Facebook Ads not delivering? Here’s how you fix it

Facebook Ads not delivering?

With 2 Billion users worldwide Facebook seems like a logical first step when you want to start advertising online.
But as a digital marketing agency that has been at it for quite some time, we can tell you that this tool is actually not as easy as it looks. It takes time, hard work, and precision to navigate this complicated system.

Advertising on Facebook can be a frustrating experience. There are going to be times when even after through copywriting, target audience research your ads may just not work. But guess what it is an extremely common thing to happen.

Which is exactly why you need to understand how to fix this situation. At the end of this exercise, you will have a clearer picture as to what actually works in your Facebook advertisements and campaigns.

It may seem like a lot of arduous and grunt work for a digital platform but these are the pain points that need to be looked at.
Here is a broad list of what all things you should look out for –

• Find out which Facebook Ad set or campaign has stopped working for you, you can do that by starting at the bottom of your marketing funnel and working your way up.
• It’s a good practice to do this periodically instead of waiting for all hell to break loose before you analyze your data.
• Try to find out which channel is the issue. Check whether the drop was gradual or all at once in your conversion rates.
• In case there is an issue with website traffic then start with your Google analytics and Facebook analytics data. Try to find out where the issue is in the funnel to target it. This means a lot of analysis will be focused on conversion rates from cart to purchase or lead to sale and more. Do a comparison study – From the 2 weeks, you see the fall vs the 2 weeks where things were working normal.
• Look at each day in your data set and was there any specific day that you could look at when things went drastically bad?
• See if your conversion rates are affected on any specific device or browsers.
• Look for any big changes or spikes in your data of conversion rates or traffic.
• Co-ordinate and find out the stock availability of your products and categories
• Have there been any recent changes to your website?
• Analyze your customer journey and find the differences.
• If you find which channel was the issue for e.g. Instagram then do this whole exercise again – research, analyze and compare. Map the funnel again but this time keep the specific channel in focus and work top to bottom. Here’s a tip – when working with such large amounts of data it is best to export the file and group similar ad sets together in your grouping of 2 weeks of data.
• Find out if its saturation or ad decay. Understand if its all your campaigns or ad sets or a particular campaign or ad sets.
• A quick fix can be a fresh creative in the rotation but it isn’t the final answer.
• If the issue is more than this then keep going further into your data.
• Other things for you to look out for can be – reach, CTR, add to basket ratio, Cost per sale, CPM, Relevancy score of ads, and Cost per add to baskets.
• Look at your demographic breakdowns too. Compare from what one age and gender you were getting a lot and if the traction is similar or not.

Based on your analysis of your Facebook ads you can take the required action. If it still does not fix the issue you may have to build your campaigns from scratch. In extremely rare cases people have also tried new ad accounts, but this means you lose all previous data, and will have to optimize everything again. So, this is an option to be kept more like a poison pill as followed incorporates. But if you are doing a hard reset on Facebook Ads then here’s a quick checklist –

• Problem with a specific campaign? Just duplicate and restart it.
• Still not working? Then use your best audiences and Ad sets and start the whole process again.
• Use absolutely fresh creatives that do not mirror the ones used before.
• Remove retargeting for the time being.
• Gradually build up your campaign and learn from what worked before.

If you have any tips or tricks please go ahead and share it with us!