Facebook Ads Not Performing? Here Are the Top 3 Issues and How You Fix Them

Ad fatigue leads to expensive campaigns that don’t work. In other words, you pay much more for less results. Here is what to do when your Facebook ads stop working.

Have you ever tried pottery before?

Let’s say, you want to create a plate. Before even getting the clay ready, you need to imagine the plate in your mind, asking yourself how it looks and what details it has. Next, it’s time to pick up your clay. Some use white clay and some prefer stoneware. Having the clay is important, but without spinning the potter’s wheel and starting to shape it, the clay won’t turn into a plate. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

Running Facebook ad campaigns is the same. Just creating a campaign and hitting the publish button will not help you to bring consistent sales and achieve long-term success. So what should you do? Evaluating data regularly and making the right decisions every day is what turns low-performance ads into high-performance & massively successful advertising campaigns. Bear with me to find out why your campaign stopped working and how you can fix it.

1. You Only Have One Type of Ad per Ad Set

If you have been managing professional pages on Instagram or Facebook there’s a high chance that you came across the boost feature on the platforms. The boost feature allows you to increase the reach and engagement of your post, and potentially generate sales and leads for your business. So, in this type of campaign (and generally the majority of ad campaigns today), you can only find one ad within each ad set. So, there’s only one type of creative asset for the entire campaign. This means that the same people might see your ads over and over again, causing ad fatigue which undermines the performance of your campaign. But the issue of using only one ad doesn’t end there. When using one kind of content, you cannot really tell whether your campaign is performing well or not, because you don’t have any other ads to compare the performance with. So you might spend a heap load of money on an ad that you believe is performing well. In reality, however, you can achieve the same result with half of the price.

How Can I Fix It? Diversify Your Creative Assets

The answer is simple, yet challenging to execute. First of all, you need to think about what different kinds of content you can create for your ad campaigns. Your best options are:

• Telling the story of your business in the video format, get in front of the camera and explain why you started your business in under 60 seconds
• Talk about the values that your business created in the carousel format, tell people about what they gain if they use your product and how your offers help them to solve their problems
• Explain problems facing your customer and then explain your solution in a written format alongside a related illustration

Come up with creative assets that communicate the same message but in different formats (like video, carousel, audio, picture, copy, etc). Experiment with different ads and then after 72 hours or a week of launching your campaign you’ll see which ad is performing better and which one has stopped working. After turning off the low-performing ads, your next step would be to create different versions of the content that already worked well, so you can create better ads that get results at a low cost.

2. You’re Overlooking A/B Testing of Different Targeting Options

Although creative assets can make or break your ad campaign, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the targeting option. Your campaign might not get the desired results because either you’re showing your ads to a huge pool of users or you’re targeting a tiny audience. You can potentially get a lot of results at a low cost by targeting a huge audience, but those users might not be your ideal customers. Therefore, you cannot make many sales (especially growing your loyal customer base) by targeting tens of millions of people right away. On the other hand, when having a small audience size, most of the time you cannot make much of a difference and just waste money on ads that no one clicks. You might also use too much or too little interest and show your ads to the wrong type of people. So how do you find the perfect audience? Two words: A/B testing.

How Can I Fix It? Try Lookalike Audiences and Interest-Based Audiences

Start by thinking about who your ideal customers are. Then, create the below audiences on the Facebook’s business manager:

• Pick a specific location and add 5–10 relevant interests to your audience
• Create lookalike audiences from your social media followers
• Create lookalike audiences from your current customer list
• Create lookalike audiences from people who visited your website
• Create lookalike audiences from people who engaged with your posts on social media

After, start A/B testing your audiences in each ad set to find out which one is performing better. The next step would be slowly allocating more budget to the ad set that is driving the most results.

3. You’ve Got Too Much or Too Little Budget

One of the biggest misconceptions in advertising is you need to have a million-dollar budget to generate impressions and sales. In reality though, not only spending too much is not required, but can undermine the performance of your campaign. Also, if you’re spending too little on your ad campaign you might not get enough data to optimize your campaign for better performance.

How Can I Fix It? Conduct Experiments on Your Budget

If you’re not getting any good results after a couple of days, it’s a good practice to start experimenting with different budgets as I pointed out below:

• Decrease your campaign budget by 25%
• Decrease your campaign budget by 50%
• Increase your campaign budget by 25%
• Increase your campaign budget by 50%

Yes, Running Profitable Facebook Ads Can Be Quite Demanding

Facebook ads will help you generate consistent sales and leads, but running successful & cost-efficient campaigns will be challenging. As a result, you either need to hire marketers or start learning the skills to do the marketing yourself. But, both hiring and learning marketing can be expensive and time-consuming. So, you end up missing a huge opportunity like Facebook ads or wasting your money on campaigns that no one sees or clicks.

That’s exactly why we’re building LaunchPad Marketing.

LaunchPad Marketing is an ad automation tool that takes care of setting up and optimizing your campaign. So, you can create the perfect Facebook ad campaign just in a few minutes. LaunchPad Marketing allows you to spend less time on marketing and spend more time on what you’re most passionate about, your business.

Get an early bird offer and be among the first to try out LaunchPad Marketing by filling out this form.