You've spent days of your life working hard on this campaign but it hasn't been shown to anybody. What the hell is going?
Advertisers face with this situation on Facebook so often that to save your nerves and peace of mind we name the most common reasons of Facebook Ad campaign's disfunction and help you to fix it.
- Your ads might be disapproved. You may check out the Facebook's Advertising Policies to know the possible reasons (such as drugs promotion, selling weapons or Adult Content etc). You will get a notification by the e-mail or you may find it going to the All Ads page. Edit your ad and resubmit to Facebook or appeal the disapproval if you think Facebook wasn't right disapproving your ad.
- Your Account Spending Limit exceeded. It happens often that you set a limit for your ads in order to avoid extra spending but later just forget about that and start to panic seeing that your ads are nor delivered. Opening the Ads Manager Menu and going to the Billing & Payment Methods you can simply change or remove the spending limit.
- Your Ad Image has more than 20% of text. Facebook set some standards to respect and one of them is not more than 20% of text on an image (including logo, slogan and other text).If your image has been given a Low, Medium or High rating; that means your ad has too much text on it and that its reach, in varying degrees, will be reduced. Facebook may reduce or just not run your ad without any warning.Still there are some exceptions. These are:
* book and album covers
* games * product images
* event posters
* charts and graphs, magazine and newspaper covers, movie and TV show posters
Do not hesitate to use Facebook's Text Overlay Tool to check your image. If you get a Medium or High result we strongly recommend you to replace the image and make sure you have less text now.
4. Your bid might be too low. Your ads compete with thousands of other ads and to choose a winner Facebook takes into account three following factors:
* Bid price – The price you’re willing to pay for the desired action.
* Estimated Action Rates – How likely your audience is to take the above action.
* Relevance and Quality – How interesting your ads are to your audience, and the quality of those ads (which is determined by the amount of negative/positive feedback)
So you should do your best to maximize these three factors to get the highest value.Setting an ad campaign you choose what actions you pay for and how much you wanna pay for them. Here you have a choice between Lowest cost and lowest cost with bid cap. In case you take the Lowest cost it means you entrust Facebook to choose the best price for your bid. Here you can be tranquil your ads will never be underdelivered. When you select a bid cap, it's you who sets the price and you may have delivery problems if the bid is too low.
5. The budget of your campaign is not enough. The basic price for campaigns ranges between 2-10$ daily per ad. That's normally an amount that is enough for Facebook to deliver your ads, gather data and optimize the process. We hope you won't try to be super greedy and imagine you could get a successful campaign for 5$ in total... The correctly budgeted campaign has far more impressions!
6. Your Optimization Goal is Hard to Reach. By selecting an optimization goal you concretize which action you want the users to take. If you choose to optimize for link clicks and Facebook will sort out those who are likely to click on links. But when you choose conversions as your objective it might turn more difficult, because of a lack of conversions. Facebook uses conversion as a source for finding good targets , so if there are no conversions your campaign is stuck because Facebook doesn't have data to work with.
But you always can use a conversion type that might occur several times a day - for example "add to cart" action instead of "buy now". Or you can go for link clicks objective for a while and when you will reach about 50 conversions per week, pass back to conversions objective.
7. Your audience finds your ads irrelevant. The Facebook Relevance score ranges from 1 to 10 and shows the attitude of your audience to your ads. People engage with the content in a positive or negative way by liking it, leaving comments or hiding it from the newsfeed and reporting it as a spam and all these actions affect your score. The better the score, the more likely your ads are to be shown than others.
If you haven't found yet your score in Facebook, go to the Ads Manager and select your campaign. Once you’re there, you may edit your columns so that your Relevance Score is displayed. Once you’ve accomplished that you will be able to see your score, positive and negative feedback (Low, Medium, or High). If your relevance score is low, start with changing your ads images. Make your ads more interesting that people wouldn't stay unimpressed. Only outstanding ads are able to catch an eye of a Facebook user. Still do not forget to refresh your creatives and refine your targeting.
8. Overlapping audiences. Facebook will prevent your ads from competing with one another during the auction and evidently might stop running some of your adsets. There is an Audience Overlap Tool that helps advertisers to find out if their audiences are overlapping. You select up to 5 of your audiences and see the percentage of overlap.
9. Your Ads are reviewed for sooooo long. All the ads pass through the Facebook review. This process is stated to take up to 24 hours, although sometimes it takes longer. So if you are in a hurry - schedule your campaign in advance by selecting the specific start and end date during campaign creation. And do not edit your ads before getting the attended approval.
10. Low quality ads. There are 3 main categories of Low Quality Ads:
Engagement bait.
All these posts asking users to "like and share, tag your friends". Facebook defines them as “Ads with spammy content asking people to engage with it in specific ways, such as requesting likes, comments, and shares”. This is against the Facebook policy and might affect your ad delivery.
Withholding Information.
I honestly hate such headlines saying "People had no idea that this SIMPLE THING whitens teeth in a second!!". And you are obliged to click otherwise you will never know what this simple thing is... This is considered withholding information and will also reduce delivery, or simply get you disapproved.
Sensationalist language.
“Ads that use exaggerated headlines or command a reaction from people but don’t deliver on the landing page”.
Well, these are the most common reasons why a campaign isn't working. Hope we made your life a little easier.
