Facebook is a popular social media platform with over 2 billion users worldwide. With its wide number of users and robust advertising, small and big business owners can use the platform for marketing their business at affordable rates. Marketers can also use the Facebook like service to make their posts more appealing to users. Don’t worry if your Facebook ads campaign is not going as well as you intended. Herein are 10 reasons that could cause this and how you can fix these issues in your retargeting campaign.
1. Facebook Has Limited or Disapproved Your Adverts
Facebook can reject your adverts from getting posted on their platform. This should not be surprising, as most ad users have probably encountered it at least once. Recently, Facebook has been disapproving and blocking all advertisement posts that do not meet their advert policies. So, if yours does not go through, there is a chance that it did not meet their requirements. You can tell by checking your notification or the ad status tool in the ads manager. Here are common reasons why your advert got flagged:
- Using age-restricted content such as alcohol, gambling, and others
- Showing prohibited content such as weapons, drugs, and other illegal products
- Facebook found your advert to be discriminatory. This can be due to many factors, including religion, ethnicity, illnesses, disability, race, and others.
- Your content is too sexually explicit.
- Using too much text in your advert
To prevent that from happening, ensure you do the following:
- If your picture advert was flagged for being inappropriate, use an image that complies with their set guidelines, save it and wait for feedback.
- For posts deemed discriminatory, avoid using common trigger words such as “you,” “your,” and “other.” For example, say “meet single Christians” instead of “meet other single Christians” or “seek treatment for STIs” rather than “seek treatment for your STIs.” Thus, avoid using sensationalized health images such as “before and after weight loss photos,” or Facebook might remove your post.
- Facebook disapproves of old marketing tactics containing many high-impact font texts meant to capture people’s attention. The maximum number of texts you can use on an image ad should not exceed 20%, or you’ll get penalized. You can use Facebook’s image text checker to check if your image has too much text. When you upload your advert image, Facebook will categorize it as high, medium, low, or OK. The best ad should be classified as “OK.”
- Your posts may also be disapproved if they do not meet a country’s age requirement. If you are selling alcohol or other age-restricted products, it’s crucial that you state it in your age targeting. Some countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Norway, Russia, Turkey, Gambia, Pakistan, and others don’t allow ads promoting or referencing alcohol. Ensure you research before posting any content promoting alcohol consumption on Facebook.
If you feel your post was wrongfully disapproved, request a re-review under the “account quality” section.
2. Choosing a Wrong Objective
After choosing to start a Facebook campaign, the next thing to do would be to select an objective to make the campaign successful. Now, this is where most users make mistakes.
The objective you choose will play a big role in whether your campaign will be a success or a failure. We say this because Facebook uses your objective to decide the presets and features that best suit your objective. If you choose the wrong objective, you might miss out on features that would have been helpful in your Facebook campaign. Go through Facebook’s AD Guide to learn how every objective is unique and check the info icon for more details.
3. Not Reaching the Right Audience
Facebook uses its users’ online activities to determine the most suitable ads. To do that, they collect data from the posts users like or share, pages they follow, and places they have checked in via the social media platform. Then, marketers use the same information to know the people that appeal to their business so they can come up with targeted ads. Unfortunately, the data collected is not always accurate, meaning you may display your ads to a target audience that may not be interested.
4. Having a Wide Audience
As much as having a big audience is appealing, a broad audience may also mean lots of competition from other marketers looking to reach the same people. Unfortunately, this may not work in your favor as you’ll often have to pay more per click without necessarily leaving an impression, leading to high conversion rates. In addition, the high level of competition and adverts costs means you will have to do more to ensure your audience stays interested in the products you are advertising.
Nonetheless, there are instances where a large audience may be appealing. For that to happen, Facebook campaigners need to be more interested in marketing their brand rather than increasing conversion rates. However, we still recommend creating campaigns to target audiences from specific regions.
5. Targeting a Narrow Audience
A wide audience might be a challenge, but so is a very small one. A very small audience will help you save on advertising costs but extremely narrowing your target audience makes it harder for your ads to reach more people. Furthermore, Facebook has a policy that limits advertisers to a minimum of 1000 users when making advertisements.
Here is what you should do for your adverts to be more effective:
- Wait for Facebook Pixel to collect more user data before launching another Facebook campaign.
- Review your geographical restrictions to grow your target audience.
- Use Facebook’s lookalike audience. Through the seed audience provided by Facebook, you can easily identify and remove people who are least interested in what you are advertising, allowing you to target people who are highly interested in what you are trying to sell via targeted ads.
- Finally, ensure you have reached the 1000 users target to make your adverts more successful.
6. The Post With Your Advert Is Missing
Your campaign may not be working because of a missing post. That can be due to the post being removed, incompatible, or not having the authority to view it. Sometimes the product you are advertising might also be the problem. Check if the offer you put on your product has expired and your inventory to see if the product is still in stock.
To fix a missing post, you’ll have to:
- Choose a different post to advertise your product.
- Look for permission from the page’s admin or editors before posting so it doesn’t get pulled down once posted.
- Create a new offer if the previous one is expired or unavailable.
- Check if your advertised product is still in stock before posting an advert.
Once you’ve followed the tips above and made all the necessary changes, toggle the ad settings back to “active” to eliminate the “update required” sub status.
7. Your Budget Is Not Flexible
Keep your budget flexible and be patient so Facebook’s algorithm can yield the best results. Set a lifetime budget instead of using daily limits. This will allow Facebook to effectively plan how to spend your budget for the best campaign ad. Use the social media platform’s automatic bidding when launching your campaign, and you can upgrade afterward. This will allow them to utilize your money efficiently.
8. Adverts Are Not Very Engaging
Facebook will always prioritize relevant and engaging ads over others. Therefore, if you don’t create interesting ads for your campaign, Facebook will often not prioritize them when sharing ads. Thus, most users won’t see them.
Use Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics to check the relevancy of your ads. The results will be sorted according to quality, engagement, and conversion rate. If you are not pleased with the results, you can use Facebook’s recommendation charts to develop better ads.
9. Not Utilizing Videos
The advert game is changing, and you need to change with it, or you will get left behind. For example, if you scroll through your Facebook news feed, you’ll notice many ads are in video form. A similar approach will ensure your ads capture the audience’s attention and make your campaign successful.
10. You Have an Overlapping Audience
Multiple ads can be problematic as they would put you in competition with yourself. To lower your costs, Facebook will do its best to try to stop adverts from competing against each other. This means users won’t see all of your ads at once. Fortunately, you can use Facebook’s “audience overlap tool” under the audiences tab to fix the issue. Once you click on the “show audience overlap,” Facebook will show you the number of people in overlap and the level of overlap in a percent form.
Conclusion
There are various reasons why your Facebook campaign may not be working effectively. Although we have covered most of those reasons, others can still be the reason for your unsuccessful campaign. Once you figure out the cause of your low campaign success, strategize before launching another advertising campaign to ensure you do not repeat the same mistakes next time. Good luck!