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Why Are My Facebook Ads Not Converting? | inSyte Blog

 Converting Facebook Ads Into Sales or Leads

You’ve set up your Facebook ad campaign and all is well.

Or so you thought.

It’s been a week.

Two weeks.

A month.

Consistently the campaign is performing below your expectations.

So you’re left wondering what exactly is the problem and how do you even diagnose it. 

Well wonder no more, we’re going to go over the 5 most common mistakes that lead to poor conversion rates, and some suggestions for how you can fix them.

It’s impossible to cover every scenario in one article, so these are just the five main issues we see most often. 

1. You’re Not Targeting the Right People 

Everything is set up properly and your campaign is definitely running. 

You can see it’s being shown to people, some of them may even be clicking on it to view your offer.

But you’re still not getting conversions.

The reason may be quite simple.

People are seeing your ads, but are the right people seeing them?

It’s easy to think we know who our customers are, but the great thing about data is that unlike our expectations it can’t lie to us.

If everything else is working, and you’re still not getting conversions, it’s more than likely an issue with targeting.

The issue is easy to diagnose, run an identical set of ads but change the targeting parameters around. 

Think about things like:

  • What interests do my audience really have? How can I find common interests with my business’ products?
  • What are my ideal customer’s demographics? What stage of life are they in and what kind of offers are they interested in because of this?
  • What behaviours can we tap into to better target our customers? Do we want people who are frequent social engagers, or not? 

If you change the parameters and instantly notice an uptick in conversions, it was a targeting problem. 

Not sure how to set up a good custom audience?

The easiest people to go after first, are those who are already engaging with you. 

Retargeting campaigns can be a great way to boost sales, and they’re easy to set up with Facebook ads. 

If you have a Facebook Pixel installed, you can easily build custom audiences of previous website visitors. 

Then you have a warm audience that you know is actually interested in your company and is more receptive to hearing offers.

From here you can scale up the audience by using lookalikes, once you have a sufficiently large sample of your real customer base.

Once you’ve done this, look at the characteristics of the people Facebook’s algorithm is choosing and focus in on them.

Refine your target market by narrowing down on the types of people who are converting the most. 

Most of all, we need to just look at who our customers really are instead of who we think they are.

It can be easy to fool ourselves, but the data doesn’t lie. 

2. You’re Targeting the Right People with the Wrong Message

But what if you’re certain you’re reaching the right people, and they’re still not converting?

Well, the next most common issue is that your message isn’t right for your customers. 

It’s another easy trap to fall into, thinking that what we find appealing in an offer is what our customers will like too.

Often, however, this isn’t the case.

If you’ve built a great audience based on website visitors and your current customers, but you’re still not creating conversions, this is probably the issue.

It’s also relatively simple to diagnose. 

Do a few A/B tests changing one aspect of your ads at a time, to see what improves your conversion rate.

Things you should consider changing are: 

  • The copy. Am I putting out a compelling offer that my target market wants to act on?
  • The images. Are my images eye-catching enough and appealing to my target audience?
  • The overall offer. Is my offer compelling enough to my audience? What motivates them the most, price, value or quality?

If you’re unsure where to start looking at what your competition is doing. 

Are their offers radically different than yours?

What can you do, or say, to stand out from the crowd while reaching the same people?

Once you find a messaging strategy that works, stick to it and refine it further.

People’s preferences change over time, so be sure to always monitor your message to make sure it’s relevant and consistent across platforms. 

If you do all this correctly, your message isn’t the problem and should be contributing to getting you more conversions instead of hindering you. 

3. Your Problem Is with Your Website

If you’ve analysed every aspect of your Facebook marketing strategy on the platform itself, and you’re still not seeing results, the problem might not be with your Facebook ads but rather some external factors.

The usual culprit is the landing page your potential customers are directed to.

A bad landing page can defeat the entire purpose of your campaign, losing customers right before the end goal is reached. 

To diagnose this, take a look at your analytics and note where people are dropping off. 

If you’re getting a lot of traffic to the website from your ads, but no conversions, the problem might be the landing page. 

