Are you finding that your Facebook ads aren’t converting as well as you’d hoped? As a small business, it can feel like a big risk to invest money into paid advertisements on social media and it can be disheartening when the results don’t met your expectations. If you have dipped your toe into the Facebook Ads pool in the past and been left disappointed, you might be saying “Facebook ads just don’t work for our business”. But don’t throw your Facebook towel in just yet – we’re here to help!
In this post, we’ll outline some of the common reasons your ads might not be performing well and offer tips on how to fix them. Keep reading to learn more!
Reason #1: Your budget is too low
As a small business owner this might be the last thing you want to hear – but hear us out. This well-known saying is popular for a reason: “sometimes you have to spend money to make money”. If you’ve been putting a very small budget into your ads because you’re afraid of wasting money, it’s unlikely you’re going to the see the results you hoped for. However, you’ll be glad to hear that sometimes, if your budget is small, you might not actually need to spend more money to see results, you may simply need to target a smaller audience that works for the budget you currently have.
For small businesses we recommend aiming for a budget of £5 – £10 a day for campaigns that focus on objectives like lead generation, messages, on site conversions and website traffic. If you’re on a tight budget and this is out of your reach, you could consider running engagement campaigns like page likes or post engagements or awareness campaigns and trailing a budget of £3 per day.
If this is the budget you’re currently working with and you’re still not seeing the performance you would like, then it might be that the audience size you’ve chosen is far too large for a budget of this size. If you’ve chosen for your first Facebook Campaign to target the whole of Northern Ireland, with little to no detailed targeting in place, your audience is likely too big for your budget. For a small business budget like the one above, we recommend aiming for no more than 100,000 in your audience and no less than 10,000.
Reason #2: Your Audience is Too Narrow
Just as an audience that’s far too big can impact performance, an audience that’s too small or too specific can also be a reason for your ads not performing. Like we mentioned above, if your audience size is below 10,000, we would suggest this is too low. However, your audience can be bigger than this but still be causing problems.
So how do you know when your audience is too small?
Frequency is a metric provided in the Ads Manager analytics and is your new best friend when it comes to monitoring campaign performance. Frequency tells you how many times someone has seen your ad. Three times is the recommended number you should be aiming for. If you check your metrics and see that your audiences are seeing your ad 5,6,7… maybe 10 times, that’s a clear indicator your audience is too narrow for the budget and campaign length. Consistently running ads that have a high frequency can frustrate users who are seeing the same ads again and again which can affect your brand sentiment. Be respectful of your potential customer’s social feeds.
The solution? If you genuinely can’t make your audience any bigger, then consider making your budget smaller and running your ad for a shorter length of time so as not to frustrate users.
Reason #3: Unclear Target Audience
How well do you know your target audience? Are you clear on their demographics, behaviour and interests? Or is each social ad a stab in the dark? If you resonate with the latter, then chances are the targeting in your campaigns are too broad and your messaging too general.
When promoting a small business online, it is essential to understand who your customers are and what they want. Without this knowledge, it can be difficult to effectively reach and engage potential customers. One way to get better insight into your target audience is to create customer personas. These detailed profiles document key information about your ideal customers, such as their demographics, interests, pain points, and goals. By taking the time to build these personas, you will gain a clearer picture of who you are trying to reach with your Facebook Ads. Armed with your new customer knowledge, you will be much better equipped to design ads that effectively reach your ideal audience and convert them. So, if you want to see better results from your Facebook marketing efforts, take the time to carry out some detailed customer research.
Reason #4: Your Ad Copy is Poor
So maybe you’ve spent the time carrying out detailed customer research to create your ideal target audience and you’ve selected a budget that is in line with the size of your audience, but your ads still aren’t converting. All too often, small businesses spend so much time ensuring the set up of their campaign is correct that they don’t take appropriate time to plan out what they actually want to say in the ad. This is crazy! You’ve put in all the hard work (and money!) to make sure your ideal customer sees the ad – so you better make sure this ad get them to convert!
