Why Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Working [And How to Fix Them]

With 2.85 billion monthly active users globally, Facebook is a robust advertising platform that allows businesses to reach potential customers in a targeted manner.

Advertising on Facebook can be frustrating for people unfamiliar with the platform. Especially when your Facebook ads aren’t converting, it’s easy to get disheartened and call it quits. You can quickly recover your conversion rate with a few tweaks to your strategy.

Effective Facebook ad campaigns require careful planning, copywriting, design work, and targeting. Troubleshoot your strategy and ad content to ensure your ads start to deliver before spending money.

If you’re tired of your FB ads not converting, this guide will show you how to increase your click-through rate (CTR), engagement, and conversions. We also explore why most Facebook ads do not convert and how to fix a campaign that isn’t working.

Facebook Ads Conversion: An Overview 

Among all social networks, Facebook has the most sophisticated advertising system. However, Facebook has more competition than smaller, niche networks. Unless you make your Facebook ads stand out from the competition, you’ll notice that your Facebook ads aren’t converting.

What is Facebook Ads Conversion?

The term ‘Conversion’ refers to the number of times a particular action was taken, such as a purchase or add to cart. This is based on the pixel, app, or offline event data.

This metric counts how many times the selected conversion occurred during the selected reporting period. Some conversions may not be directly measured due to incomplete or missing data, so statistical modeling may be used instead.

Facebook Ads Conversion is defined as the number of times someone interacted with your ad. This would relate to taking a specific action (CTA) such as clicking on a link to your website or booking a call on your calendar.

Facebook Ads have an average conversion rate (CVR) of 9.11% across all industries. That’s why it’s a no-brainer for businesses to utilize Facebook’s unique ad formats, targeting options, and ad objectives. Particularly, the conversion optimization objective.

Pick the right optimization goal to increase Facebook ads conversion. By optimizing your ads for conversions, you can manage your campaign budget, use smarter ad bidding, and increase your ROI. 

By controlling your ad costs, you save money and don’t spend too much without getting much back. This ensures you’re not throwing good money after bad.

Make Sure You Meet Facebook Ads Rules

Designing your ad with multiple ad formats helps your target audience discover your brand across Facebook products. 

Before we dive into the details of crafting a Facebook ad, the first thing to be mindful of is that you must meet all of Facebook’s specifications. This can be one of the key reasons why your Facebook ads aren’t converting. 

Facebook Ads Specifications

Facebook Feed Image Ads

  • Resolution: At least 1080 x 1080 pixels
  • Aspect ratio: 1.91:1 to 1:1
  • File types: JPG or PNG 
  • Text: 125 characters (without a link)
  • Headline: 27 characters 
  • Link Description: 27 characters

Facebook Feed Video Ads

  • Image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels minimum
  • Image ratio: 1:1 (desktop/mobile) or 4:5 (only mobile)
  • Video formats: MP4, MOV, or GIF recommended
  • Size limit: 4GB
  • Max video length: 241 minutes
  • Sound and captions: suggested but not required
  • Thumbnail image: Limit text to 20%
  • Headline: 27 characters 
  • Description: 27 characters

Why Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Converting

Are you trying to increase Facebook ads conversion? Perhaps you’re sending people to a cheat sheet or checklist, a webinar, or even a quiz. Maybe you’re trying to get people to subscribe to your email list and you’re getting a lot of clicks, but few conversions.

We’ll walk you through five reasons why your clicks aren’t turning into conversions or leads and how to fix them.

1. Disapproved or Limited Ads

If you notice your Facebook ads not getting results, they may have been rejected. Before showing an ad, Facebook ensures that it follows its policy. When it doesn’t, they’ll send you an email and notification with the reason. 

Facebook ads manager limits ads among special categories such as age, politics, housing, and dating. As these categories are protected, additional approval or restrictions are required to prevent discrimination. This is one of the main reasons why most business owners find their FB ads not converting. 

How To Fix This:

  • Edit your ad

Using the information in your disapproval notification, you can amend or rewrite your ad, save any changes, and resubmit it to optimize ads conversion. 

  • Appeal the decision 

With Facebook’s Request Review form, you can appeal a decision if you feel it was a mistake your ad was rejected (since AI reviews the ads).

2. Exhausted Your Spending Limit

Setting a spending limit for your account ensures the campaign doesn’t exceed your budget. However, it’s easy to forget the limit after you set it. You’ll find your FB ads not converting if the limit is reached. 

How To Fix This:

Change, reset, or remove your spending limit to rerun your ads:

Make sure you use money wisely when creating an ad campaign. Creating a budget for a campaign can help you figure out how much money you will need to spend.

An ad budget can help you avoid overspending and allocate resources efficiently.

3. Achieving Optimization is Tough

Facebook can target your audience more precisely when you select an optimization goal.

Optimizing for link clicks tells Facebook to target users with high user value (or their history of interactions with similar ads.) 

The following chart explains how users interact with paid content: 

The right optimization goal narrows down your audience to increase Facebook ads conversion. However, conversion optimization often leads to delivery issues.

This might be why your Facebook ads aren’t converting. Since Facebook optimizes conversions, it uses that metric to find ideal targets. 

However, without conversions, there isn’t enough data to work with, and you don’t know who could be interested in the campaign. 

How To Fix This:

Instead of optimizing for conversions, you should optimize for link clicks. This way, you can still track conversions, but Facebook can also see who clicked on your ads. Once you start converting consistently (Facebook recommends 50 conversions per week), you can return to the conversion goal.

