15 reasons your Facebook ads fail and how to fix them

One of the most popular social platforms these days is Facebook because it yields great results at low costs. A Statista study showed that Facebook is used more than LinkedIn for marketing. While 89% of B2B businesses use Facebook, 81% use LinkedIn.

Yet, many brands still end up going wrong with Facebook ads. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Facebook can’t work for you. If there are issues with Facebook, there are also ways to fix them.

Here are the 15 reasons your Facebook ads fail and how to fix them

1. No relevant value:
   

   To drive engagement, Facebook prioritizes its content and advertising as per relevancy. This may work for users, but can be a problem for advertisers. Your content has to generate the right interest and only right content can gain high relevance score.

How to fix: You have to work on ads that give away something for free. It could be a free ebook, some guide that is downloadable, a free trial or webinar to promote your business.

1. Not targeting the right audience:
   If you don’t target your custom audience, your ad might not work. You need to target specific businesses that will buy. Also, if you don’t make your relevance clear in your value proposition, the ad may fail.

How to fix: You need to target your ads using Facebook’s Custom Audiences. You can use a current client list to target people who are already customers but don’t follow you on Facebook, or you can work on ads targeting different niches in your industry.

1. Your content isn’t the right type:
   

   Many B2B Facebook ads fail because they do not use the right content for the target audience. While creating content, it is essential to know the purpose of the ad. There are also other areas to focus on like whether or not you want to use images vis a vis video ads. This has to do with strategy.

How to fix: It is better to choose ad types based on the goals of the campaign and relevancy to your audience. If your audience engages more with videos, you could try video ads or link-based ads.

1. You are not at the right place at the right time:
   

   The space and the time of the ad matters a lot on Facebook. Every placement has pros and cons depending on your audience and goals. Your competitors are not just other B2B companies, but also posts from family and friends and other news sources.

How to fix: You need to focus on ads that are most likely to reach your target audience. For that, first narrow down on where most of your traffic is coming from. Newsfeed is a great source. So if you want you want a good ad ROI, don’t opt for a cheaper alternative.

1. You are not looking at optimizing ads and pages for mobile:
   

   A major mistake is ignoring mobile users completely. Facebook’s growth depends a lot on mobile ads more than any other type. Facebook ads work well with mobile users because ad blocking often doesn’t work on mobile. So, you need to target mobile users instead of desktop users if you want your Facebook ads to have the most reach.

How to fix: You may have to run different ad campaigns for desktop and different for mobile. Also, make sure your ads can easily be viewed on mobile devices as well.

1. You are not focusing on the conversion funnel:

   Even while advertising a B2B brand on Facebook, you have to customize your messages to specific audiences at different points in the funnel. It is important to consider the funnel when developing a B2B ad strategy.

How to fix: Your focus needs to be on your conversion funnel when developing your ads. Ads have to be created for conversion, so make sure they are distinct and have a purpose.

1. Your ad is of low quality:
   

   If Facebook thinks your ad is of low quality and does not have much relevance for your audience, it will be very tough for you to get impressions.

How to fix: It is easy to fix this one because Facebook lets you see the Relevance Score it assigns to each your ads. You need to just add it to your Ads Manager columns using the Column Customization options. Once you ad has received 500 impressions you’ll get a score from 1 to 10, ranking the relevance of your ad to the audience.

1. Your ad has too much text on the image:
   

   With a lot of text in it, there are chances that your ad may have lower impressions or you may end up paying a higher price to get continued delivery.

How to fix: You can solve this by checking any messages you receive in the Delivery column of your Ads Manager dashboard. You will clearly see a message saying “Too Much Text In Image”.

1. Your ads have breached rules:
   

   Facebook has several rules on what you can say in your ad and what you can’t. If you have breached the copy rules, your ads won’t run.

How to fix: This is also easy to fix because you can check the delivery column. There will be a message, accompanied by a red dot that says “Not Approved” at the ad level.

1. Your budget is too low:
   

   You may struggle to generate impressions if your ad set budgets are too low. Especially if you are using manual bidding, you will have to set higher daily budgets than you expect to spend.

How to fix: If there is a daily budget that you have set that you cannot exceed, don’t create so many ad sets that each has a very small daily budget. You can reduce your ad set splits and go for fewer ad sets with higher budgets.

1. You have reached your campaign spend limit

Don’t forget to cross check if you have you have reached your campaign spending limit. If that happens, you will see a message saying “Campaign Spending Limit Reached” in the Delivery column at the campaign level.

How to fix: The easy solution is to increase your campaign spending limit!

1. You reached your ad account spend limit

Like the campaign spend limit, you also have to check if you have reached your ad account spending limit. You will know in Payment Settings area of your Billing Information.

How to fix: Again, an easy easy solution is to increase your ad account spending limit.

1. Your offers aren’t attractive enough:
   

   If you are not getting impressions through your campaign, it is possible that your offer may not be that enticing to them.

How to fix: You can try and create a different ad copy. Go for new images and use new ad formats. You can even explore and test how these different versions against one another to find out what works the best for you.

1. Your campaign objective is wrong:
   

   Every Facebook campaign has to have a proper objective to optimize actions. You need to ensure that you are optimizing your ads for your desired action.

How to fix: If your aim is to gain traffic for your website, optimize for landing page views instead of impressions. If you want conversions, optimize for that conversion instead of for link clicks.

1. Your pixels have gone wrong:
   

   An important thing you need to check if you have a low conversion rate is whether your Facebook Pixel is installed correctly. For this, you can install the Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Chrome.

How to fix: Go through your checkout and conversion process and pay attention if the correct events are coming up on each page. You can also look at this through your Ads Manager.

Conclusion:

Facebook ads are a great way to make the most of your marketing budget. If you think they are not performing well, you can always use the above mentioned ways to fix them. Make sure you have looked at all possible options to leverage Facebook ads.