The text you include in your ads can make or break your conversion rates. There are several key factors to consider when writing effective ad copy, including clear messaging and attention-grabbing headlines. For example, you should be sure to highlight the benefits of your product or service rather than simply listing out its features. How can your product or service speak to that pain point you identified in that detailed customer research you carried out in point number three? It is important to keep your target audience in mind at all times, tailoring the language and tone of your ads to speak directly to your identified customer personas. Don’t be too general in your messaging. It’s a good idea to target specific groups of people with customised messages that appeal directly to their interests and needs. This can help you get better results from your Facebook ads by increasing engagement and generating more clicks and conversions overall.
Reason #5: Your Landing Page Doesn’t Convert
If the objective of your Facebook Campaign involves sending users through to your website, then this is for you.
A high-converting landing page is critical to the success of any Traffic or Conversions Facebook Ads Campaign. A successful landing page effectively encourages users to take the desired action. This can be anything from signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase to downloading an eBook or contacting your small business for more information. To ensure that your landing page converts well, it’s important to make sure its optimised. This means thinking about what action you want users to take on the page (eg. signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase) and then putting relevant Calls-to-Action (CTAs) in prominent positions throughout the page. Additionally, you should prioritise essential information such as pricing or product features above less important details, so that visitors can quickly get a sense of what your business offers and why they should choose you over your competitors.
Ultimately, whether you’re looking to increase downloads, leads, or sales, having a well-designed landing page is crucial if you want your ads to convert. So, start thinking about what your objective is, and then work on fine tuning that landing page.
Reason #6: Your Call to Action is Not Effective
When it comes to effective Facebook Ads, one of the most important aspects is your call to action. After all, the whole purpose of an ad is to get people to take a specific action: whether that’s signing up for your newsletter, making a purchase, or simply learning more about your product or service. But if your call to action is weak or unclear, this can affect how well your ads convert.
One of the main reasons why Facebook Ads don’t convert well is because they fail to make the benefits of clicking on the ad clear. You need to make it clear to a user exactly what will happen when they click through; if you’re offering a discount or free shipping for example, be sure to clearly communicate these benefits. If the benefits to the user are unclear, they are unlikely to take action on your ad.
So, if you’re struggling with low Facebook ad conversions, it might be time to take a closer look at your call-to-action to see where improvements can be made.
Reason #7: You’re not learning from your previous ads
Finally, another contributing factor to your ads not converting could be that you’re not learning from your previous ads.
By taking the time to evaluate what worked and what didn’t you can take all this valuable data and apply it to your next campaign. Maybe in your previous campaign you tested two different images and two different audiences. Which audiences responded best to which image? Did either of the audiences not perform to your expectations? Should you consider removing that audience and either trialling a different audience or putting all your budget into the audience that did perform?
If your ads aren’t performing as you’d hoped, you can’t keep trying the same thing and hoping for better results (that’s what Einstein calls insanity!). Spend some time looking over the results of your previous campaigns and make notes on what you could try differently this time. If you don’t have many campaigns to refer to, then apply this thinking to your new campaigns: create 5-10 ad variations testing different imagery, copy and CTA buttons to discover, quickly, what works and what doesn’t for your target audience.
Analysing ad performance and applying what you found will help you to create highly optimised ads that convert.
Need help with Facebook Ads?
These seven suggestions are a good starting point for understanding why your ads might not be performing as well as you’d like, and we hope they’ve been helpful. Facebook Ads can be a great way to reach your target market, but only you if take the time and put in the effort to make them effective. But maybe you don’t feel like you have the time to research, analyse and optimise to make your ads the best they can be? Don’t worry, we’re here to help! If you need assistance putting this advice into practice or just want someone else to manage your Facebook Ads for you, get in touch. We have years of experience creating successful ad campaigns that generate real results for our clients. And we’d love to chat to you about how you can improve your Facebook Ad performance.
We’d love to offer you a complimentary 30-minute introductory call via Zoom to learn more about how we can help drive more sales and leads to your business through Facebook Ads.