4. It’s a Cold Audience

Check your news feed now and see how many ads are trying to sell you something. You’re likely to see ads from brands you’ve never heard of. Are you taking action? Not likely. Because you’re a cold audience.

This might be a prime reason why your Facebook ads do not convert. 

How To Fix This:

Keep your sales pitch for retargeting ads, where you show a specific ad to someone who has already visited a website about one of your products. It’s much easier to sell to warm audiences.

5. Overlapping Target Audiences

If your campaign’s ad sets have nearly identical audiences, Facebook prevents your ads from competing during the auction. This increases the chances of your FB ads not converting.

How To Fix This:

You can check if your audiences overlap using Facebook’s Audience Overlap tool:

  • Check out your audiences
  • Check the boxes for each audience you’d like to compare (up to five)
  • Select Actions > Show Audience Overlap.

Steps To Fix Your Facebook Ads

1. Get Your Sales Process Dialed

Your Facebook ads do not convert when your sales process isn’t streamlined. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do you have a high-converting video sales letter?
  • Is your application process streamlined?
  • Are you attracting qualified leads?
  • What is your auto-curation mechanism?
  • Have you created a show-up sequence for your leads?
  • Do you use sales assets on the call?

If your answer to any of the above questions is a NO, this might be why your ads aren’t working on Facebook.

One of our clients, Rudiger, faced a similar issue. He had brilliant ad campaigns running on Facebook, but his ads weren’t working.

It turned out that his sales process was a bottleneck. 

We placed an appointment setter in his business and removed Rudiger completely from the sales process. We set up automations to onboard people who signed up with automated sequences and booking call links. 

The prospect receives nurture content, follow-up emails, referrals, and text messages without Rudiger having to do any additional work. Once he gets off the phone, he can send all the details to the prospect with a few clicks. 

He can now focus on the sales call to increase the efficiency of the sales system. 

If you find your Facebook advertising campaign not generating qualified leads, ensure that your sales process is optimized. 

2. Dial In Your Offers 

When we onboard any client into SWS, we first dial in their offers to make it cold-friendly.

If you’re selling a cold offer to a cold-audience, this might be why your Facebook ads do not convert. Your prospects don’t know you yet. 

For instance, if you read this guide, check out a few other blogs, get a little idea of who we are, and then schedule a call with us, you’re a warm lead. But then, how do you convert a total stranger into a raving fan? 

We’re going to focus on four parts of creating an irresistible offer:

  • Avatar

Your avatar is your target group. The following factors are considered to define your target group and make the rest of the offer:

  • Who are you working with? 
  • What CRM do they use? 
  • Do they have a spouse? 
  • How much do they earn? 
  • Do they operate as a solopreneur or have a team? 
  • The Ending Point

This is the end goal for the avatar. What happens when they go with you down the road? 

  • Do you help them generate leads? 
  • Are you getting them book calls? 
  • Can you get them more sales?
  • Are you helping them lose weight for an event or live a healthier lifestyle?

You have to be very specific about where you’re taking the person. This helps your Facebook ads perform better. If you don’t provide them with a clear path to follow, they won’t want to explore further. 

  • Activation Points and Mechanisms

These last two steps in your offer creation take you from the starting to the ending point. The activation points are defined as the steps that have to be taken to reach the ending point. Your Facebook ads do not convert unless you have minimum activation steps with an efficient mechanism.

Example Case

For example, if you wanted to go to Starbucks for your morning coffee, you would have to:

  • Get up
  • Get dressed
  • Walk down your garage 
  • Get in your car and drive
  • Find a parking spot 
  • Get your coffee
  • Drive back home.

The above steps are Activation Points performed to reach the ending point (Starbucks). Your aim should be to minimize the activation steps so that your avatar does only what is necessary for each ending point.

In contrast, Mechanism is what you get paid for.

Let’s take DoorDash, for example. It delivers food directly to your door. Your activation steps include the following:

  • Placing your order through your phone
  • Walking to the door
  • Paying for your coffee
  • Enjoy your coffee.

DoorDash is a leading food delivery company in the US. It is a great example of a brilliant mechanism. You pay them to reach your ending point more conveniently. This concept applies to your offer creation as well.

You want to create a mechanism that takes the avatar through the necessary activation points, helping them reach the endpoint in the least amount of time. 

FB Ads Not Converting: FAQs

Why are my Facebook ads not generating leads?

This is likely because you lack a clear conversion funnel — and it’s time to look into your site’s user flow and usability to see how they guide users through your buying process. The way your site is built can have a huge impact on how users move through it. Additionally, we have outlined some key concerns to pay attention to in this article on Facebook ads.

What is the best time to run Facebook conversion ads?

Running ads on a weekday between 1:00 pm and 4:00 pm is generally considered good practice, as that’s a peak time for Facebook usage.

Can I schedule the Facebook ads manager to turn off ads at night?

Run your ads on a schedule. This means showing your ads based on your audience’s time zone. You might even need to pause Facebook ads at night, especially if you require filling out a form or completing a purchase. (These things require effort from your audience.)

Wrapping Up: Facebook Ads Do Not Convert

Advertising on Facebook can help your website get more traffic.

However, if your ads aren’t working on Facebook, you may be making some common mistakes before getting your audience to your landing page.

In this guide, we’ve covered some simple fixes you can do to mend Facebook advertising campaigns not generating qualified leads. 
We’ve helped thousands of companies start and scale their business using tools, software, and intelligent strategies just like this. If you want to develop a profitable client acquisition strategy that works every time, book a free consultation call, and one of our advisors will get back to you.

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