Five reasons your Facebook ads might be underperforming

Facebook ads can feel tricky, but in reality, they’re not - but they require a LOT of testing and tweaking until you reach the ultimate goal, which is targeting the RIGHT people, at the RIGHT time with the RIGHT message.

If you’re not getting the results you want, here are five things that you should be looking at:

1) Your audience

It might be that you’re not targeting the right people. 

You can have the best ad in the world, but if you’re showing it to the wrong people it’s never going to be successful. 

Facebook gives you lots of ways to create suitable audiences. You can use custom audiences (these are your “warm” audiences: website visitors, Facebook/Instagram followers, video viewers and even your email contact list) and then you can create lookalikes of these audiences, giving you a whole load of new people who are really similar to your current audience.

You can also create saved audiences, which you can build based on your ICA (ideal customer avatar) using age, gender, geographical location (if relevant), job roles, interests, hobbies, where they shop, who they follow etc. 

The more you know about your ideal customer, the better! 

2) Your objective

Have you chosen the correct objective for your ads?

When it comes to your objective, you have to be clear in telling Facebook what you want your ads to do - it takes your instructions at face value! 

The objective you choose will dictate who your ads are shown to. If you choose “traffic” then Facebook shows your ads to the people within your chosen audience that it thinks will click your link. If you choose “conversions” it shows the ad to the people most likely to take the chosen action (download, purchase etc) and so on.

So if you’ve set up a traffic campaign, hoping that people will click the link AND buy, then you’ve chosen the wrong objective.  Facebook is showing the ad to people that will click the link, for sure… but you failed to mention you wanted people to take an action. 

3) Your creative

If your images are bland, they could be doing you a disservice. 

It’s really important to find “traffic stopping” images. The type of photo that’s going to make your ideal customer stop scrolling and actually notice your ad. That’s not an easy task as you have to think outside of what you personally like, and really put yourself in the mindset of your ideal client/customer. 

As a business owner/brand you can get caught up in your logo/your branding and whilst images including these things might work, you have to be prepared to consider that equally, they might not! 

You want to find an image that feels natural when it’s in the newsfeed of your ICA but equally will intrigue them enough to take notice of your ad. 

4) Your words

It could be that your copy isn’t working.

You have a split second to catch someone’s attention on Facebook, so you need to learn to be short and snappy! 

That’s not to say that ads with long copy don’t work, but you need to make sure that your first line is attention grabbing.

Focus your attention on your headline and the first line of your copy - your headline should tempt people in, and your first line of copy should fully back that up! 

These two elements should make the reader either want to read more or take immediate action.

5) Your budget

If you’re not willing to allocate a decent budget then you might not get the results you hoped for.

I’m a firm believer that everyone can get started with Facebook ads from as little as £1/$1 a day, however if you want Facebook ads to deliver a serious amount of traffic or leads for your business, then you have to allocate a decent budget.  

Facebook ads are run on an auction basis, so everyone is competing, and in a very busy marketplace you do have to pay to play.

Once you’ve made some changes in one, some, or all of these areas, you should start to see your results improving. 

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