Consider changing the following aspects to see if they improve conversion rates: 

  • Make sure the message is consistent across your ads and landing page.
  • Make sure the landing page has a clear and obvious prompt for what to do next, e.g. “add to cart”. 
  • Keep the important parts of your offer above the fold. Don’t make people scroll down to see it, or they might miss it. 
  • Like with your ad messaging, try different combinations of headlines and copy to see what works best.

Another major factor on your site that might be hampering conversions is having a poor UX design. 

You want to make transacting as seamless, easy and straightforward as possible once you’ve convinced people to join your site.

Don’t do things like force them to sign up for an account, or try to capture their details for no good reason.

They’re already there and ready to become a customer, so try to avoid anything which could stop this from happening. 

Your website is like your goalpost. 

Ads shoot towards it, and you want to remove anything which could be blocking them from scoring. 

4. Your Bidding Strategy Isn’t Working

Let’s say everything else is working, but your ads just aren’t being shown to people.

You can see they’re running, but you’re regularly coming in under budget and as a result, not enough people are seeing your ads to create a healthy amount of conversions.

The issue could be with your Facebook bid strategy. 

Bid strategy is an important consideration when we’re looking at Facebook marketing campaigns.

To understand why we need to look at how Facebook chooses which ads to show us.

The three main factors are:

  1. The bid price. Who’s willing to pay the most to reach the consumer in question. 
  2. How likely the person in question is to perform the action you optimised around (e.g. likes, leads or conversions).
  3. The relevance and quality of your advertising material.

We can’t influence the second factor, and if we’ve optimised our copy and messaging all we can really control is the bid amount.

This is usually not an issue if you’re sticking to “lowest cost” bidding, as Facebook automatically optimises your bidding strategy for you.

There are exceptions, for instance, if you’re competing against a lot of other businesses using the same strategy.

In that case, if Facebook thinks their ads are more relevant or higher quality, you lose out.

The main thing that can create problems is when you select “cost control” as your bid strategy. 

If you set your bids too low, Facebook will always prioritise other advertisers who are willing to pay more per action.

That’s why it’s important to monitor your bidding strategy if you’re managing costs manually. 

An easy way to benchmark a good starting point is to start your campaigns using the “lowest cost” strategy.

Once it’s been running for a while, you can move on to a form of cost control using the average bidding costs you’ve been paying to get good results. 

As the old adage goes, “You’ve got to spend money to make money”.

Don’t be too frugal with your bidding strategy or you may just be wasting money. 

5. Your Ads Aren’t Actually Running

Your ads have been running successfully for a while, but you notice a sudden and inexplicable dropoff in conversions.

Maybe you just launched your ads, but you’re getting literally zero conversions.

In either of these cases, it’s likely your ads have stopped running.

This can happen for a variety of reasons, but the two main ones are reaching the budget cap and Facebook disapproving your ads.

The budget cap is simple, if you haven’t budgeted enough for your ads to run a whole month continuously, the service will be suspended until you up the cap.

To avoid this try setting weekly budgets instead.

Facebook can also disapprove ads on their own discretion when they break the terms of their advertising policy.

These ads will then not run until you change the offending piece of content, or you appeal the decision by contacting Facebook support.

Either way, you should keep an eye on your ads regularly to ensure they are actually running. 

There’s nothing worse than wondering why you’re not getting conversions, when in fact you’re just not running any ads at all.

Conclusion

We hope that helped you diagnose any problems you may have with your Facebook ads not converting. 

Remember: 

  1. Be sure you’re targeting the right people.
  2. Make sure your content matches your audience.
  3. Check your website and landing pages to ensure they’re optimised for conversions. 
  4. Use the right bid strategy to match your competition. 
  5. Make sure your ads are actually running and not disabled for whatever reason.

 

If you need any further help, feel free to contact us via the below form.

We’re e-commerce digital marketing specialists dedicated to driving up your bottom line.

We have lots of experience diagnosing and optimising Facebook ads for conversions for our customers. 

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