from your customers, allowing them to interact more with your business and consequently improve conversion rates.

7.    Poor Advertising Creative

In many cases, business owners will get tempted to create fancy advertisements, adding bright graphics, and flashy images, all seeking to capture the attention of potential customers. While these are guaranteed to turn heads, sometimes this can become excessive, oftentimes dissuading viewers as they seem suspicious. Sometimes, simple but elegant is the best technique. Additionally, ensure that the ad content matches with the product you are selling, which maintains consistency with what the customer expects. If the viewer gets what they see, it enhances the chances of converting viewers into customers. Additionally, customers also react better to products with social proof, such as verified customer ratings or comments, which will further boost the credibility of your adverts. You are likely to get higher conversion rates if potential customers feel they can trust your business. Finally, ensure your ad content avoids these common copywriting mistakes that might hinder the reach of the ad.